> Microsoft was making significant gains in market share [...] Microsoft had some high end wp7 and wp8 devices too, but not many people bought them
And that's the problem: the phone market is fundamentally aspirational, phones are status-symbols, it's the high-end that directs the market. Yes, you can have a number of bottom-feeders at the cheap end, but they are fundamentally irrelevant: (almost) nobody buys a KaiOS device because of KaiOS, they buy a cheap phone that will run whatever OS ships with it. And the same was happening for Microsoft: people bought MS phones because they were cheap, and then chucked them away as soon as they could afford a flagship Android or iPhone.
If you cannot produce a flagship phone that people actually want to buy for the OS, for the experience, rather than for the price, you're having no impact whatsoever on the direction of the market, regardless of numbers. Nokia was still shipping hundreds of millions on cheap featurephones when it died on its ass.
I mean, maybe you both high end and low end, so there's something to aspire to, but on a global market, the majority of phones sold aren't flagships. And a new entrant isn't going to be able to sell a flagship phone with no apps; and you're not going to get apps without at least expected sales. Addressing the bottom of the market allows you to get sales to justify app development, and that allows you to make sales for high end phones plausible.
I don't use iOS devices, but I understand the experience is generally considered to be pleasant. The Android is really not that great; there's definitely room for someone to build something with UI that's not made of molasses; but it's going to be a real uphill slog to get it into the marketplace, and it's going to have to be driven by market share on the low end that goes upmarket over time.
> a new entrant isn't going to be able to sell a flagship phone with no apps; and you're not going to get apps without at least expected sales.
That's where you need the commercial talent to go out and make deals, build relationships, get mindshare before you even go to market. To do that, you need sexy software, a sexy experience that makes a difference, and a lot of money. A clunky OS targeting the low end will never be sexy, and you'll never convince developers to work on it "for the good of the web" or some other non-financial reason.
> The Android is really not that great; there's definitely room for someone to build something with UI that's not made of molasses
But the thing is, there really isn't. Android is actually pretty good, on flagship phones it works as well as iOS. There just isn't a massive quality gap to exploit. One needs a value proposition that changes the game, because you're not going anywhere with progressive enhancements.
> it's going to have to be driven by market share on the low end that goes upmarket over time.
Nobody has ever done that in post-2007 mobile. Nobody. Every player that saw the low-end as strategic, went there to die. As Microsoft demonstrated, it's a road to nowhere. You need to make a splash at the top end, make headlines, make people want it, or you'll never move the needle.
> That's where you need the commercial talent to go out and make deals, build relationships, get mindshare before you even go to market. To do that, you need sexy software, a sexy experience that makes a difference, and a lot of money. A clunky OS targeting the low end will never be sexy, and you'll never convince developers to work on it "for the good of the web" or some other non-financial reason.
I think I agree with most of this. But on the other hand, Jio was able to make KaiOS "sexy-ish" by promising to gather millions of new to smartphone users, only possible because of the low cost. And they delivered, and apps showed up, at least a little. That's not because the phones were sexy, or people were excited to buy them, or because they're not clunky, or because of some open web BS; it's because the phones were cheap and capable enough and the numbers were there. Mozilla clearly wasn't able to build the relationships to get there as we know from history, but it was able to be done with Firefox OS because Jio did it with the fork.
> Nobody has ever done that in post-2007 mobile. Nobody. Every player that saw the low-end as strategic, went there to die. As Microsoft demonstrated, it's a road to nowhere. You need to make a splash at the top end, make headlines, make people want it, or you'll never move the needle.
If anything, Microsoft's WM10 flop proved it. WP7 and WP8 were doing ok, WM10 didn't address the low end and the sales disappeared[1]. Is 2.5 - 3% market share great? No, but they had a reasonable bump after WP8 (q4 2012) and WP8.1 (q2 2014), and a proper release of WM10 (q4 2015) likely would have been another bump instead of a rather quick demise. It didn't help that there were signs that the WM10 release was not a quality release and that Microsoft had plans to abandon the platform; I was interested in a phone at the time, and could see that a) there was nothing worth buying for WP8.1, b) nothing worth waiting for on WM10, c) Microsoft didn't care, so I should start making my way towards the door.
Like I said, it's an uphill slog. You've got to make consistent releases that don't suck, which isn't easy.
And that's the problem: the phone market is fundamentally aspirational, phones are status-symbols, it's the high-end that directs the market. Yes, you can have a number of bottom-feeders at the cheap end, but they are fundamentally irrelevant: (almost) nobody buys a KaiOS device because of KaiOS, they buy a cheap phone that will run whatever OS ships with it. And the same was happening for Microsoft: people bought MS phones because they were cheap, and then chucked them away as soon as they could afford a flagship Android or iPhone.
If you cannot produce a flagship phone that people actually want to buy for the OS, for the experience, rather than for the price, you're having no impact whatsoever on the direction of the market, regardless of numbers. Nokia was still shipping hundreds of millions on cheap featurephones when it died on its ass.