[OT] mobile rising

Joakim dlang at joakim.fea.st
Thu Nov 9 14:42:41 UTC 2017


On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:22:22 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> I also think we should add to this discussion that Google was 
> hellbent on going forward with Android even when it was clearly 
> inferior. Apple tried to squish out Google's services from 
> their iOS products for a while. And that is exactly what Google 
> tries to prevent by funding things like Chrome and Android.

Do you blame them, given such anti-competitive measures long 
undertaken by MS and Apple?

> So for Google Chrome and Android does not have to make sense in 
> business terms, it is basically an anti-competitive tool to 
> protect their own hegemony (relative monopoly) by retaining 
> critical mass and making it difficult for competitors to build 
> up a competing product over time (you need a source of income 
> while your product is evolving from mediocre to great to do 
> that).

There is some truth to this, but if you cannot compete with a 
free product- cough, cough, Windows Mobile- I don't know what to 
tell you.  In other words, google cannot afford to spend a 
fraction of the money on Android that Apple spends on iOS, 
because google makes so little money off of Android by 
comparison, so there are disadvantages to their free model too.  
It is one of the reasons why they have now plunged into the 
high-end smartphone market with their recent Pixel line.

I think the lack of a viable business model for Android vendors, 
other than Samsung, is a huge problem for the platform, as Apple 
hoovers up two-thirds of the profit with only a tenth of the 
phones sold:

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/80-of-global-handset-profits-comes-from-premium-segment/

As I said earlier, the mobile OS story is not over yet, there are 
more changes to come.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list