Android vs iOS: Clusters and Cascades
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/20/iphone-ownership-all-time-high-us/
This post shows the progression of iPhone usage in the US along with charts to physically see the increase. Looking at smartphone platform usage, iOS has increased from 25% in 2010 to 43% in 2016. While the chart shows the considerable increase in use of iOS over the years it also shows a considerable increase in use of Android over the years. Android increases from 29% in 2010 to 54% in 2016. These two platforms make up 97% of the users with the others making up the remaining 3%. This shows the iOS and Android are the two dominating platforms in major competition with each other.
This relates to what we have learned in class because of the idea of the relationship between clusters and cascades. We have a set of people who use iPhones and a set of people who use Androids. For this example we’ll call iPhone users behavior A and Android users behavior B. There is a threshold q for people in the remaining network to adopt behavior A over behavior B. It is clear that the Android network has a cluster density greater than 1-q because these initial iPhone users were unable to cause a complete cascade with threshold value q. That is how it seems to me, two clusters in competition, each trying to overtake the other and cause the complete cascade but both incapable of actually doing so. This is a case where we have two strong competing behaviors. I think that the idea of social contagion also contributes these clusters. Many people will copy their friends without worrying about the rest of the world. That is why one may find many clusters/groups only using iPhones while others are only using Androids, and why breaking into these clusters proves to be a difficult task. Also, the fact that these two platforms were able to push the rest of the smartphone platforms to becoming basically nonexistent shows that iOS and Android have caused complete cascades in such networks examining iOS/Android vs Blackberry/Symbian/HP/Palm for example.