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- cross-posted to:
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Across the world, the biggest smartphone manufacturers are Apple (28%), Samsung (24%), Xiaomi (12%), Oppo (6%) and Vivo (5%). However, there are geographic patterns in popularity, with Apple dominating North America and East Asia, while Samsung leads in South America, Europe, Africa and West Asia in addition to its home turf of South Korea. Xiaomi is the most popular phone brand across South Asia, Spain, Venezuela, Ukraine, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Palestine, while Tecno is popular in West and Central Africa. Oppo, Vivo and Huawei lead in Indonesia, Bhutan and Togo respectively.
And I went from using an iPhone because eventually I couldn’t do anything I wanted to on it anymore. I couldn’t develop my own apps for personal use without jumping through stupid hoops, I couldn’t customize my experience in any way that wasn’t the approved Apple plan, the app environment was sparse (I know this has changed but it was terrible for years). I stopped being able to jailbreak them in order to give me a half-assed semblance of control over my phone.
Finally I gave up and moved to Android, around about 2010. No regrets whatsoever, and now I can install a privacy oriented version of Android on a lot of different phones, since it’s open source (sorta). I can use other app stores like Fdroid for FOSS apps. I shudder to think what would happen if Apple were the only phone maker.