Apple’s Strategy to Make its iPhone Users Adopt its Smart Speaker
When talking about a smart speaker, the first name that comes to most people’s mind is Amazon Echo.
With Alexa-enabled smart speakers, Amazon revolutionizes a new device market which is expected to grow $15.6 billion by 2025, as per MarketsandMarkets.
Amazon’s Echo is currently leading the smart speaker market with more than 50% market in the US. But if we take the global market, players like Baidu, Alibaba, and Xiaomi also come into the picture.
These companies have a great market share in Mainland China and some other parts of Asia.
Globally, Amazon is still leading the market with Google following behind but Apple is quite behind at the 6th position. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th place belong to the aforementioned Chinese companies respectively.
But things are about to get interesting as Apple planned bigger things for its smart speaker, Homepod.
Apple has a good market share when it comes to smartphones. So, using their smartphone fan base, Apple is trying its users to adopt its smart speakers.
It’s not necessary to use a Homepod even if you have an iPhone but it’s a fact that most iPhone users want to remain in the Apple environment thus use Apple other products such as Apple Watch. Because the devices work best in a single environment.
And that’s what Apple is planning to do with its smart speaker.
A patent application by Apple got published in USPTO that talks about the Apple device and its smart speaker, you can shift your on-going call from one device to another.
The patent application gives a scenario where you pick a call and move with your phone and if there is a device such as a homepod speaker nearby you can transfer and continue the call using the speaker and do other work rather than holding a phone.
For further safekeeping, the call will transfer back to your iPhone as you get disconnected from the device if a loss of electricity or distance issue.
It’s fair to assume that Apple will provide this feature limited to their own devices. Doing so would make iPhone users choose its smart speakers over Amazon or Google because they would get so many such features.
With this feature, Apple kills two birds with a single stone. One, it makes taking calls and doing other works simultaneously easier. Second, to use this feature, you need both Apple’s phone and the smart speaker — ultimately what Apple desires.
This is just a single feature, Apple might bring more such features to entice its user base to adopt homepod rather than Amazon Echo or Google Home.
Google could also play such a move as they have its own smartphone brand, OS, and smart speaker. But things will get difficult for Amazon as Alexa has no much presence outside its Echo devices.
Amazon is also struggling to keep the high market share in smart speakers. Once held a market share of 90% now only holds 1/4th of the total market.
Things will further be going to be tough for Amazon if they don’t plan out as quickly as possible. So far Amazon’s business strategy of “Alexa Everywhere” is getting a good result but for how long they can keep it up, only time knows.