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Comment by cliveowen | Hacker News Reader

I'm sick of people talking about iPhone's market share only to follow it up with "Android, meanwhile, continues to increase its market share". You're comparing an OS with a product, that's like comparing the market share of a Hyundai sedan with the market share of Shell fuel (if the Hyundai sedan could only work with a given brand of fuel). It doesn't make sense and it doesn't serve any purpose.

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It does if you're thinking what OS/market to code your app for.

If Apple doesn't license it's OS to other manufacturers, that's their business decision, but they are (also) an OS maker nonetheless.

Well I seem to remember there was a time beating iOS as a whole was hard to believe, and some still think that's true for tablets, even though Android already has more market share in tablets (each quarter, not yet in total userbase), and it's only a matter of time until it more or less replicates the success in smartphones. This would've happened sooner, if Google's employees weren't so dense to think that they don't have to do anything to push Android tablets, and thinking that devs only need to let their phone apps scale to tablets, which in hindsight I'm sure they also realize what a stupid statement that was at the time.

When? iOS never had the dominant share (globally) - that passed from Symbian to Android.

I don't remember such a thing. If it was, it was brief. For the longest time, smartphones ran Symbian, PalmOS, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile (order varied by year).

Android phones largely took marketshare from the above. The original 2006 prototype looked largely like one of the devices above (mainly the blackberry) [1]. It was only after the iPhone that Android pivoted hard towards away from embedded keyboards.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_proto...

iPhone isn't a product, it's a product family, like Samsung Galaxy.

iPhone 5c, or iPad 3 or iPod Touch 5th Gen are products, and they all happen to run iOS, which is an OS, like Android.

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