Saw this on Reddit and it's great news for Apple:
Android isn't cool with teenagers, and that's a big problem
Nearly 9 in 10 US teenagers use an iPhone, spelling disaster for Google's mobile future
It's no secret that Android is the most-used operating system in the world, a title it first earned after surpassing Windows in 2017. Unfortunately, that's a fact not quite represented in the US. Although Android held the top mobile OS spot for years, Apple finally managed to overtake the competition in September of 2022, surpassing 50 percent market share for the first time. As you'd probably guess, those numbers have only increased from there.
There's no shortage of blame to go around for the ever-widening gap between various Android-flavored choices and the annual iPhone upgrade, but one place that seems to go under-analyzed is teenagers. With younger audiences adopting smartphones earlier than ever, it's no surprise they've found themselves entrenched in a dedicated ecosystem from a young age.
Unfortunately, it might spell even more trouble for Android's install base in the US, both in the short term and for years to come.
About a month ago, investment firm Piper Sandler released its latest biannual study of teenagers, surveying over 9,000 adolescents across America from various regions and backgrounds to determine trends across dozens of industries. It's an interesting enough report to dive into — video games are up, fashion is down — but the line that caught my eye was, unsurprisingly, based around smartphones. According to this year's report, 87 percent of teenagers surveyed own an iPhone, while 88 percent expect to buy an iPhone as their next device.
At the risk of sounding overdramatic, these are death spiral numbers for Android in the US. No amount of adjusting for the margin of error can make these statistics sound healthy for Google's future in mobile. Put simply, Android isn't cool with the American youth of today, and that's a problem. It speaks to some of the underlying rot facing Android's future, and unfortunately, only some of it can be improved by Google in the future.
To me, Android's problems here lie in three distinct spaces: ecosystem lock-in, advertising, and bad experiences. The first is, by far, the factor playing the biggest exponential role here. With an average age just shy of 16, the respondents to this poll were nearly all born in a post-iPhone world. Their parents almost certainly had smartphones, whether they used early iOS devices or products from Samsung and HTC. There's a strong chance their first smartphone wasn't a low-end or budget Android phone, but a hand-me-down iPhone.
That's to say nothing of the earliest experience these kids likely had with Apple products: the iPad. Bouncing from a tablet to a smartphone linked by the same operating system was crucial in developing a sense of Apple's ecosystem early, and as these respondents have gotten older, they've only dug in their heels more. Piper Sandler's study points out that 34 percent of teens also own an Apple Watch. That's one in three teenagers who have purchased (or, at the very least, inherited) an optional, expensive accessory purpose-built for a single device. You won't find that level of dedication anywhere in the Android ecosystem, especially among younger users.
More at: androidpolice.com |
