Douglas Wake responds to Eric Jackson’s piece “Android Users Don’t Know Enough To Matter.”
This post was previously published as “Eric Jackson Doesn’t Know Enough to Matter.”
There are some pretty hard moments in life. Sometimes your crush marries another person. Sometimes you find out that the awesome new gadget you were going to buy has some crippling issues.
And sometimes you find out that a man who may well be very smart has nonetheless written a piece on a subject that’s clearly outside of his area of expertise. And as you read this piece, you smell the rank odor of bias toward the companies he favors.
And then you realize that this man’s opinion is posted on a far reaching blog meant to be read by investors and other assorted high class individuals who all, presumably, are well educated on a variety of subjects. This can only mean one thing: this man’s opinion is supposed to MATTER to people.
This moment hit me late Saturday night as I read Eric Jackson’s piece “Android Users Don’t Know Enough To Matter.” In it, Jackson uses data from comScore and Net Applications to make some pretty bold declarations about the nature of Android users. These declarations are that Android users, and I quote:
Are not tech savvy
Never use wifi
Never do Web browsing
Never update their operating system
The statistics Jackson uses are, respectively: that 68 percent of Android users never use Wifi for web browsing, that Android’s stock web browser only makes up 19 percent of market share for mobile web browsing, and that only 7 percent of Android devices are on the latest version of the OS.
Jackson goes on to assert that Android’s users “have happened to acquire a cheap phone to make phone calls and text their friends,” and “have no loyalty to the phone or no idea of what they can do with it.” Furthermore, Jackson makes a weird statement about Google “trying to revamp their OS to keep up with iOS 6.” Then comes the best prediction in the entire piece (best meaning “most revealing”) when Jackson states that “by the time many of these Android users have been educated enough to take full advantage of Android features, many of them might well want to graduate to owning an iOS device.”
The trouble is, Jackson never figured that a nerd like me might read his piece and call him on his wild assumptions. (Seeing as how I wish to publish this piece as widely as possible, I must quell my temptations to use less…polite terms to describe the piece.)
First and foremost is this idea that Android users are not tech savvy simply because they don’t browse the Web as much on their phones or don’t use Wifi nearly as much as their iPhone wielding counterparts. No, those numbers from that survey require a deeper analysis than “Welp, if they aren’t using it, they must not know how to use it!”
First, a history lesson. The iPhone was launched first on AT&T and has since been most popular on that carrier here in the US. Android, on the other hand, has grown up on the other three big carriers. In fact, the explosion in Android’s popularity first occurred on Verizon, currently the second biggest carrier in the United States, with the launch of the original Motorola Droid. That popularity continued to grow by leaps and bounds with the launch of the original Evo on Sprint, and continued with the Galaxy S series by Samsung. Now, while AT&T introduced tiered data in 2010, Verizon didn’t get rid of unlimited data until the second half of last year, Sprint still hasn’t, and T-Mobile doesn’t charge overages for those who run over their allowances, choosing instead to throttle their speeds. This means that for the vast majority of embedded Android users, Wifi simply isn’t needed, whereas it’s a much greater rarity to come across an iPhone user who still has their unlimited data. Furthermore, Verizon especially has specialized in more rural markets, an area which the other three carriers largely ignored (until Verizon’s ingenious 3G coverage ads of late 2009). Jackson may not know this, but high speed home internet is pretty hard to procure in such areas, due to the astronomical cost ISPs have to face versus the revenue they’d bring in from the relatively few customers they’d gain.
Granted, it’s probable that a lot of people using Android don’t think about connecting their phone via Wifi. It’s also probable that a great deal of Android users aren’t truly “tech savvy.” However, Jackson never discusses a fact well known among anyone who’s ever sold phones or discussed them online: a great deal of iPhone users aren’t either!
It is the experience of many that iOS is championed as a simple mobile operating system, and has been since its debut against the clunky and convoluted monstrosities known as Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In fact, if anything, Android has been derided by many of Apple’s fanboys as too complicated as well. It has been my experience selling phones that first time smartphone buyers looking for a simple experience often lean toward the iPhone as the de facto option.
Furthermore, Jackson’s statements do a great injustice to the large and thriving modding communities among Android users, such as XDA Developers. And while Jackson may be right that most Android users aren’t yet enjoying Ice Cream Sandwich, he doesn’t look at the real reasoning behind why they aren’t.
