> If you take market share as a determiner, Google has basically crushed Apple
I believe you mean that Android has dominated iOS in terms of market share. But when one company gives their OS away for free to everyone and the other restricts their OS only to their own devices, that's the only result you could ever reasonably expect.
Google as a company has had little to no involvement in the creation of specific phones. And when they have had involvement, they've outsourced much of the work. That's actually partially why this article exists -- the Pixel phone represents their first foray into making their own phone, software and hardware together, like Apple does.
So to me the statement that Google has crushed Apple makes little to no sense because until now Google hasn't even attempted to compete with Apple directly, and Apple has intentionally limited the scope of iOS's distribution.
If we're going to compare Google-created phones to Apple-created phones, how many Pixel phones do you see daily vs. iPhones?
Hm. I'm not really sure that's a good way of looking at it. I think comparing manufacturers is a more apt comparison. How does Apple compare to Samsung to HTC to (now) Google?
but even if you want to look at the market share by operating system, I think you should then look at revenue. Seems like Apple makes a lot more money from it's market share compared to Google.
When people think about buying a phone, it's always between an iPhone and something else. Something else is the entire rest of the world, iPhone being the reference for the consumer.
> When people think about buying a phone, it's always between an iPhone and something else.
Not really. When my dad wanted to buy a phone, it was either a Samsung or something else. iPhone never entered the conversation. When my mom wanted to buy a phone, she just got the same thing as my dad so they could help each other. Same thing with my sister and her husband.
My wife used a Samsung Galaxy S3 and then an S5 for the last five years or so. She never even thought about getting an iPhone until recently when I convinced her to do an experiment with me.
You know what every single one of those people that I just mentioned cared about most in their phone? "Having a big screen." And when they first started looking, iPhones all had tiny screens, so they didn't even consider them.
I personally also never even considered an iPhone until very recently when I decided to just try it out for kicks. It's a decent phone. I miss that back button though. Navigating back in iOS is tedious and I think iOS is total shit in a lot of ways, like not letting me absolutely position the home icons or even letting me replace the home screen.
I'm guessing you are in the US where people are a bit more exposed to other phones marketting. In Europe, in still not much the case. Although I'm happy finally some brands are breaking this silly iPhone cult.
Even for companies, latest Google flagship was described as an attempt to pass iPhone quality. Everybody still wants to out-apple Apple; which says something.
I think the author only brings that claim to make a point. Which is, Apple put companies like Blackberry (RIM), Nokia, and Motorola on life-support several years ago after the introduction of the iPhone.
Fast forward to now, market share of the iPhone is in decline worldwide due to the proliferation of the multiple brands offering Android OS on their "Smart" handsets. [1] The author is merely painting a portrait of things to come.
I think apple has actually lost the "smartphone war".
Android market share is somewhere around 85%, ios under 15%.
It doesn't matter who manufactures the hardware if you control the software and this is true especially if profit from the phone hardware manufactured by you is not really that important part of your profit stream.
Control of the software is one of the things the article points to. Google is putting their name on phones to increase the control they have over software. The OEMS and carriers have demonstrated that they will mostly do a shit job of it.
The sale of smartphones? Concrete numbers seem hard to come by, but it seems unlikely that there are as many Pixel/Nexus phones out there as there are iPhones. Google has a lot more 'copycats' to contend with.
http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp