Is the iPhone starting to wane?

Recently I came across an article in the Observer that questions if the iPhone is about to lose its mojo. There’s a lot of chatter about interest moving from iPhones to shinier, newer Android phones in the U.S. And some hipsters think the iPhone is becoming a common ‘safe’ option, rather than the cool ‘different’ choice.

I wanted to know if the wider public shares these views, so recently I went out onto the streets of Central London, to talk to some trendy students and other young urbanites to find out if these trends have permeated ‘more mainstream’ life.

What did I find out?

Surprisingly, none of the twenty-somethings I spoke to were aware of the much talked about battle between iPhone and Android. They hadn’t read about it and their friends weren’t talking about it. And whilst they’d heard of ‘Android’, they didn’t understand what it was. Instead, Android seemed quite nebulous to them, spread across lots of devices, not really its own entity, quite difficult to grasp and hold onto. In their eyes, an operating system couldn’t really threaten the iPhone.

Another thing that came out was that the iPhone is still perceived as the coolest phone by fairly mainstream yet trendy young people. There’s just something about the inherent beauty of Apple products that cues coolness and drives a cult following. People I’ve spoken to have practically cooed over the design of the iPhone. But what is it about the design that’s so influential? The answer is partly Apple’s simple design approach - it screams confidence, and confidence is very attractive (there’s a great piece here that goes into more detail on this).

Going further, whilst these youngsters thought of the iPhone as cool, there was a sign of implicit iPhone-boredom starting to bubble beneath the surface. “It’s not new anymore, it’s just a bit improved, we’ve seen it before really” was the verdict from one cool urbanite.

I should point out that none of these consumers had iPhones (or Android phones). They wanted iPhones, but the expense of them (and the long contracts) just made them opt for the next best thing. So instead they had ‘functional’ smartphones with some cool features.

This is where Android gets more interesting. The people I spoke to felt that Android phones probably do what the iPhone does, but at a cheaper price. So Android phones might be an alternative for pragmatists looking for affordable devices. But the jury is out whether it’ll ever really become a strong consumer brand and if others, for example a rejuvenated Nokia might depress its impact out of the US.

So where does this leave the iPhone? Well Android seems to be struggling to get past the early adopters, and the iPhone is still cool to more mainstream consumers. I suspect Android will need to work quite hard to gain the cool status of the iPhone, particularly as Android is an operating system. What Android lacks is the tangibility of beautiful design – and here Apple still reigns supreme.