Give Google a little more credit. They have 7 separate products with over 1 billion users each [0]. Search, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Youtube and the Google Play Store.
[0]: https://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-with-1-billion-...
[0]: https://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-with-1-billion-...
Android and Chrome and Google Play are unprofitable.
???
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/05/app-revenue-climbed-35-per...
$20B in revenue.
with the 30% commission, it would be at most $6B. From http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/google-earnings/i...:
> Alphabet posted nearly $15 billion in sales for the year from Google's "other revenues," which include cloud services and hardware products, like the Pixel phones and Google Home smart speakers.
I think you're getting at what is sometimes called "cost of revenue" and "net revenue" for businesses where it's important to report on sales channel costs.
Google doesn't break down the Play Store revenues this way, but for advertising there's a similar dynamic at play where it's "revenue" and "traffic acquisition costs"
Market is complex, there is not one thing or another can explain.
Also, it's on the same infrastructure as apps so they already have a good backbone for delivering it
So it is not about the profit Android brings to Google, rather the money Oracle looses by OEMs not paying for licenses.
https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2018Q1_alphabet_earnings_releas...
And I'm saying this in spite of being less and less happy with Google's search results lately. It has become very difficult to prevent Google from generalising queries beyond all recognition.