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Comment by lazaroclapp | Hacker News Reader

Say what you wish about the fractured Android ecosystem, but it managed to get >84% of the market-share vs <12% for iOS, despite having arrived later and being (at least in its earlier incarnations, before Android 4.x) a much less polished product. Samsung alone has more users than Apple does. Spreading their innovation around to partners was a killer move from Google the same as selling their software to IBM clones was a killer move for Microsoft.

Note: Not arguing that Apple's strategy was unsuccessful in the least, but Google wouldn't have been able to beat Apple at their own game (integrated hardware-software luxury-branded product) at the time of the iPhone/Android release.

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It's because of the cost, nothing else. Everyone I know would switch to iPhone in a heartbeat if they had the Rs. 60k you need in India to buy one. My Android phone, on the other hand, cost me Rs. 13k.

Android thrived because shelling out a month's salary on phones is a losing proposition in third world countries (which have the majority of phone uses)

Price is just as important in the first world countries. Not everyone wants to spend almost $1k USD on a phone, which is something you might drop and break. When there are Android phones on offer with equal or better specifications and a lower price, most people will pick that one.

This is just not true. Android manufacturers sell huge numbers of high end phones that cost the same amount as iPhones. I have owned both, and found the Android to be a much better user experience. iPhone has the worst keyboard I've ever used, the screen on the 5 was way too small, and I just find the whole UI to be really clunky and badly designed for the way I use devices (eg. The lack of a back button and inconsistent way apps try to deal with this limitation)

Sure, plenty of people like iPhones and plenty of people would swap, but I know a lot of people who really don't like iOS and are far happier with a high end android

> This is just not true. Android manufacturers sell huge numbers of high end phones that cost the same amount as iPhones.

But not in India, a third world country, as OP makes the point. Majority of Android budget range here is ₹5000 ($90) to ₹15000 (~$300). Where as an iPhone costs ₹53,500.

My point is that there are probably plenty of Indians who, if they had 53,000 to spend on a phone, would choose a high end Android. Some iPhone fans try to make the argument that "everyone who could afford it would buy an iPhone", and that is just not true as evidenced by the large number of high end Androids which are sold. Some people just don't like iOS.

Apple's profits from the iPhone alone in the last quarter exceeded the total profits of Google and Microsoft combined.

This is both true and completely irrelevant.

How so? This is about Google's relative competitiveness. You seem to blithely dismiss Apple's success with iOS relative to Android, claiming that high end Android phones sell in comparable quantities. This is patently contradicted by the facts. If the goal of an enterprise is to make profits, Apple is crushing Google in the mobile device business.

The discussion is not about whether Apple is a profitable company, its about whether "everyone who could afford it would buy an iPhone". There is plenty of evidence that many people prefer Android regardless of price. Whether Apple's business model is good or bad is a completely different discussion.

Google & Apple aren't remotely in the same business WRT mobile. Apple is hugely successful, no question, with their success riding largely on four factors: 1) industrial design, 2) idiot-proof OS, 3) zero hardware diversity, 4) 3rd party developer support. Google is hugely successful, too, but they have no mission statement that says they are intending to squeeze every last penny from the mobile market. I mean seriously, the last number I heard was that there were close to 1500 people working on Chrome-related stuff. The fact is that Google makes "small" (hundreds of millions to a few billion) amounts on a broad variety of things, and underwrites the spectrum of R&D/engineering via their advertising juggernaut. Whether they do well at this or not is another question, but they are not competing with Apple on hardly any fronts.

At first i thought, you were comparing against only the mobile divisions of Google and Microsoft. But after some search, I found that their profit is really massive!

Now i really want to understand the forces in play, that help the iphone reap such gigantic profits :)

I don't think so. Having an iPhone is considered a status symbol. If they started selling it for say Rs.20K, it will lose its allure.

Well, in the US, a bit over a year ago I chose the Galaxy Note 3 over the iPhone 5S because it was bigger, faster, higher-resolution, had much more RAM, had a much larger battery (which was replaceable), etc. The iPhone 6 didn't exist at the time and I stand by my choice to go with an Android phone given the options at the time.

It's not because of the cost. I switched to Android because I wanted a large phone and the Galaxy Note was available YEARS before the iPhone 6.

Then there is the annoying fact that as soon as a new iPhone comes out, the old ones get slow/ start crashing Every single iPhone my family has had (sample size of fifteen, starting from the original phone) has had this issue.

Edit: the other big issue was the iPhone's lack of multitasking. For the longest time it wasn't possible to do something as trivial playing Pandora while reading HN.

Android phones are cheaper than iPhones. That's all it is.

So? It doesn't matter how simple it was; it worked.

And the larger sized screens really made a difference to the market.

It's amazing to see Samsung in so much trouble now that Apple has released the iPhone 6/6+. They have lost a staggering amount of profit in only a few months.

