The first iPad came out more than a decade ago in 2010. During that time tablets had a lot of popularity. Phones were getting bigger and tablets provided an alternative to carrying big laptops. Apple entered the market amid a lot of competition.
Now in 2022, the tablet market is dominated by iPads. No other tablet can provide what the iPad is providing. For many people iPads have become the laptop replacement.
How has the iPad been able to dominate the tablet market? The easy answer is that the competition is just not good enough.
Let’s first look at the advantages that the iPad had. iPad OS only runs on tablets made by Apple. They have full control of the app ecosystem. For developers, it is also easy to create apps and optimize them because it’s more standardized.
The first competition Apple had was Android tablets. It started with the Nexus 7 I think. Then all the other Android companies started bringing out their own tablets. The issue here was the different sizes of these tablets. Apps needed to be able to adapt to the different requirements of the tablets. Moreover Android didn’t have a proper tablet version like iPad os. So the functionalities it provided for a larger display were also inadequate. The only tablets that ended up standing out were the Samsung tablets. But they also didn’t have enough app support.
The other competition Apple had was from windows. Windows suffered the same issues android did. Windows never had a good tablet version of their OS. Most of the time it was their desktop version. It never did a good job of optmizing it for the tablet. This also lead to a lack of good apps for the tablet experience. It was a really hard to find a good windows tablet.