In 2017, 728 million iPhones were active and in the US alone the number of iPhones in 2020 went up to 113 million. Apple’s ecosystem otherwise called as Apple’s walled garden is massive. Around a billion people today on earth are using over 1.4 billion Apple’s products. Though the sales of iPhone have seen a recent decline, Apple is growing its ecosystem by tens of millions of people every year.
Each year Apple adds up to its processors and improves the functioning of its devices catching attention of more and more people. The walls of the Apple’s walled garden are growing higher as time passes, making it nearly impossible to climb out and have a look outside the walls. Most of the people start by buying an iPhone and then buy an Apple Watch Or Airpods as it gives them better experience. This ability of Apple products to work so smoothly with its own products makes the customer avoid the other choices.
The walls of the walled garden have grown so high that people using Apple devices don’t have any knowledge about what’s going on with the world outside the walls with the companies like Microsoft, Google, etc. Or simply they don’t have any interest in knowing it.
Though Samsung and google has their own ecosystem of products, Apple truly does it better than anyone else with its operating systems in each of its devices making them work better together as a community. The features like iCloud, Airplay, and obviously iMessage with which you can share messages, money, stickers but “Only to another Apple device” are really awesome. That uniqueness of not working with other Android or Microsoft devices make more and more people desire to have at least one Apple device, in most cases, an iPhone which further leads to purchase of Apple’s other products like iPad or a MacBook.
However, if the walled garden would have been bad, it wouldn’t have got such a growth. So definitely it’s beautiful. You can make it more beautiful by changing the default browser or the mail service or of course better options for subscriptions like Spotify, Netflix, Prime video. However, the beauty of the walled garden reduces when you welcome a new product of some other brand into it (i.e. it reduces the user experience) for an instance, Samsung’s mobile phone or Microsoft’s laptop. Apple also claims that the App store and the walls are there to protect the user privacy and security.
The only question is, if the walled garden is so good to get into then why does there exist those walls? Why can’t you send an iMessage from an iPhone to an Android? Well, that’s a part of a debate but surely that’s something which has helped Apple to become the richest company in the world.
It attracts you and then attracts you more, resulting in more expenditure for you and more and more growth for them. Surely there’s a lot to learn for the other companies and startup today from Apple’s amazing walled garden.
