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Across the world, the biggest smartphone manufacturers are Apple (28%), Samsung (24%), Xiaomi (12%), Oppo (6%) and Vivo (5%). However, there are geographic patterns in popularity, with Apple dominating North America and East Asia, while Samsung leads in South America, Europe, Africa and West Asia in addition to its home turf of South Korea. Xiaomi is the most popular phone brand across South Asia, Spain, Venezuela, Ukraine, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Palestine, while Tecno is popular in West and Central Africa. Oppo, Vivo and Huawei lead in Indonesia, Bhutan and Togo respectively.
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It’s really so sad to see how marketing alone can shape the landscape even when they 🍎 are scamming their users so hard.
Hello, I’m a dedicated Apple user who came across this post on the “all” feed while scrolling. I know that I’m not really the intended audience of this community so if I’m not welcome to discuss here, feel free to tell me to get lost. I don’t want to impose.
I thought it might interest you a bit for me to share my two cents - just for context, I’m very technically competent, much more than the average smartphone user. Feel free to ask me anything. I am not a fanboy of anything in particular except Star Wars, so I’m not particularly inclined to get defensive - I’ll try my best to stay objective and I’m very happy to talk about Apple’s flaws as well.
Anyways, with all that out of the way - my reason for continuing to to use iPhone isn’t because of marketing. I don’t buy it because I think it’s cool/trendy/whatever. I get it because I prefer the experience of iOS over Android. When I tried Android, I found it a lot harder to get things the way that I liked them, it generally felt like it needed a lot more hand-holding from me.
I definitely don’t feel scammed. I’ve been using iPhone since 2011 or so and I’ve been a Mac user since 2016 - most recently I feel like the Apple Silicon MacBooks are genuinely good value, but prior to that I would definitely say that Macs were relatively overpriced compared to Windows PCs. I feel like iPhone is priced maybe (~20% or so?) higher than a comparable Android device, but personally, to me, the price is absolutely worth the improved experience.
And I went from using an iPhone because eventually I couldn’t do anything I wanted to on it anymore. I couldn’t develop my own apps for personal use without jumping through stupid hoops, I couldn’t customize my experience in any way that wasn’t the approved Apple plan, the app environment was sparse (I know this has changed but it was terrible for years). I stopped being able to jailbreak them in order to give me a half-assed semblance of control over my phone.
Finally I gave up and moved to Android, around about 2010. No regrets whatsoever, and now I can install a privacy oriented version of Android on a lot of different phones, since it’s open source (sorta). I can use other app stores like Fdroid for FOSS apps. I shudder to think what would happen if Apple were the only phone maker.
Thanks for sharing.
Surprised by a few Europeans countries, like Spain or Belgium
Belgium
You probably meant Luxembourg.
I live in Belgium. I think I count on 2 hands how many people I have seen with an iPhone, and I have a quite young workplace.
Surprising that apple is top. Literally every public place where you are where a phone rings or an alarm goes off, there is a 90% chance it is the default Samsung tone/alarm and almost everyone in the room immediately checks if it was theirs lol.
It could just be small sample size giving a wrong result. These are based on website hits, not official sales figures.
I meant Belgium, as it’s the only iPhone country between 3 Samsung countries.
Seems like Luxembourg is no data?
Seems like Luxembourg is no data?
I didn’t compare the shades of grey, I just assumed that Luxembourg is the only “other brands” country in Europe.
Grey is ‘I couldn’t be arsed to look up this country; it’s tiny so I hope no one notices’.
How in the fuck is this organized?
USA, Nigeria, Japan, India?
Major markets. The arrangement is whatever LibreOffice chose, which for some reason is reverse alphabetical order. Oh well, at least World comes first.
I don’t think this is accurate. It says Apple is the leading phone where I live, but the large majority of people here are too poor for an iPhone. Plus you rarely see people with them outside the rich areas of the city.
Apple has ‘won’ a lot of countries with just 20-30% marketshare, because the Android market is so fragmented. Look at China, for example.
Does anyone know if the Indian government’s asset freeze on Xiaomi, and its attempts to stir up a China vs India culture war, have affected sales there?
