The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: Infrastructure providers historically fail to capture value compared to OS
“Chip companies didn't capture the value. ISPs didn't capture the value. Mobile network operators didn't capture the value. Windows and iOS did, but they were doing something else.”
Evans: Google's real innovation is in cloud services, not Android OS
“What's increasingly apparent from Google is that all the innovation really is happening in the Google services that get laid on top of Android, and in many cases, of course, are also available on iOS and indeed on the web.”
Evans: Google generates more revenue on iOS than on Android
“You know, Google is making more money on iOS and Android right now.”
Balaji: Apple's Bitcoin ban will drive users off iOS within three years
“Like, you know, locking down Bitcoin on the iOS platform is going to be, I think, seen in like three years as one of the more short-sighted things that, that could be done. Because it's going to be so, such a big deal. And so it's the kind of thing that could …”
Olivia Moore: Gemini hits 50% of ChatGPT scale on Android, 17% on iOS
“Like, if you look at Android, Gemini is at, like, 50% of ChatGPT's scale on mobile, whereas on iOS it's, like, 17%.”
Evans: Global iOS and Android devices will reach five billion
“There's one and a half billion PCs on Earth. There's three billion iOS and Android devices on Earth. We'll go to five billion.”
Evans: iOS split-screen multitasking will not reignite iPad sales growth
“It's not going to, you know, suddenly reignite sales of iPad growth sales growth, but, you know, it may change what it means to use it a bit.”
Apple Maps has 3.5x more iOS users than Google Maps
“That Apple Maps has three and a half times more users than Google Maps on iOS.”
Evans: Android's evolution matters more to mobile's future than iOS
“And so another way of saying this is kind of, you know, the question of what Android is kind of matters to the future of mobile. The question of what iOS is doesn't matter in quite the same way.”
Evans: iOS users spend four times more than Android users
“You have double the revenue on iOS for half the users, and so very roughly four times the spend.”
Evans predicts active iOS and Android devices will reach four billion globally
“And we'll go to four billion iOS and Android.”
Evans: Complex Apps Take 2-3x Longer to Develop on Android Than iOS
“If you want to make a cool video chat app, you've got a really serious problem. Making it work consistently across Android devices. It will take you twice as long or three times as long as it did to code it on iOS.”
Evans: Apple generates double Android's developer revenue on half the devices
“And if you look at the revenue growth rate, the run rate growth rate, that means that Apple probably paid out ten billion in the last 12 months. And there are, as it might be, four hundred fifty million active iOS devices on Earth, so Apple is doing double the…”
Benedict Evans: Non-technical users need cheap iOS devices, not Android
“The iOS is the one that goes to the early adopters, and Android is the one that all the grandmas get, where actually the grandmas should be given the 50 dollar iOS device.”
Evans: Android E-Commerce Basket Sizes Are Half of iOS
“Basket size or an e-commerce transaction or, you know, payment rate on Android that's half what you see from iOS, and that's, as I said, it's really just a function of price.”
Active Android devices will reach 2-3B; iOS will reach 700-900M
“And, you know, as things play out with the current dynamics, which aren't really going to change in the next two or three years, we will end up with seven, eight, nine hundred million iOS devices in use on Earth. It's probably about 500 now. And we'll end up w…”
Evans: Mobile Is First Tech Era with Two Simultaneous Platform Winners
“It's the first time we have two, two, two winners, in effect.”
Evans: iOS extensions enable Google and Facebook to integrate deeper into iOS
“And so the funny thing here is, of course, this is basically giving Google and Facebook a whole list of ways to get the hooks deeper into iOS.”
Evans: Apple is relaxing its ban on user-accessible mobile file systems
“So it feels like Apple are kind of backing off a little bit from the absolutism of you, there should not be a user accessible file system at all.”
Evans: iPhone users account for 75 percent of retail basket size
“If you were to look at share of value right now, it's probably three quarters of your basket size.”
Chen: Mobile games require high monetization to sustain paid user acquisition
“Mobile games, you know, all the iOS games have been about, well, it's always going to be sort of, you know, paid install driven, so the monetization needs to be incredible, right? Needs to be free, and then monetization needs to, you know, you sort of are tryi…”
Wroblewski: Facebook's early iOS app suffered from using HTML web views
“When their iOS app, they literally had like an HTML web view, JavaScript rendering pseudo browser, making the feed. They hadn't, didn't write it in native code and the thing would crash and it was slow and memory was just a zoo.”
Evans: Apple's 900M active iOS devices rival 1.5B global PCs
“There's only one and a half billion PCs on Earth, and Apple has nine hundred million iOS devices out there.”
Evans: iOS and Android ship 1.5B units annually with 3B active devices
“IOS, Android, doing over one and a half billion units this year, and probably over three billion of those things in the world today.”
Evans: Apple iOS has 700M to 800M active devices
“And then there's a platform with eight, seven or eight hundred million active devices, iOS.”
Evans: Android M lacks major tentpole feature improvements
“Android M, which has a bunch of perfectly worthwhile sensible improvements, some of which were in iOS, some of which will be in iOS, as is always the way with this stuff. No really big tentpole improvements, to be honest. A few little bits and pieces, and lots…”
Evans: Tech developer conference announcements fall into three distinct categories
“I tend to think about these kinds of events as splitting into three categories. So first of all, there's the stuff that is a nice incremental improvement if you're used to the platform, like something cool happens in the calendar, something cool happens in the…”