And yet, even with that strategy being implemented for the past few years, the iPhone is losing in global market share, and Android is 5x bigger now. So it's not very effective in this context.
What "market share" are you measuring? If it is number of devices sold then so what. Maybe narrowing down to number smartphones sold? A little more interesting.
I prefer Android myself, but claims of Apple "losing" need to be substantiated. It is certainly the case they are losing the least profitable customers but that is a very hard business to be in.
How about instead we look at market share of revenues? Even better what about share of profits since that makes more business sense. Asymco has a post for that: http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/03/first-apples-rank-in-mobile...
I prefer Android myself, but claims of Apple "losing" need to be substantiated. It is certainly the case they are losing the least profitable customers but that is a very hard business to be in.