iPhatigue

This is the text of a BBC piece I wrote, based on our Reuters story of a week or so ago.  

The problem with smartphones is that they’re visible. We want them to be visible; we flaunt them. We put them on the table in restaurants, we fiddle with them if conversation lags; we not only need them, we need to be seen with them. 

Nothing encapsulates this ostentatiousness more than Apple’s iPhone. It has become not only the most popular smartphone on the planet, but it’s become the iconic accessory. But is it losing its lustre? 

At least in places like Singapore and Hong Kong, pockets where the iPhone was once king, I believe it is.

Driven by a combination of iPhone fatigue, a desire to be different and a plethora of competing devices, users are turning to other brands, notably those from Samsung.

According to one measure, a website gauges traffic collected across a network of 3 million websites, Apple’s share of mobile devices in Singapore fell from a peak of 72 percent in January last year to 50 percent last month, while Android devices rose from 20 percent to 43 percent.

This seems to be backed up by checking out commuters: Where a year ago iPhones swamped other devices on the subways of Hong Kong and Singapore they are now outnumbered by Samsung and HTC smartphones.

This is partly driven by iPhone’s success. For some, it is a matter of wanting to stand out from the iPhone-carrying crowd. Others find the higher-powered, bigger-screened Android devices better suited to their changing habits – watching video, writing Chinese characters – while the cost of switching devices is lower than they expected, given that most popular social and gaming apps are available for both platforms.

Of course this isn’t the end of Apple or the iPhone. The company could come out with a great iPhone 6 and I’m sure the fickle public would flock back. And Apple makes a lot more money from its devices than does Samsung, so don’t expect its CEO Tim Cook to be panhandling on your street corner any time soon. 

But there is something at play here. For one thing, Singapore and Hong Kong tend to be bellwethers of Southeast Asia, and to some extent India and parts of China — all big and important markets. 

Then there’s a longer term issue: it was usually assumed that, once converted to the iPhone, users would loyally stick with Apple. For one thing, the whole ecosystem thing — downloading apps, music, movies and syncing with other Apple devices — would lock folk in. For another, aren’t Apple users supposed to be blindly loyal to the brand? 

The apparent decline in iPhone users in Singapore and Hong Kong suggest that neither of these assumptions necessarily holds true for all those who buy Apple devices. This is hardly surprising, perhaps, given how many iPhone users there are out there.

But it might also suggest that smartphone users are much more inclined to jump from one brand to another, and from one operating system to another, than we thought. If so, that has implications,  not only for Apple, but for Samsung too, as it basks in its dominance of the Android-driven market.

Perhaps, just perhaps, all those hip Samsung users might soon decide the hip smartphone to show off is a device from a company we’d either written off, or one we haven’t even heard of.