Is this related to the phenomenon where, as the smart phone market got larger the diversity of options decreased? Naively, I would have assumed the opposite. Seems to be similar in lots of large hardware markets where I would expect there to be a large enough total customer base to justify serving at least a few groups with niche interests, but it often seems like that doesn't happen and you get a very small number of very similar monolithic offerings.
My theory would be that as the market grows and matures and the mainstream offerings are refined, niche offerings are marginalized. Most people probably adapt to the mainstream even if they'd really prefer a somewhat smaller laptop for traveling given the 13" one is pretty light and refined. Some people will buy whatever phone is smallest but most won't.
well once android hit the market it became more rare to see RIM-compatible software, palmOS software, and all the other players back then that i can't remember. The installed userbase for android, which was designed for well-off Marls was massive, and iphones supplanted the need for nearly every other purpose built communication device. Why bother making my [chat client/browser/social media app] compatible with 16 OSes? iphone using cocoa or objectiveC or whatever and android using java meant only two stacks to maintain - at least until the platform started pushing updates whenever a new phone was released, and now you've fragmented the OS market - which leads to devices becoming obsolete before the end of their actual useful life.
the first company that can make a phone that can run android apps in a virtual machine and otherwise be a glorified electron app server (run javascript/webasm apps only) will clean up. If they make it possible to upgrade the components (m.2 storage, sodimm memory, socketed SoC), even if you have to take it to a store to upgrade - they'll win the entire market.
yeah this is strange and I don't fully understand it. perhaps the options exist and we just haven't heard of them (like there's a chrome extension or an OSS library that solves every conceivable problem)? Or that the nature of the modern smartphone software stack encourages too much bundling of functionality?
