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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

Google makes more money from iOS than they do from Android. Of course Google doesn't mind if you switch hardware vendors, just so long as you keep using Google products.

Also, I disagree with the notion that Apple "heavily pushes vendor lock in". They certainly don't go out of their way to make it easy to switch, but I can't come up with any examples off the top of my head where they're deliberately making it harder to switch without having a good reason for that decision. After all, Apple doesn't really have to do anything at all to keep people invested in its ecosystem, since platform-specific software, by its very nature, already acts as a form of lock-in, and iOS has a lot of software that other platforms don't.

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   > They certainly don't go out of their way to make it easy to switch, but I can't
   > come up with any examples off the top of my head where they're deliberately 
   > making it harder to switch without having a good reason for that decision.

Just an example for those that are not familiar with Apple devices.

You can sync your calendar, reminders and contacts with iCloud. But you don't have to.

iCloud calendar sync is basically a CalDAV server. You can setup your own CalDAV and sync with that if you like. On the iDevice you have to set the parameters for your server which makes it slightly harder to setup than iCloud, but that's just the way it is and not Apple's fault. There are no other stumbling blocks to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Once set up it works like a charm. I can say "Hey Siri, remind me to buy pasta" and a split second later I have a new VTODO on my CalDAV server.

What do you use as a CalDAV server?

Simple Radicale[1] setup behind an NGINX proxy.

[1] http://radicale.org/

> Google makes more money from iOS than they do from Android.

I think that statement's based on an old stat that, at that time, Google's revenue from licensing (Apple was paying for Maps) and advertising (including web and search advertising, and at the time Google was the default search provider on iOS and this was also before Siri was around to displace some web search) to iOS users was greater than its revenue from Android.

The facts on which all that was based (market share, basis of iOS revenue streams, etc.) have changed substantially since then.

Fair enough, it's certainly possible that the stat is no longer true. Unless they've talked about it recently, it's hard to know for sure. Here's an article from May of 2015 that says that 75% of Google's mobile search revenue comes from iOS, which probably hasn't changed too dramatically since then, but it may no longer be accurate: http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/27/apples-ios-drives-...

> Here's an article from May of 2015 that says that 75% of Google's mobile search revenue comes from iOS,

Ah, the other figure from a report from Goldman Sachs that nobody has seen but it is now dogma.

When you find the report, please, put it.

And, by the way, using Appleinsider as source is very funny

It is funny, but it was the first result my search gave me. The result after was from another site that reported the same figure though, so it's not like AppleInsider was alone.

Re lock-in: I agree. I attempted to switch to Android (Nexus 4) several years ago from whatever iPhone I had at the time. I had no issue transferring data over (or data I cared about, at least). Services (mail, chat, etc.) mapped just fine. My primary complaint, at the time, was lack of a well-performing PDF reader/viewer, and a handful of apps that I'd become semi-dependent on and had trouble finding suitable replacements for (e.g., Omnifocus - which has nice intregration between the mobile and desktop versions). I only wanted to change my mobile workflow, not the rest, so I switched back to iOS (I also found the interface grating at the time, not certain why anymore).

This is not, strictly, the fault of Apple, but of app developers and myself. Either for not making multi-platform a thing (Omnifocus), or for others not stepping up to compete, or for my inability or unwillingness to continue my search for suitable alternatives.

All this said, most of my coworkers use Android devices, and several want to switch to iPhones, but have run into the same issue I did, but in reverse.

This one comes to mind, which they left unfixed for years.

http://www.minyanville.com/sectors/technology/articles/Apple...

From the article, it sounds like it was a hard problem to solve.

So if someone texts me an address, I can have it open in Google maps by default when I click it?

> Google makes more money from iOS than they do from Android.

Source?

It's been stated in numerous articles over the years. I don't have any source offhand, though a quick DDG search gives me a story from 2012: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/03/29/iphone-4x-revenue-an...

> It's been stated in numerous articles over the years

Then it will be easy to find any source that it is not the same old "Google makes 4 times more from iOS than from Android" that was debunked years ago for using assumptions about a royalty figure in the Oracle vs. Google trial and nothing real

Here's an article from last year claiming that Google made 75% of its mobile search revenue from iOS: http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/27/apples-ios-drives-...

As I said, when you can find that "report" we can start to discuss about the figures. Until then, it has the same validity as using a random function in a computer to guess those numbers

That's completely ridiculous. Even if the exact figures in the articles are wrong, it's still generally accepted that Google makes a significant amount of its mobile revenue off of iOS. Demanding that I unearth some vague "report" to give you specific figures is completely meaningless. Doubly-so since it doesn't even matter what the numbers are, because the whole point was that Android users switching to iOS are still extremely likely to be using Google products, which means Google's still making money off of them.

> That's completely ridiculous.

What is completely ridiculous is claiming things without any proof

> it's still generally accepted that Google makes a significant amount of its mobile revenue off of iOS

This is not your claim

> Doubly-so since it doesn't even matter what the numbers are,

Oh, no, it matter when you have made a very specific claim that can't be supporte

I made a general claim based on a widely-held belief in support of the notion that Google doesn't care if people switch away from Android because Google still makes money off of those people regardless of which platform they choose, as they'll still be using Google products. Please stop trying to nitpick about specific irrelevant details such as how accurate the numbers are that have been reported in various articles.

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