People don't want a quarter inch drill bit, they want a quarter inch hole.

The same way developers don't want a larger audience to build products for, they want a larger paycheck.

(Doesn't sound all that altruistic, but it's true).

...and this is how something like the Solana 'Saga' Phone can only sell 25k-50k units, and still be a success.

It's all about the audience:

Right now Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) own the market as far as smartphone operating systems go.

It's how they can get away with taking 30% of all app revenue, without developers packing up and leaving (there's nowhere else for them to go).

The big selling point of Web3, from a development perspective, is that it contains a highly passionate niche audience, that are hungry for new products, with money to spend.

In just about any other situation, you'd have to run costly ad campaigns to find these ideal customers, in a sea of billions, using Meta/Google ads.

(And compete for attention with the other 4.4M apps spread across Apple & Google's app stores).

Web3 offers a highly concentrated, well funded audience - with very low competition (as of this writing, Solana has ~350 dApps, total). That's a big opportunity for developers!

The only problem is: Web3 still gives a painful user experience.

And that's the problem the Solana team wants to solve, where the phone's Web3 wallet works just like the Apple Wallet (seamlessly).

Solana Labs co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, had this to say:

"Users won’t have to sign into four different applications to create a crypto transaction.
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Imagine you have 50,000 to 100,000 people who trade daily on Magic Eden, that’s a more lucrative distribution channel for developers than the app stores with hundreds of millions of users.
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For Web3 all the money is in these small niche groups right now."

As the saying goes: niches get riches.

(And it rhymes, so you know you can trust it).