Network effects giveth and taketh away—how I let go of the iPhone

I'm not actively monitoring all consumer technologies, but it's been a while since I've played with Android (Google mobile operating system). After a few years, I thought I should check it out. To do so, I needed an Android phone. Getting one was the easy step.

The challenge was that after more than 15 years of using an iPhone daily, quite a lot of my digital life is intricately embedded in the Apple ecosystem. To properly use Android for a week or two, I had to transfer a few things. I'm not going to bore you with the technical details, but after finding a utility to sync pictures, import contacts, and sign back in two dozen apps, I was up and running.

And my first impressions were... delightful.

Android, in its 15 iteration, has become charming, fast, and quite sleek. (Full disclosure: I'm not suffering from Samsung's tedious system layer, but I'm using a Nothing phone with its minimalist UI.) And although my iPhone is technically more powerful, it does feel sluggish and–let me say it–boring.

There's definitely a novelty factor at play here, but I don't think it's the only factor. iPhones now feel like Teslas. Ten years ago, they were the embodiment of the future of consumer tech. Now? They're dated. In comparison, Google has done quite an interesting job at iterating its OS. Even Android Auto works like a charm (whereas it was a nightmare a few years ago). Syncing banking cards was seamless. Finding your stuff in the settings menu is quite intuitive (Apple is currently a disaster in that regard). Etc.

It's now past the one-month mark, and I'm still on Android while my iPhone, uncharged, looks at me reproachfully from the bottom of a drawer. I don't feel I want to switch back to iOS. And there's a business lesson here from a platform point of view.

Whether on platforms A or B, you are, by design, locked in a walled garden through many network effects. As mentioned above, your contacts, photos, apps, logins, and passwords. Some tools and apps are even designed to be so nice and so proprietary that you wouldn't want to switch for fear of missing them. That would be iMessage for Apple. All these build up a critical mass of interactions that pin you down in a given platform.

If you have a reason to switch once and overcome the pull of this critical mass, the network effect of the new platform will then try to lock you in. But more importantly, going back to the previous platform instantly becomes very painful. Network effects play both ways: they can pin you down if you're in and push you away when you're out.

This is currently one of Apple's main problems.

They become boring for consumers. And with nothing new, interesting, or exciting to do with this platform these last years (Apple Vision being a foreseeable bust doesn't count), their hold on our consumer's digital lives erodes. The lesson here is that as powerful as they are, network effects need to be sustained.

Oh, and iMessage? I'm now fully committed to WhatsApp. 🤗