Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

It's been tried, but you need a very large scale to pull this off. So it often just fails. Think RIM, Jolla, Microsoft, even Symbian as an ecosystem.

To make something that has a consistent quality (or look and feel) you'd need to be in control of both the appliance and the ecosystem, and most companies do not have the money or knowledge to do that. It's also hard to make money that way, which is why only a single-digit amount of brand names actually manage to do it long-term.

The only reason we have two choices at all is because there is Apple and there is everything-that-is-not-Apple. The second one is also using a different model (separate hardware and software vendors, and OS forks in varying degrees), but at least the commercial variant has Google behind it with plenty of in-house specialists and money to throw at it. Without Google, Android (as a technical thing) could have been constructed (since it already has been: Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, Tizen), but has the same problem that all the other non-duopoly attempts had:

  1. The content simply isn't there
  2. The network effect doesn't catch it
  3. There isn't enough similarity and consistency (too much internal differentiation is bad)

This isn't really much of a technology problem as people might think, and inversely, the technical arguments matter a whole lot less than what people tend to attack or defend positions with. The mass market doesn't care how many floating point operations a phone can do, but an insignificant technical fact like that is what is usually used as measurement of 'quality' or 'value'.

Regarding smaller scale ecosystems, those exist, but mainly outside of Western Europe and outside the North America. There are billions of people that live elsewhere in the world that do not use iOS or Android, and instead might simply rely on feature phones or significantly reduced smartphones that run a handful of 'apps' and aren't user-managed. Some of those operating systems never make it out of the local markets, and others (like KaiOS) might be available on a broader scale but not really sold retail anywhere outside of their local markets.

I've had Pixel 1, 3 and 5 and my experience was they got better every time

It depends on what you consider important. The wired audio output from my LG G8 phone is better than anything I can get from an Apple device.

I also much prefer the fingerprint sensor on the back than Apple's methods.

Microsoft has been making pretty great hardware and even the OS has made significant strides. That said, the applications don’t have anywhere near the consistency of polish that I find in the App Store.

Similarly, the Pixel hardware is pretty good. The internals are about as good as the iPhone, but something about the hardware fit and finish isn’t equivalent to me, but it’s very close. Same with the top-end Samsung devices.

The biggest issue with Android for me is the consistency of the available applications. For almost any need I can find a well-crafted iOS app that both works well and looks great. With Android some of the most functional apps look like something from Windows Mobile in the mid 2000s.

There’s also vast differences in consistency throughout the Android experience. For example, anywhere in iOS tapping the top of the screen scrolls to the top. Android still doesn’t have this consistency, some apps offer it and others don’t. Same with the swiping in from the edge behavior. For me, it’s these little things that Apple does well.

This has been getting better but in general it seems to more closely resemble the Linux ethos where many things work, but are ugly or difficult to use.

I think it has a lot to do with incentives and company culture.

Disclaimer: I’m not working right now and taking a lengthy break after a long career at Amazon, so here’s my experience. And I bounced around the non-AWS side of the company for over 10 years, so I’m not speaking to AWS.

Amazon will never make a product anywhere near Apple quality, especially when it comes to fit and finish. Amazon hires a lot of MBAs, fresh out of college, and Amazon’s culture around OP1/OP2 forces organizations to justify their funding and head count. Add in the perverse promotion incentives, and you get outcomes where the company tries 100 different things at any given point in time, and tries to see what will stick. There’s never a holistic vision on delivering one product and making it “insanely great”. Instead, it’s a mess of myriad different things, developed by burned out engineers, layers of management, and MBAs who have all kinds of ideas, though a single 30 minute meeting will provide enough proof these people don’t use their own products.

It’s these endless amounts of processes and “mechanisms”, as Amazon calls them, that you get cringy and ridiculous features such as Alexa trying to sell you garbage when all you wanted to know was the weather. The MBAs are under the gun to deliver “something”, and now you can add in the stress of people having families, depending on their Amazon employment to stay in the country, not to mention the cut throat culture, it’s all a recipe for cheap plastic or things that no one actually needs.

Amazon has a document-writing focused culture, as opposed to using Powerpoint. You’ll find tons and tons of PR FAQs, or in some organizations, product oriented “North Star” vision documents. There’s plenty of corporate speak with phrases like, “delighting customers”, even though it’s some half baked service or product with dizzying amounts of complexity to justify promotions.