See, when an update becomes available for an Android phone, it’s pushed out to its users within a matter of days. It usually comes in the form of a popup alert telling the user to download the update, and if they decline, it tells them where they can go to do so later. However, most Android users don’t have access to such an update. At least not yet. Ice Cream Sandwich has yet to be released for many of the most popular Android models sold in the last year, and if we’re being honest, we haven’t even come up on the one year anniversary for most of the phones that ever will receive that update. Ice Cream Sandwich is a more massive change for Android than Apple has ever attempted for iOS, and its speed of adoption reflects this. Granted, yes, the adoption is slow, and the lack of speed for this adoption is annoying, but the trouble has been traced to the manufacturers and carriers offering the phones. The users are NOT the problem, as Jackson arrogantly claims.
Further proof that Jackson is hilariously wrong is reflected in the very reports that show that paltry 7 percent adoption rate. Android’s monthly pie chart shows that Gingerbread, the second newest version of Android, commands most of the installed base. It didn’t get that way overnight either, but the adoption rate of Gingerbread jumped by a good percentage every single time the update became available for a popular model that was sold with the previous version installed.
However, since facts don’t get in Jackson’s way, he plows on, and so shall I. Jackson’s claim that Android users pick the platform simply as a cheap way to talk and text is utterly fallacious. Why? Because Android is still a smartphone platform, which inherently carries a greater monthly cost to use than a phone that can simply talk and text. Even on the prepaid carriers, which are less expensive (and thus more accessible) the cost is higher. Also, claiming that the main adopters of Android are the great unwashed who go for the cheapest possible service ignore some basic numbers. The four big carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint) have between them 280 million subscribers. Even if every single person in the US had a cell phone, that would only leave 30 million people for the regional and prepaid carriers to divide between them. That’s a relatively low amount of people, accounting for only 10 percent of the total US population.
Therefore, Jackson’s statement must be amended: many Android smartphones are cheap to free on the contract carriers in the US. However, what Jackson fails to note is the principle inherent in this fact: by combining relative ease of use (versus the old guard of smartphone OSes) with a low price barrier to entry, Android made smartphone technology accessible in a way that no other OS ever did before. The iPhone may have made the smartphone attractive, but Android put the smartphone IN REACH. This has been a hard lesson for Apple to swallow, but it is learning, as its price for the iPhone 4 has dropped to 50 bucks, the 3GS (the only 3 year old phone still regularly sold on the market) is free, and now Apple is soon offering its phones to the great unwashed on prepaid services like Cricket, Virgin and Boost.
Speaking of learning lessons, Jackson also confuses who has been showing what they’ve learned in their major updates between Android and iOS. His statement that Google is trying to revamp Android in order to compete with iOS 6 gets it completely backward. Four of iOS 6’s major highlights (Facebook integration, Apple Maps and Navigation, Facetime over Cellular, email attachments) have been available on Android and other platforms in some form or fashion-sometimes for years. iOS 5 was even worse, with at least eight major features that had their origins in other platforms (like Siri, OTA updates, camera access from lock screen, Twitter integration, iMessage, free email with an Apple ID and the Notification Center).
All of this ignorance has to be leading up to something, however; Jackson wouldn’t get so many things so wrong unless he had an agenda on his mind. Fortunately, he’s clumsy enough to tip his hand when he makes that comment about Android users “graduating” to iOS.
Look, Jackson, I get that Apple made its products into status symbols by overpricing the hell out of them and making them look pretty and run well. However, when you speak in terms of tech savviness, iOS is a baby toy compared to Android. It still misses many features that Android has had for awhile (such as direct sync with computers without the need for peripheral software, bluetooth file transfer, true multitasking for all apps, file management on the device itself, and NFC integration) and Apple has made it clear in the past that it does not like people trying to expand iOS’s functionality. Therefore, the only possible interpretation one can glean from your use of the word “graduate” is that you mean Apple products are on a higher plane in a non technical sense. Also, considering you’re on The Street, you must mean in some kind of financial or status sense. This kind of elitism is not only offensive, it is simply unacceptable in a world where class warfare is supposed to be a thing of the past (try not to laugh, everyone). This hope of yours that more people move to iOS, as expressed in a financial publication, also belies the point of your piece: you’re trying to do your part to help Apple succeed at Google’s expense, most likely due to stock interest. It’s spelled out in your profile piece after the article. You pursue investment agendas, and if Apple’s stock isn’t hot right now, then a barbecue in a Florida summer isn’t either. You also know, as an investor, that if Google’s success with Android is anything other than evanescent, anyone holding Apple stock will soon see it start to dip as more people discover the benefits of the little green robot’s OS.
The bottom line is that while Android is not perfect, you do a disservice to your own criticisms of the platform by insulting its users and insisting that they will only move above such insults if they pick the platform you prefer. If I were to make a suggestion, I would say you should check with someone who has actually paid attention to the industry for the past few years before you make your conclusions public.
Sincerely,
Douglas Wake
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photo by nickwallen / flickr