Sayonara, iPhone: Why I'm Switching to Android
I was already fed up with my lousy AT&T service, and was seriously considering switching to the HTC Incredible, an Android-powered phone that runs on the Verizon network. But then, after seeing Google's new mobile-phone software, I've made up my mind.
Context & Ripple Effects
The columnist's exit is the third chapter of a complaint thread this corpus has been running since 2007: the original iPhone confession about AT&T flagged the carrier as the weak link at launch, and by July 2009 TechCrunch was calling AT&T 'a big, steaming heap of failure'. In August 2009 the same author had already walked through quitting the iPhone over Google Voice, so this week's announcement reads less like a spur-of-the-moment review than the endpoint of a two-year argument.
What tips it now is that the alternatives finally look viable: Google's new mobile-phone software plus the HTC Incredible on Verizon give an unhappy iPhone owner somewhere to go. BNET picked up the same-day framing of the market as a three-way race among Google, Apple, and RIM, which is how widely this individual decision was read.
First-order effects
- One more influential early adopter moves off AT&T's network to Verizon, with the HTC Incredible as the landing device — exactly the customer profile AT&T's exclusive iPhone deal was meant to lock in.
- Google gets a public testimonial that its new mobile software alone can close a sale that months of carrier frustration had left open.
Second-order effects
- Verizon's Android lineup becomes the destination for dissatisfied AT&T iPhone users, turning network quality complaints into direct subscriber transfers between carriers rather than just grumbling.
- Apple faces pressure to loosen the single-carrier exclusivity model in the US, since every AT&T outage now costs it defections to a rival platform, not just a rival phone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US smartphone competition reorganizes around carrier-plus-platform bundles — Google winning share through Verizon distribution while Apple's growth becomes hostage to its partner's network reputation.
- Platform loyalty proves contingent: the gatekeeping power of a single-carrier exclusive erodes once a credible second ecosystem offers an equivalent or better bundle elsewhere.
The trend: US smartphone choice in 2010 is being decided less by handset features than by which carrier-platform bundle escapes the AT&T bottleneck first.