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Comment by esrauch | Hacker News Reader

> I expect to pay for Android and iOS while I buy the device

I think when you buy an Android phone you aren't paying for the OS (based on a quick search it seems that Google doesn't get a cut of Samsung phone sales and doesn't charge OEMs any licensing fees).

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Android is technically "open source and free", but all the profit from the Play Store goes directly to Google (i.e. The 30% from app store purchases completely skips OEMs like Samsung and funnels entirely to Google).

Hence, why they're willing to offer the OS for free and why they push so hard for it. They make far more money from app purchases.

They make _far_ more money from mining all the data your device sends them about you. The secret sauce for Android is the proprietary Google Play Services package that contains all the APIs that make the device usable (and enables the snooping). The base open source Android OS is limited in functionality.

Right: the comment I replied to was saying that they don't think the 30% cut is fair since the user paid for the OS. I was just pointing out that doesn't seem to check out since they didn't actually pay for the OS (if it's Android and not Google hardware).

They might reasonably say they'd rather pay for the OS upfront instead though.

Though you may be paying the device manufacturer for their (probably terrible) re-skinning of the stock Android UI (Samsung and Xiaomi come to mind as examples that make a pretty different-looking/feeling skin on their devices).

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