Check your dates. Samsung started losing much of its profit before the iPhone 6 came out. It lost 66 percent of its profit year over year in the summer quarter (Apple's weakest quarter, in fact).

Samsung may have lost some market share and profits when the iPohne 6 was launched, but it really started bleeding when it stopped any pretense at innovation, and it just kept iterating on the ugly design of Galaxy S3 and the bloatmess of Touchwizz. Galaxy S5 was considered a failure. Because of that Samsung intends to "rebuilt everything from scratch" with Galaxy S6. It's not because of the iPhone 6.

I've checked the dates. Samsung recently posted their biggest loss in operating profit since 2009. Which unsurprisingly coincided with record sales and market share growth by Apple.

I didn't say they didn't lose MORE when Apple launched the iPhone 6. I said Samsung was already on a FAST DECLINE in profits since EARLY THIS YEAR.

Part of the reason why they are cheaper is that they are made by many manufacturers with experience in large scale electronics production who compete strongly on price for most of their product lines. If Google had decided to launch Android by themselves with the electronics production capabilities they had at the time, it would have been priced like Google Glass. If they had partnered with a single manufacturer, it would still have been vastly more expensive than what they did.

Not that there aren't other important factors for Android's success, as even relatively expensive Android phones are quite competitive with iPhones in market-share. But even if you assume it is just price, that is an argument in favor of the multi-vendor strategy, not against.

>it would have been priced like Google Glass.

Glass was purposely priced out of the range of consumers. It was meant as an experimental platform only.

Sure, I know I am being hyperbolic.

Still, it would have been priced higher than relative high end Android phones, have worse specs than mid-level phones and be perhaps better only in consistency and software-hardware integration (did I just accidentally describe the Nexus line?). It would not have beaten Apple at its own game and without a larger market-share and more friendly developer terms, it would not have had enough apps to achieve critical mass (and now I seem to be describing the Windows Phone...).

I am glad it is. Millions of people are able to get the benefits of smartphones because of that. If Google can bring auto-driving cars to the whole world with lower cost then I will again gladly welcome it. However, that's still a decade away really.

84% market share is a loss if you don't make any money on your product.

Well you are still potentially stopping your competitors from making money on their product.

That's certainly true, although I don't think Apple is struggling in the revenue department these days.

To be fair, Android has contributed to Google's core business by massively expanding the reach of their search ads...or so the story goes.

> 84% market share is a loss if you don't make any money on your product.

Its a win if it is preventing a competitor from getting the kind of dominance in a market that is key to delivery of a product on which you do make money (like, in Google's case, mobile platforms are to online advertising) that they could use to extract rents that would cut into those profits.

Chrome and Android don't need to make money directly to be successful, they just need to be popular enough that other browser or mobile OS vendors can't use their position to cut off Google's advertising revenues.

iOS has a 42.5% market share[1], where are you getting your info from?

[1]https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

That's their share of mobile web browsing. It measures usage, while the other numbers here are measuring share of unit sales.

There's always been a big disparity between the market share and web usage share of Android vs. iOS: http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mob...

Google (probably) knows the answer to this question. How many people completely miss the WiFi connection prompt?

You could mix in data from browsers (how many people browse near a wifi point that they have connected to with their browser, but don't connect with their wifi? how many people browse in the evening/morning but not connected to wifi?)

There's probably a wealth of demographic data they could correlate through gmail content and/or chrome browsing trends to correlate user income level, although I don't know if Google has privacy controls in place that makes sharing this data between divisions possible.

Smartphones are the first computing experience for a lot of people. My mom, 64, had never used any sort of computing device before I got her an Android smartphone. She doesn't even know what a browser is. The only thing she knows is how to use WhatsApp and order things off a shopping app I installed for her. To her, that's the "internet". And she is perfectly happy with that.

IDC: Android at 84% (http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp)

Strategy Analytics : Android at 85% (http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/31/android-reached-reco...)

Lol, 84% in what countries?

Looking at our web stats across our clients, android isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to iOS.

Having a large market share in third world countries who won't buy your app isn't much of a win.

>> ask Whatsapp. :)

Whatsapp is really a special case, though. They cornered a market that's relatively unique. Third-world countries don't need another messaging app.

And from my experience here in Cambodia, everyone is using Facebook anyway. So it isn't a clear black and white "third world countries only use whatsapp" either.

Also, there is a severe desire of everyone to buy an iPhone -- so they just lag behind a lot. You can buy a pre-jailbroken iPhone 4G for around $100 here.

If Whatsapp lost, sign me up for losing.

> Having a large market share in third world countries who won't buy your app isn't much of a win

Pretty sure the large market share in third world countries also doesn't care about your win either. They just have Android phones. Not sure if it is Google's win, users' win or OEM's that make the hardware's win. Kind of a mix perhaps.

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