iPhones are like the Holy Grail of mobile phones depending on who you ask but many people aspire to own one. It is for this reason that Apple continues to command a cult like following around its product line but the most outstanding of all is the iPhone.
Love it or hate it but the iPhone is a marvel of engineering that its design DNA is evident in most competitors offering (Hey, I am the Notch) since it first grace the market. The iPhone is the number one smartphone to beat year in year out, with almost every iteration that graces the market.
Even with this love, you find that majority of population can’t own one and the situation is no different in our beloved Uganda. Below are the 5 top reason why most Ugandans are frenemies with the iPhone or why they don’t use one.
The Affordability Question
We couldn’t skip this one given the average selling price of a brand new iPhone is increasing instead of decreasing, that it now cemented the proverbial $1000 flagship smartphone price range. Away from this, the average selling price of a brand new iPhone is above $700 which translates into UGX 2.6 million, way out of reach of most Ugandans.
The competition has instead replied with affordable devices that play within the low and mid-range segments that most Ugandans use.
Restrictions
If there is anything non-iPhone users hate the most apart from the obvious price factor, it is app restrictions. Whereas the Android world not only allows you to download multitudes of songs and apps to an extent of side-loading them, the same can’t be said of iPhones.
A story is told of an Android user who was looking for a trendy song only to ask for it from an iPhone peer who had it blasting on his stereo. The iPhone user shared it and it appeared as a link on the Android side, redirecting to iTunes. You get the gist? Anyways the story ends there.
Apple’s ecosystem is built in a way that they’re boundaries in place from where one can download songs, apps and other services. Unless one wants to go nerdy and venture into jail breaking their device but we don’t advise you to venture into that territory. Even Apple has worked hard to patch these loopholes.
The above keeps many Ugandans away from the iPhone.
iMessage
iMessage is Apple’s equivalent of WhatsApp + SMS only that it works only on iPhones and Macs. It is like SMS texts on steroids
Fellow iPhone users exchange texts, emojis, GIFs, photos, voice notes, stickers etc over the internet in signature blue bubbles while the rest receive the above with many of these features excluded as green text bubbles.
What kind of segregation is this?
To join the club, one has to part with a prohibitive figure of acquiring an iPhone. This on top of other free chat alternatives keep a whole lot of Ugandans away from iPhones.
Non Expandable storage
Actually this used to be a joke thrown around to iPhone users for not being able to upgrade their device storage, resorting to buying a shiny new one with increased storage or pay Apple for iCloud storage.
If all you got is 16GB, it was unless for you chose any of the above recommendations until Apple upped its game that newer iPhone models come with at least 64GB of storage.
On the other side, even dirt cheap smartphones allow for expandable storage via a microSD card. This comes at a fraction of what Apple would charge lets say for a newer iPhone.
High Data usage
If you can afford an iPhone, so can you afford these pricey data plans of today. However there is an urban legend that iPhones consume more data than their Android counterparts, given their apps are always bigger and so are their updates.
On the Android side, Google allows one to tweak their data usage, offer limitations, quotas etc on top of the systems inbuilt features to allow for this. If it comes to choose sides, most Ugandans choose to spend less on data.So you now know what side they choose.
The China Effect
Apple has some competition that especially plays strong here. Here you will find the likes of Samsung and Famous Chinese phone makers like Huawei.
And when it comes to Samsung, it has a wide distribution network and third-party after sales services that makes its products widely available to a lot of Ugandans.
This however can’t be said of Apple, whose distribution is limited to a few authorized resellers.
Still on this, Apple has competition from budget brands like itel,Infinix & Tecno that have quality products for less pennies on top feature phones. Even with the increased smartphone demand, these still rule in terms of volumes sold as they are way cheaper and very accessible.
Limited Distribution
I guess you saw this coming, but how many Apple Shops do you know in Uganda? Save for a few authorized retailers and used iPhone resellers in downtown Kampala, the list is very short.
Apple prefers to keep it that way and is very selective on who to add to its reseller list. This as well could be as a result of our economy that existing resellers haven’t been aggressive in expanding their shop footprint save for a few littered around “affluent neighborhoods” and the usual “UK Used” resellers downtown.
If demand was ripe, maybe distribution could scale as well.
On the other side, the competition is well distributed that you can find other phone makes in every major town in Uganda.
Interoperability with Android
Interoperability between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android is almost non existent. Whereas the face value to the end user between the same apps on either side of the platform looks the same, the workings are different that at times it takes a great deal of work to port an iPhone app (where they mostly launch first) to Android.
Some on the Android side don’t even bother to launch an iOS client/clone especially music apps.
Accessories
Apple’s accessories are not universally available in Uganda and in the few places they exist, they’re pricey. Let us look at the iPhone charger for instance, unless you roll with fellow iPhone wielding friends, you’re most likely to run out of battery and have no one to save you with a lightning charger as some if not all own USB based chargers.
Limited telecom support
Uganda is majorly a price sensitive country save for a few 1% if these exist anyway. As a result, most telecoms only push budget models to drive up data usage not the pricier models like iPhone.
Given telecoms are some of the biggest advertisers in the country, that limited exposure makes the iPhones sort of exclusive from the masses while the budget models become prominent almost everywhere.
The only telecom that tried to break this was Orange and we all know where it went.
This much airtime for budget models and price sensitivity makes them appealing not the iPhones.
