Tons of people are making a strong effort, but it's just not happening -- no one is showing up to knock Apple and their application store off their throne, especially when talking about the application store. Turns out the iPhone is extremely dominant, Apple is too damn organized, and there are tons of developers backing them up.
Can we explain why this is the case? Is it possible to analyze some of the decisions Apple made that put them in this place, ensuring their serious dominance when it comes to the 'best' smartphone (even if they don't have all the market share yet)? It seems like no one can pull off any reasonable level of competition so far (except for the great try that is the Palm Pre). Here are 5 specific reasons as to why this happened.
#5: Planning ahead always works
There are several phone manufacturers who really have no sense of where their company is going (think of Motorola), and they are always stuck listening to the carriers, who drive the way phones get made. Apple stuck to a really solid roadmap, forcing their carriers to accept the phone on their own terms, and knowing they'd say yes because of how good it was.
#4: It's just all about the damn developers
There are loads of great developers out there doing work for the mac, and they know all about good design. Apple's SDKs have always been extremely high-quality, and this fosters great quality in their developers, too. Naturally, this was their approach with the iPhone, and it has seriously paid off.
#3: The iPhone's operating system is easily the best
No rocket science here, really -- if you can control your hardware well enough, and make the software, too, your quality should automatically go up, especially when your QA standards are as high as Apple's. No huge range of phones or clones to run the software, and you avoid all those pitfalls that come with every other mobile OS out there.
#2: Apple has turned being the underdog into a fine art
A lot of people expected the iPhone to fail -- the mobile market was simply massive, they said, full of established players who wouldn't let Apple come in and do whatever they wanted. They continued to say this after the phone was released -- basically until the app store exploded. No one is saying it anymore.
#1: From Steve Jobs on down, high standards are crucial
When you've got a company kicking absolute ass when it comes to their hardware, software, and all the included apps, and insisting on some of the smallest, most design-conscious decisions that make a huge difference to the end-user, these same standards trickle down to the developers and make everything great.
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