Android's weak sales drive Verizon toward Apple's iPhone
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
This is a pretty giant red flag here. No "official" data, versus what we know - Verizon is easily the largest Android carrier in the US, Android's marketshare has been on a meteoric rise, and Google is claiming 300k Android activations per day (which, granted, is likely a worldwide number!) versus Apple's claimed 230k iOS activations per day (which again, is worldwide, and includes the iPad and iPod Touch).
I don't at all buy the argument that Verizon's Android push has failed, which is why they're looking to pick up the iPhone. I think that Verizon's Android push has wildly succeeded, but they're looking to capitalize on AT&T's battered reputation by carrying the iPhone as well. To think that a carrier must commit to a single platform at the expense of all others is somewhat silly. Verizon will see a lot of growth by offering the iPhone, and I suspect much of it will be in the form of AT&T customers who are fed up with subpar service but who love the device itself.
By strengthening Android over the last 3 years, there's now an alternative and Apple isn't the monopoly in the smartphone market. Now VZW can get iPhone on more reasonable terms.
It would be helpful to understand what actually went down...
Back in 2006, Apple wanted a new way of selling handsets. Apple did not want to do subsidized, they wanted to supply the handsets to the carriers, charge a fair price to the purchaser, then share in the revenue (that was received by the carrier). VZW declined that deal. AT&T (which at the time was still Cingular) liked the possibilities, liked the prototypes, and decided to buy in. The 'revenue sharing' deal ended up being a bad thing for Apple, because a very large number of original iPhone handsets sold (perhaps as many as 30%) were never activated on AT&T. A few were jailbroken/unlocked and used on T-Mobile, but large number of them ended up on the far side of the Pacific (in various countries). So Apple had to go back to AT&T and renegotiate a more conventional deal. Now that the deal is similar to what VZW normally has (and exclusivity is about to end), we will (hopefully) see some competition in the US iPhone market.