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> healthy ecosystem of phone manufacturers. For awhile there were but now? Now it's really just Samsung.

Confused, aren't there a ton of phone manufacturers? Sony, OnePlus, Asus to name a few off the top of my head. In what sense are they all "unhealthy" except Samsung?

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It's the market that's unhealthy. Samsung and Apple are really the only big players at this point - Sony has sub 1% market share, Asus likely even less. OnePlus is owned by OPPO and together they have about 9% market share. Samsung is the only brand that is actually able to compete with Apple.

Still confused. So what would be healthy in your mind? The sheer number of manufacturers competing in the Android ecosystem seems like the definition of a healthy market for Android phones—in contrast with iOS where there's 1 player. Obviously you can't have 10 manufacturers each with 50% market share, so what sign of health are you looking for that deviates so strongly from the status quo?

In other industries a healthy fragmented market looks like the major player having 30 percent share, the second about 20, and the rest is divided among a dozens different competitors.

Obviously this is not the case at all in the android market.

Android seems [1] to be 34% (EDIT: or 23%? see [2]) vs. 15% for the top 2 players—is it really that stark of a contrast with 30% vs. 20% to call it unhealthy?

[1] https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32114999

That kind of market share in volume is useless. The market share in value is much more relevant. Selling 100 usd smartphones is not the same as selling 1000 usd smartphones.

What are the statistics for those?

The statistics are as following: Huawei made a few 1000 usd smartphones, but nearly went bankrupt and had to sell their mobile division.

Did they sell everything mobile or just the Honor brand?

Huawei's fate had nothing to do with markets or with the price of their phones though.

So for 2021 the revenue share is

Apple 44%

Samsung 16%

BBK Electronics 16% (Oppo/OnePlus/Realme 8%, Vivo 8%)

Xiaomi 8%

Others 16%

That's according to Counterpoint Research [1]

Profitability appears to be even more skewed in favour of Apple but I don't know the exact numbers.

It would be interesting to know what's included in that 16% others category as that's where any challengers would be coming from.

[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-reven...

Note that OPPO/OnePlus/Realme isn't BBK, as original report distinguishes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27871845

Wikipedia claims that BBK is the parent company of Oppo and Vivo, in the case of Oppo based on this government source:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160423202414/http://www.dg.gov...

Unfortunately, I don't know what the authoritative source for company information is in China. It can't be blog posts and media reports I suppose.

Interesting. I found OPPO and vivo's official response for a question. It seems that it should be distinguished for statistics, though they share origin and founders. https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/557027909615399132.html https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/1606300474779701827.html

That is pretty much exactly what it is. https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers

Samsung is at about 35%, BBK is next at about 23% (Oppo+Vivo+Realme are subbrands of BBK as is Oneplus).

BBK is a bit the 'Luxottica of Android' if you will with several brands under them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBK_Electronics

See reply in other thread - nobody cares about volumes, but value share.

No, YOU don't care about volumes because it doesn't confirm your own biased opinion.

Plenty of other people care about market share (not to mention you're deliberately ignoring all the non-phone Android ecosystem that has established).

Samsung has 23.7% market share, Apple 18%, Xiaomi 12.7%.

https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share

You forgot the word "unit". It's not money, it's units.

Apple doesn't dominate the number of widgets, they dominate in money.

Doesn't Samsung make a bunch of parts for the iPhone?

If so that’s kind of insane to think about the market dynamics where that makes sense.

Samsung makes everything that can be made on Earth, so it's hard for Apple to avoid. And why would Samsung refuse to make profits on iPhones?

Those aren't necessarily the same business/P&L just because they're all called Samsung either, so it's natural for them to compete with each other.

(Sure they're owned by the same people, but Apple and Google are also owned by the same people - American 401k providers.)

Samsung is a conglomerate - the various Samsung businesses are separate, but they are affiliated in deeper way than just having the same investors.

Samsung's chip department is likely very far from their phone department. They make everything, basically, some say they even run a country.

This is very US market centric.

Maybe from US point of view.

Maybe now only Samsung contributes to upstream Android project significantly, and makes advanced device. For example, Desktop Mode code is came from DeX IIRC, WearOS is finally merged to Samsung's OS, foldable phones and customizes are from Galaxy. Samsung is also a one of the biggest conglomerate that has own fab and makes SoC, display, battery, DRAM, NAND, etc... Possibly also Huawei contributed much but it was gone. I think Sony, OnePlus, Asus makes just good smartphones for consumer, but not contributed to advance futuristic Android ecosystem much now (Perhaps Sony Ericsson was big in early days). I'd like to see AOSP commit ranking by organization.

>For example, Desktop Mode code is came from DeX IIRC

What Desktop Mode in Android are you referring to, and what parts of it came from Samsung DeX code? There's nothing really in AOSP that resembles DeX.

>WearOS is finally merged to Samsung's OS

Wear OS is closed source.

I don't have exact data to hand, but my recollection is that Samsung is the only Android phone manufacturer turning a profit on phones.

I haven't looked up any others, but I just looked up OnePlus and saw this [1]:

> For the first time in company history, OnePlus passed the $1 billion mark in revenue and became profitable. (2018)

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/oneplus-profitable-830348/

if that case the case why are they all still making android phones if it isn't profitable? My perhaps naive presumption is that they are in fact profitable but not a high margin market. If it was not a profitable venture they wouldn't make them

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