On pretty much every metric except eyeballs, Android is losing (including the value of eyeballs - advertising doesn't matter if the people seeing your ads cant pay for your product), so why does 68% of market share matter?
This is Hacker News -- a site for people who set out to build things that don't exist yet. the ability to target 68% of the world's smartphone-using population seems pretty interesting to me. For example, consider an education platform, as Nicholas Negroponte attempted to with the OLPC project. Whether there's monetization or not, there might be an interesting opportunity there.
Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.
At the end of the day, it's money that makes the world go round. If you're making more profit than your competitors, you're getting ahead, because you have more money for R&D, more money for marketing, more money for buying promising start-ups, and more money for lawsuits.
I mean, the fact that Apple has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars in cash - more than the treasuries of many countries - paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android.
This is like comparing two people with one making $1 million & the other $100,000.
Then saying that the latter has a very bleak future.
And I have to disagree with you, I don't believe that money makes the world go round.
In your world maybe.
Siri, remind enraged_camel to read this comment again in five years. Having a lot of money on hand doesn't mean you can easily spend all your competitors out of business.
How does stupid bullshit like this actually make it to this website?
Profit only matters if you own Apple. I'm more concerned with the variety of options I have as a consumer, and the competition between manufacturers driving them to produce better hardware.
However, smartphones could be life-changing for poor people. They probably won't be able to afford a computer but an Android phone for under $100 is within their reach.
Poor people with smartphones mean they have access to more information and will be able to communicate easier. I've read stories about how basic phones with SMS empowered people in poor countries. They could do much more with smartphones.
So if everything is about the money, yeah, Android is definitely losing.
Even if Android keeps gaining marketshare -lets say it gets to 70/75%- I don't think this will play the same way as Mac/PC did in the 90s. Most of what people do these days with a computer / phone is platform agnostic (web browsing, for instance).