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You are falling prey to your own model :)

The important thing to notice is that the median user's mind is neutral about features like lockdown, security, side-loading, and everything else, because they don't think about features. They think about concrete interactions, like "playing candy crush", or "talking to grandma/grandkid", or "buying stocks", or "trying that app that my coworker showed me".

And when they can't do it ... "it didn't work for me" ... they, ironically wisely, don't even speculate why it did not work. The folks you see on forums who recommend "doing factory reset and it'll work" or "clean the cache", etc... are obviously the "Dunning-Kruger poster kids".

Median users are monkey see monkey do, that's why if they see "it works on Ted's iPhone" then their thought is "I guess I'll get an iPhone". And ... it works. The US is iPhone-land.

...

And interestingly this hyper-pragmatic (arguably too narrow-minded) approach to technology is also what leads to the interesting cases when enough teenagers want Fortnite on their iThing. And that's when the generalizer machine of society can pick up this thing and sometimes it spits out useful principles. (Mostly we get just one more bad statute on the books.)




You're making statements about how people think in general, but most of the world isn't iPhone land.


Most of it perfectly applies to the Android universe too.

And the US device market is still the trendsetter, which is basically Appleistan.


Apple is only about half the US mobile market, and the rest of the world the trend is clearly Android. So calling the US market the trend setter seems odd because if that were the case then the rest of the world would be trending strongly iOS but this pattern has been stable for years.


I mean with regards to the sideload-lockdown, ApplePay-or-nothing, privacy-CSAM-detection trade offs.

Apple is the premium brand, the Goliath in the market, especially considering revenue and profit.

Even if there are many Android phones they are of various brands, and Alphabet/Google is not rocking the boat, F-Droid works relatively okay.




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