When Nokia killed Symbian, they had 60% of the phone market here in Brazil, and their sales were RISING (not declining, as they were in many other countries).
Now Brazil is the dream land for chinese knock-offs, and OS fragmentation, my startup make iOS and Android apps, and I found it bizarrely hard to sell those here, when I ask a random person on the street what phone they use, they don't know, and when I take a look I see:
If the person is very rich, or very dumb, a iPhone (very dumb because we had instances of people without money to eat taking crazy debts to buy iPhones... Apple Reality distortion field is crazy).
If the person is part of the shrinking real middle class (real because the government says that if you earn 500 USD month you are middle class, obviously this is absurd), a Samsung Android.
But those are 5% of the population at most... The rest of the population I see:
S40, Symbian (specially on... SONY phones O.o Sony had once a great Symbian line, and they were really popular here, and those phones are hell sturdy, lots of people still have them), Android customized to look like Symbian (Sony phones frequently do that too, I own a Xperia Play, and my mom a Symbian Sony Phone, and for any tasks the two are almost the same), HiPhone (a popular clone of iPhone that use some weird OS), Symbian clones (that usually have Facebook and Youtube but you cannot install anything else and is incompatible with actual Symbian), S40 phones, some blackberry and old windows phone (I never saw a WP8 phone! and I see more old windows phone than WP7 phone!)
This proved to be a nightmare to my startup, I cannot nab a random person in the street and convince them to install my app, because most likely they have some crazy phone OS that is not iOS, not Android, not WP8, not Blackberry.
And if someone launched a good sturdy phone with Symbian, hardware buttons (god how I hate touch-screen, specially when you need to dial in the rain in a very rainy country) but with a good API, I would GLADLY pay iPhone levels of money to have it. And I guess most brazillians would buy it too (although to them it must be old Symbian levels of price, iPhone level is reserved to the top 5% richest)
I miss Symbian so much :( Oh well.
When Nokia killed Symbian, they had 60% of the phone market here in Brazil, and their sales were RISING (not declining, as they were in many other countries).
Now Brazil is the dream land for chinese knock-offs, and OS fragmentation, my startup make iOS and Android apps, and I found it bizarrely hard to sell those here, when I ask a random person on the street what phone they use, they don't know, and when I take a look I see:
If the person is very rich, or very dumb, a iPhone (very dumb because we had instances of people without money to eat taking crazy debts to buy iPhones... Apple Reality distortion field is crazy).
If the person is part of the shrinking real middle class (real because the government says that if you earn 500 USD month you are middle class, obviously this is absurd), a Samsung Android.
But those are 5% of the population at most... The rest of the population I see:
S40, Symbian (specially on... SONY phones O.o Sony had once a great Symbian line, and they were really popular here, and those phones are hell sturdy, lots of people still have them), Android customized to look like Symbian (Sony phones frequently do that too, I own a Xperia Play, and my mom a Symbian Sony Phone, and for any tasks the two are almost the same), HiPhone (a popular clone of iPhone that use some weird OS), Symbian clones (that usually have Facebook and Youtube but you cannot install anything else and is incompatible with actual Symbian), S40 phones, some blackberry and old windows phone (I never saw a WP8 phone! and I see more old windows phone than WP7 phone!)
This proved to be a nightmare to my startup, I cannot nab a random person in the street and convince them to install my app, because most likely they have some crazy phone OS that is not iOS, not Android, not WP8, not Blackberry.
And if someone launched a good sturdy phone with Symbian, hardware buttons (god how I hate touch-screen, specially when you need to dial in the rain in a very rainy country) but with a good API, I would GLADLY pay iPhone levels of money to have it. And I guess most brazillians would buy it too (although to them it must be old Symbian levels of price, iPhone level is reserved to the top 5% richest)