I, and the kind of people who spend time thinking about these issues, tend to assume that, well, maps and calendars and email and so on are very important, because we use them all day, and that the tight integration of Google services is a good reason to buy an Android phone and their absence would make it unsalable.
But most people do not have that kind of job. One thing that always bothers me about a certain kind of product demo is the moment when the product magically tells you that your flight is late or the gate has changed. But most people don’t fly enough ever to have this problem – that’s not actually a real, mass market use case.
Thoughtful piece, and an astute observation. Thing is, a lot of these feature that we make a big deal of, as, if not tech-savvy so at least tech-interested users, are barely icing on the cake for most people. Take the Apple Maps debacle back on iOS 7. Not only was it completely blown out of proportion in the tech press (if we can call it that), it was also such a small thing in the larger scope of things, and yet we whined about it. Some people are still whining about Apple Maps, despite the fact that it’s been good enough for a (relatively) long time now, so called power-user or not.
Want to blow a tech-head’s mind? Tell them that Gmail isn’t the largest webmail service. It’s not because it’s not better than most, if not all, of the competition. It’s because the other alternatives, no matter if it’s Hotmail-come-Outlook.com, or Yahoo Mail, or Fastmail, or whatever, are all good enough for most people. That’s it, plain and simple.