A grim title I know.
However I chose my words carefully. Let me make no mistake, Android itself is going nowhere. In developing countries where wages are low an iPhone is unobtainium. An cheap Android smartphone is their only chance of connectivity.
However in developed countries Apple has the largest percentage of smartphone sales of any brand. In the US Apple have over a 50% share of the entire market, more devices than all the Android devices combined.
The average person who can afford and is willing to spend the prices of high tier mobile devices will generally buy an iPhone. In the UK at least where I have the most experience an iPhone is basically the default device for anyone under 30. A lot of them don’t have the latest generation, I often see plenty of 11’s and 12’s still in use but it has to be iPhone. It’s all they’re willing to use.
Most of the other people will fall into just 2 categories. Someone who is not willing to pay Apple prices, and therefor will go for a budget Android device, usually sub £200. The second is the enthusiast. People buying Android foldables, S25 Ultra’s and some of the eastern markets offerings such as the Oneplus 13, or Oppo Find X8 Pro (I’m purposefully avoiding Pixels from this list, they’re just trying to target Apple users) do not represent your basic smartphone user. They are people that love to tweak, tinker, game and push their devices.
These are the users that Android flagships are targeted towards. Without these users on board the segment will most likely collapse. With the news last week about Google’s plot to block unsigned app installations this is looking increasingly likely.
Just recently we’ve had another massive blow to the Android enthusiast, the death of Nova launcher.
Nova launcher has been an absolute staple of Android for as long as I can remember. For those that don’t know it’s an app that can replace the stock launcher (think theme, but a bit more) of your Android device. It launched back in 2011, I remember using it at least a decade ago. It had the beauty of making the manufacturer’s tweaks and decisions irrelevant, if you didn’t like the way your phone looked and the way you had to navigate around it you could just install Nova launcher and customize it however you liked.
It’s a story we hear all too often. A big company buy a little one and ruins it. They impose all of their corporate, greedy practices onto the original team and eventually push them out. Credit to the original developer Kevin Barry, the poor guy had been the sole developer of Nova since the company was bought out in 2022, obviously maintaining it out of sheer passion but that obviously could only last so long.
To some this may mean nothing. But to me it really does feel like the stars are aligning with a message. The Android I knew, and loved as a tech enthusiast is dying. Big corporations have won again. They’ve taken something fun, relatively open, community driven and unique and completely whitewashing into an advertiser friendly, bland, controllable product.
Cynical as it is, I hope every single one of the Android flagship devices fails off the back of these decisions. That Samsung, Google and every other manufacturer supporting these decisions are reduced to only peddling budget Telescreens (appropriate 1984 reference). The sad thing is they’re probably perfectly happy with this. They could essentially give away their budget devices and still turn a profit through the ad and data revenue just using one of these bloat ridden devices generates.
We’re only half way through this decade, and it is not looking good.
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