> So brand and ecosystem are “fleeting”. When are you predicting that the iPhone - which has been around and profitable since 2007 will fail?

I said brand and ecosystem are secondary [to critical unique hardware/software features]. UI/UX are fleeting because they're ultimately a matter of style, which come in and out with the tide, to paraphrase Jefferson.

I don't see iPhones going anywhere. There are a lot of grandmas out there.

> So you think all of the cool kids are going to use crappy $300 Android phones?

The cool kids are tooling on cheap Linux devices like PinePhones which will form the basis of less general-purpose, more app/service-focused phones produced by other kinds of (not necessarily "tech") companies, for other purposes: think industrial phones from Honeywell for $200, luxury phones from Coach included in a $395 clutch, a free Tide phone with a monthly laundry detergent subscription, to the point of calculators: coveted objects in the '70s, given away as branded giveaways at Burger King and your local credit union by the '00s. Smartphones will get there.

> So from what I see most older people are using cheap Android phones. [...] If Google can’t make a decent video app[...]

Some grandmas use FaceTime, others use Skype.

As per Duo, Google blew it and no one will ever use their video chat apps again (unless under YouTube, that's their last shot).

> By 2016, the iPhone 4s was 5 years old. But you said you were forced to make an app for Android anyway. Also, 4G was ubiquitous on even low end phones by then.

Like Skype, our product internationalized well. We were doing video surveys all over North America, as well as surprisingly random European, Asian, and Australian locations by late 2016. South America and Africa in '17.

> But as far as performance, even today most Android phones are crappy prepaid phones sold by second rate carriers like MetroPCS and Boost Mobile.

Sounds true.

> Do you realize how easy it is to build your own subscription infrastructure?

Having a subscription flow doesn't mean people use it. I'm talking more about business models than technical feats. A passable video chat service + payment flow isn't so hard in the technical sense, for us the key was aligning with a viable pricing model for our customers, which sustained our development regardless of investment, which helped secure further investment.

We built a sweet automated transaction flow, and no service providers ever used it. Instead we emailed invoices and they always got paid. But we were transactional, selling to SMB/enterprise customers. Different story with different pricing models and customer base. I haven't done consumer subscriptions: that's where it seems that Apple wrings out developers, particularly game developers. Though I can see happily giving up 30% on virtual items with no marginal cost.

> Just like you can “delete” Safari on iOS but the underlying rendering engine is still embedded in the OS - just like IE.

You can run Chromium and Gecko on Windows and Mac. You can't run Chromium or Gecko on iOS.

> But it wasn’t a huge distraction to build the Android app....

If we were only targeting North America, it would probably have been a bigger distraction to build the Android app. The problems that necessitated a native app ended up seemingly being hardware deficiencies based on cost considerations. Booking rate for services after successful survey ended up being substantially lower in North America among Android app users, yet it was very high among Android users with devices capable of running the web app, which had motivated us to build the native app to support more Android users in the first place. Didn't really pan out on this continent.

Critical in Europe and Asia though.