Are AI features pushing Android sales either? IMO a few things are happening at once:
AI has hardly any truly compelling use cases for consumers, they’re at best moderately useful (I don’t need AI to write replies to texts etc). Hence consumers are sceptical about it, whilst also being worried it’s gonna come for their job and make them worse off.
AI aside there has been a slow down of innovations in consumer tech over the last 5+ years, certainly compare to the 5/10 years prior to that (hence big tech jumping on the AI hype train so hard). It’s getting increasingly hard to justify upgrading your handset every 2 years.
Meanwhile Big Tech have lost their sheen, people are losing trust that technology is going to make their lives better. This is in large part due to ******tification, but the AI scepticism will be feeding into it to.
Feels like we badly need some exciting new companies and products to shake things up. When was the last time you saw someone with a new device and thought ‘I need to get one of those’?
Customers don’t always use new features, but they love the idea that having something fancy justifies their purchase—especially when showing off to family and friends. There are plenty of people like that, and without them, minor upgrades, or even borderline misleading advertisements, wouldn’t sell nearly as well.
In China, where smartphone competition is intense, people boast about having a Leica lens (Xiaomi), AI features (Samsung), or HarmonyOS (Huawei’s supposedly “100% self-developed” OS), yet they don’t necessarily enjoy using these features. You’ll hear someone say,
“I just bought this phone to take quick snapshots of work documents.” Meanwhile, nationalists proudly claim that China leads in 5G, but the first thing many users do after getting a new phone is ask on forums,
“How do I turn off 5G to save battery?”
That’s why Apple plays the
“better camera” card, even if it’s not the absolute best still-shot camera on the market. It’s also why they continuously push
Apple Intelligence—from last year’s WWDC to the September event, and again in the recent iPhone 16e launch video. If they didn’t, they’d risk being seen as
“falling behind.” And for those who upgrade their iPhones every year, or those on a 2–3 year cycle for a standard/Pro model, these new features—no matter how incremental—help them feel like they’re keeping up with the competition.