The issue with having so many yearly releases is also just the explosion of OS versions you have to think about. I release an open source app and it’s always kind of a pain that I have to think about all these different OS versions, each with its own quirks and minor bugs (some of which aren’t directly visible to the end user), and it makes testing annoying.
Apple would probably just say “just update to the latest OS”, but you can’t just get all users to do that because each new macOS version stops support for some not-too-old hardware (7 years is not that old for a computer) and sometimes people don’t want to upgrade to a new OS for random reasons (stability, or some software stops working in a new OS version, or they just prefer the older UI). I do agree that at at least switching to a 2-year cycle would probably help a bit. Right now there’s just too much churn, and not enough concrete improvement in each macOS release to justify the churn.
I think outside of iMessage, Apple just gets the US market, which isn’t a surprise I guess because Apple is an American company. The way they advertise their phones and design their features feel like they are all optimized for the US market first. A lot of new features like Apple Card and redesigned Apple Maps always come to US markets while other big markets have to wait a long time before Apple brings them over.
There are other small things like the heavily app-focused design, which favors a lot of different apps that each does one thing and one thing well. This is different from how a lot of emerging markets have superapps (e.g. WeChat) that will dominate your daily life. A quick example: iOS has built-in non-customizable QR code scanning (either as a quick action from Control Center, or automatically from the camera app). This is useful let’s say you want to scan a restaurant menu or an URL link. But let’s say you live in China, most of the QRs codes you see are usually WeChat / Alipay links that you have to open the specific app and scan the code from there, making a built-in OS feature completely useless.
And of course iMessage itself is also a uniquely N American thing because a lot of other countries moved organically to other apps like WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat and so on.
The iPhones are also priced expensive enough (Apple doesn’t do price differentiation across markets) that in a lot of lower income countries they are just too expensive compared to lower-priced Android devices, whereas in US, the general income level is high enough that they are affordable (but still expensive) to a lot of folks.
I do wonder about the specific markets like Japan, since iPhones are also really popular there, and I wonder what Apple is doing specifically right there comparatively? (iPhones are popular everywhere but I feel that in Japan specifically it’s even more popular. Maybe because of a lack of good local competition?)