TL;DR: Apple dominates the US smartphone market, but EU regulations may offer Android a chance for resurgence by enforcing messaging interoperability and standardizing hardware features.
I’ve seen this a lot lately on lemmy - that android needs “saving” or that we need government intervention to stop Apple. But, I would argue that android is its own worst enemy. Even the best android phones are plagued by quality issues, both hardware and software. Google’s own pixel lineup has seasonal class action lawsuits over build issues, and now they automatically opt you into non-arbitration agreements whenever you activate a new Google phone.
Personally, I’m willing to take the risk because, in my experience, stock android is just so much better than iOS (and other android flavors). But therein lies the issue - android could compete with iPhone just fine, but android manufacturers can’t (or won’t) compete with apple’s relentless pursuit of build quality and software polish. Another damning aspect of this is that Google is supposed to be the best software company in the world, yet they’ve taken more than a decade to figure out messaging - something apple figured out back in ~2010. Android doesn’t deserve to claw back market share in the US until their phones are actually better per $ than the iPhone.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As somebody who has professionally done software for Android (and iOS and a lot of other things all the way back to very early dynamic websites with CGI-script backends) I would say that the biggest enemy of Android is the increasing bloat of each new version of the framework as it was not designed well to begin with, has “evolved” by layering stuff on top of stuff and has had multiple changes in the way it’s supposed to be used (in the professional lingo, “at the technical architeture level”) so it’s been a bloated mess for a while.
The result is a slower OS which uses more memory and storage and ditto for apps made for it, and they’ve even managed to fragment the developer community (by adding a 2nd programming language, for no reason other than to copy Apple in doing so) and frankly I see no sign at all that the bloatware-framework trend will stop, much less reverse (my - granted, limited - experience with Google Technical Architects is that they’re not really qualified at that level)
