Meeting Apple on Apple's Terms
upstart writes:
'We don't want to build an ecosystem that shuts the door':
For smartphone manufacturers, competing with Apple must feel like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Every. Single. Quarter.
The best iPhones aren't necessarily the best phones outright (read: they're not), but the Cupertino giant has undoubtedly managed to cordon off a large swath of smartphone-owning consumers (perhaps indefinitely so) through its decades-long focus on building a watertight product ecosystem. Heck, even Samsung, Apple's biggest competitor, has seen its own home country fall victim to iPhone fever, and Apple remains a force to be reckoned with in China, too.
What, then, are Apple's rivals to do? According to OnePlus' Senior Product Marketing Manager Rudolf Xu, there's only one thing for it: push for greater compatibility with iOS.
"I think the key thing is to build a bridge with iOS," Xu told TechRadar during a recent visit to OnePlus HQ in Guangdong, China. "That's why, for example, on OxygenOS 15, we have a feature called Share with iPhone, and people love it - we are getting very positive feedback, because it makes file transfer [between Android and iOS] a lot easier. That's something that Android devices have always struggled with.
"Another thing is the sharing of live photos," Xu continued. "If you capture a live photo with the OnePlus 13, you can actually still see the live photo effect on an iPhone [if you transfer it]. That's because we're using the latest format to package live photos.
"These are all the efforts we're putting in to build a bridge between OnePlus products and the iOS ecosystem. We don't want to build an ecosystem that shuts the door for other customers. We want to make [our ecosystem] as open as possible, so that we can attract more users."
In person, Xu's comment about "an ecosystem that shuts the door for other customers" wasn't made in reference to Apple directly, but it does rather nicely highlight the crux of the issue at hand. Apple won't willingly open up its operating system to rival software developers (and why would it?), so there's only so much that brands like OnePlus can do to improve compatibility between Android- and iOS-based devices.
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