How Apple's 'Live Photos' Can Win Where HTC's Zoe Lost

It's frustrating for everyone who isn't an Apple partisan when Cupertino takes credit for magical, revolutionary new features that other phone makers have had for years.

Of the everything-old-is-new-again iPhone 6s features, though, one highlights why Apple is winning where others fail: Live Photos. It attaches 3-second videos to your still photos, just like HTC Zoe, one of HTC's magical, revolutionary new features on the HTC One M7 from 2013.

Zoe was always stuck because HTC didn't have enough market share to make Zoes a trending, socially shared idea, and it couldn't get Facebook, Instagram, or other major players to support the Zoe format. Eventually, HTC transitioned into turning Zoe into its own app-based social network, which got lost in the crowd of app-based social networks.

Apple says Live Photos will be available on Facebook later this year, a deal HTC was never able to close. That means more than a billion people, on every platform, will be seeing the videos iPhone 6s users create.

Making a Market
Here are the key numbers: 43, 29, 8, 5, and 4. That's the market share percentage of the top five smartphone makers in the U.S.: Apple, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and HTC. Zoe was restricting itself to a fraction of HTC's 4 percent of the market. No wonder it didnt' take off.

Live Photos will initially be accessible to those on the new 6s, but will be viewable on any Apple platform running the latest versions of iOS or Mac OS, which is a significant percentage of that 43 percent. Add everyone who uses Facebook, and Live Photos will sweep across the Internet like Zoes never did.

The unified nature of Apple's platform means it can create ecosystems for new services. The fragmented nature of Android manufacturers' competitive services means they can't, and furthermore, it means they can't sell their services to companies like Facebook because they don't have enough of a built-in audience. Google can do these things, but the manufacturers can't. You don't really hear much buzz around Samsung Apps or Milk Music, in large part because Samsung's story is confused by the interaction between its and Google's own services.

When a service becomes more useful because more people use it, that's called a network effect. It's something a market leader can put into play to advance its lead. It's pernicious and it reinforces itself. Individual Android players, except Samsung, just don't have the market share to put their own network effects into play. And without control over their software platforms, they may not be able to tell a clear story about those features even if they have a large market share. That means no matter what other phone makers innovate, Apple has the best chance to make all of those features mainstream.