Not that they weren’t paying attention to that before – they still had their mid-range devices and even some cheap offers, but the attention they had for them was nothing like what they’re doing now.
All in all, the Galaxy J7 has been a pretty good release and we expect to see even more similar phones from the company in the future, especially now that they’ve been exploring some more interesting ideas for their design and marketing. Meanwhile, other brands have been focusing on one of the three main segments lately, which has allowed Samsung to gain an advantage.
Apple are still working almost exclusively in the high end, even though they’ve been testing the waters with some cheaper releases lately. Whether or not they’ll see any success with those is early to tell, but it would be interesting to see that company become a major competitor in another market segment.
But they will still lack one key factor that Samsung and other Android-focused companies have – the freedom of an easy rooting procedure for their devices. While Android makes this pretty easy, iOS keeps getting locked down against jailbreaking, something that its users are pretty unhappy about as a whole. Although, admittedly, the ones that care are only the power users of the operating system and not exactly a huge majority in the context of how many people are using iOS as a whole.