Android is winning for Google in a massive way once you understand their goal. Google's Android and even Chrome strategies are that _no one_ should win at the OS/platform level. They never want another Windows, or Mac, or IE, or anything that prevents them from leveraging the open web because it's fronted with proprietary code that can block them.

The best way to win at that game is to either force the market to adopt the system they can manage ("with Google" approved Android phones and the market) or make the web the only worthwhile source of truth among a hodge-podge of OSes that try to bolt on proprietary components. Even the major commercial forks of Android have not yet proved to derail this from succeeding.

Google doesn't have a strategy to serve ads on android? sure they do, it's called a web browser. Google has the largest ad network on the internet, and just about every time you view a webpage google gets a cut of it. It doesn't matter whether you use an android device or an iOS device or a windows computer or a potato, google makes money.

if google can encourage people to use the internet more by selling smartphones, they win. The point of android is not to cannibalize iOS market share, it's to eliminate the dumbphone. They don't want anybody to ever be without internet.

That's not true.

Android gives Google a large number of devices where Google is the default search engine and (assuming we're talking about the "official version") always will be.

That's a big win - default search in the browser is something they and others pay a lot for and for (official) Android devices Google aren't paying that. The reason that they pay that money to others (including Apple) is that that's a way of serving and selling ads to the mobile platform.