[rchaud]

The OHA has about as much relevance as the League of Nations did in the 1930s.

Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded.

Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.

[Apocryphon]

There was a time when it felt like HTC made every smartphone. Of course, that was very early in the history of smartphones, and mostly because HTC phones were often not branded as such, so they were almost like the mystery manufacturer behind everything.

Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.

[rchaud]

HTC dominated the Windows Mobile 6.1 phones, which was a small market compared to Nokia and Blackberry.

As an independent OEM, they were selected by Google to build the G1, the first Android phone. But the touch smartphone market at the time was only in the millions. That's the scale HTC could handle.

When the market started exploding in 2010 onwards, HTC couldn't scale up, so Samsung, LG and Huawei took advantage.

[Apocryphon]

Yeah, HTC's brief dominance as the Android OEM only lasted until 2012-2013 or so. So a four or five year run, followed by a few notable collaborations with Google, the Nexus 9 and the Pixel.