[dtnewman]

If you look at the numbers right now, Google isn't close.

In Q4 of 2015, Apple generated about 63% of it's revenues from iPhone sales [1]. That's almost 2/3rds of revenues for a $605B company. Google is nearly as large in terms of market cap (~$550B) but revenues from Android don't even come close (never-mind hardware sales, which are negligible). It's estimated that Android has brought in around $31B _total_ revenue [2] since it was launched in 2008. The numbers by year aren't publicly available, but even if we're being very generous, it's unlikely that Android accounts for more than 10% of Google's revenues in any given year.

So yeah, in terms of smartphones, one company (Apple) is basically a smartphone manufacturer with a few things it does on the side (laptops, etc.) and the other is a search engine with smartphones as a side business.

Personally, I prefer Android. I've been an Android user for years and I can't bring myself to switch. I broke my Nexus 5x phone recently and I've been using my wife's old iPhone for a few weeks now and I can't wait to go back. But I roll my eyes every time I read an article about how Google is on the verge of taking over the market from Apple. Sure, if you look worldwide, the number of Android phones out there exceeds the number of iPhones, but if you look at the high end of the market--which seems to be where all the money is made--iPhone are still quite dominant. When I start to see Google's numbers get into the same _ballpark_ as Apple's for Pixel sales vs. iPhone sales, then I'll be intrigued.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/253649/iphone-revenue-as... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...

[rtkwe]

I don't think Google has to personally get to the level of Apple to have "won". When comparing the two it's better to look at the whole market instead of just Google vs Apple because there's so many manufacturers for Android and only one for iPhones.

[dtnewman]

I totally agree. You can be much smaller than Apple and still win. My point is that Apple's iPhone is a behemoth, and until now, Google's Nexus phones have been a niche product. Now, they're starting to compete more directly with the Pixel, which is a truly high-end phone. But until they get meaningful sales numbers, it's still very much a niche product. I agree with the article that Google has made a phone with the _specs_ to compete. But I've heard this before and yet the iPhone still dominates the high end phone market.