The mobile market is about to get interesting. For years, Apple has dominated both market and profit share, with Google’s Android more recently having severely cut into Apple’s market share while also taking a bite out of profits.
Meanwhile, almost completely forgotten in the mix is Firefox OS, Mozilla’s browser-centric mobile OS, which has been making gains of its own lately. Given Apple’s unwillingness to compete in low-margin markets, we’re about to see a serious scuffle between Firefox and Android for the future of mobile computing.
Apple Locking Itself Out Of The Future Of Mobile?
Smartphones have reshaped mobile, but really only in the rich Western world. Throughout much of the planet, old-school feature phones still dominate, though this is changing, as research from NPD illustrates:
The growth in smartphone adoption over the next few years won’t come from North America and Western Europe, however. Not most of it, anyway. That growth will be from emerging markets as they replace feature phones with smartphones.
In these markets, Apple is a non-entity. By choice. As Apple CEO Tim Cook told Businessweek, “There’s always a large junk part of the market. We’re not in the junk business.” Instead Cook believes Apple can dominate the richer half of the market while Android and others scrap it out for supremacy in the low-end smartphone world.
It may not be that simple. And Apple may not have much of a choice, anyway.
The closest Apple gets to “low end” is its “beautifully, unapologetically plastic” iPhone 5c. Emerging market consumers can’t afford it and more affluent Western consumers don’t want it, as recent data from Mixpanel suggests:
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