India has not frozen Xiaomi’s assets as far as I know. They got a pretty big fine for tax evasion (they said they were paying the tax in China, but weren’t, or something like that).its attempts to stir up a China vs India culture war
All the viable alternatives to Xiaomi (Oppo, Vivo, Realme, etc.) are also Chinese, so this doesn’t really matter. Now these companies are challenging Xiaomi, but they’re doing it by offering comparable performance to price ratio and better cameras. Also, Xiaomi has conceded to our demand to set up some local manufacturing. Low-end phones are now assembled in Chennai, Bengaluru and Noida, although the components are still imported.
Edit: First sentence is incorrect, as pointed out below.
India has not frozen Xiaomi’s assets as far as I know.
$676 million of assets were frozen by the Indian government in 2022 and Indian courts rejected an appeal by Xiaomi in 2023.
All the viable alternatives to Xiaomi (Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, etc.) are also Chinese, so this doesn’t really matter.
Vivo was subjected to an asset freeze in the same year and Oppo was also investigated. As far as I know, the Indian government is still putting pressure on Chinese smartphone manufacturers in 2024.
Oh right, some of their assets were frozen, due to non-payment of tax. I thought you meant freezing all assets and kicking them out of the country, like what happened to Huawei.
To some extent, these might be routine tax evasion investigations. But there is definitely a pattern of certain Indian companies getting favourable treatment over foreign competitors. Whether this is a deliberate move, or just politicians shaking up businesses for hush money, I do not know.
IIRC, top 4 out of the 5 vendors in India were Chinese with the outlier being Samsung. Nothing also has a factory in South India(Chennai, I think) which is why their products are almost available in India from Day 1 but they don’t have much market share.
Tecno phones suck ass, I used to have one in nigeria
I had one too. Great specs and battery life but piss poor software support.
The fact that almost everything in the northern hemisphere is apple phones it is fully incorrect like how Germans have less Iphones than most of eastern europe
Apple is leading in a lot of countries despite Android being the dominant OS, because the Android userbase is divided among different manufacturers. See China, for example.
But here is the thing the only phones people buy in eastern Europe is xiaomi and Samsung and pretty much the only ones with Iphones don’t even live in eastern europe
It could be a different stratum of society. Maybe like politicians and businessmen. They say ~5% of Indians have iPhones, but I only know two people with iPhones (and one was second-hand).
I would go back to android if they had iMessage. That’s really what’s keeping me on iPhone.
What’s so special about imessage?
It uses Wi-Fi and has sms fallback and works with iMessage
RCS on android is similar, and when IOS 18 comes out of beta it’ll finally support RCS which basically solves this completely. Uses wifi or data, sms fallback, works cross platform, and allows for high quality pictures/video, read receipts and reactions
RCS is a pile of garbage for many reasons. On Android, it’s locked behind Google’s proprietary, privacy-invasive Messages app, and there is no API for third-party RCS clients (like with SMS). The encryption is also implemented in that proprietary client, offering no transparency and meaning that it’s probably backdoored. No one should ever trust encryption software if its source code isn’t public. People should use actual private messengers like Signal, with open source applications available for all platforms, as well as all of the features you mentioned. The only thing it obviously lacks is SMS fallback, but it’s really unnecessary, because Wi-Fi or cell data are literally available everywhere nowadays.
Yeah but you can bet Apple will do their darndest to make it unlikely anybody is using it.
I’ve been on the iOS 18 beta for the last month or so and RCS support has been super smooth. Still “green bubbles” so it’s hard to distinguish at a glance from SMS, but there are headers every time it switches between the two like when switching between iMessage and SMS
Aren’t they suppose to be compatible with Android at some point due to the EU?
iOS 18 will have RCS support. It’s available in the public beta already and is integrated pretty smoothly
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It’s sad how you recognize that Apple tactics to artificially keep their users captive is working for you.
I would rather suffer an inconvenience than recognizing I’m captive of a company.
Just use Signal. It’s private and secure, available on every platform (including desktop), you can send photos, voice messages and all kinds of other files.
Do you have a Mac? Or can run a Mac VM? You can use bluebubbles on a Mac that will let you use iMessage on non apple platforms
Yeah this is my solution. I run Bluebubbles on my Android phone and have the bluebubbles server running on an old mac mini.
This was a huge part of me being able to switch back to Android after being on iPhones for 6 years.
