And many of these hardware makers, if not most, aren’t seen by Apple as serious competitors.įurther, Apple chooses to play only in the premium end of the smartphone market, so it isn’t even trying to compete with the many low-end, low-priced Android phones out there. It’s just not as definitive as it seems, since it is fragmented among so many hardware makers, and even flavors of the platform. So Android’s dominant market share is by no means irrelevant. Obviously, without Google and Android, Samsung and the other Android phone makers wouldn’t likely be competitors.
That difference in business models is the reason why, for instance, Google does better maps than Apple, but Apple is able to garner more trust from banks and merchants in its fledgling mobile payments product, since it doesn’t collect the data.Īpple’s real competitors are the Android phone makers, principally Samsung, which is the only one that has found major, enduring global success. Instead, it makes money on the phones themselves, which are a combination of its hardware, software and cloud services. And Apple’s homegrown apps aren’t available for other mobile platforms. It makes money from Android and the apps, as it does from search, by gathering user data and selling advertising using that data.īy contrast, Apple’s robust mobile operating system, iOS, is only a component of its hardware products. It licenses a no-cost mobile operating system - Android - and produces apps, for that system and for Apple’s. Google doesn’t make phones, despite its brief ownership of Motorola. Second, it’s important to recognize that Apple and Google aren’t direct competitors in the smartphone market. Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted in late October that the two iPhone 6 models “have become the fastest-selling iPhones in history.” The two rivals are playing different games We won’t know how the new models are doing for a while, but early numbers and lines at stores suggest that they are selling strongly. 30, Apple sold nearly 40 million iPhones, more than most analysts had predicted, and a new record for the September quarter, up from about 34 million last year, the previous record.Īnd that figure reflected only a couple of weeks of sales of the new iPhone 6 models, in a limited number of countries. … but Apple continues to do wellįor instance, the figures might suggest that iPhone sales are cratering. But there’s more to the picture than appears at first glance. This is a huge achievement by Google, and a real or potential problem for Apple.
(Android phones appeared a year later, and took years to become decent.) This is split among scads of phone makers.Īpple’s iPhones - the only handsets Apple allows to use its iOS mobile operating system - have somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of global market share.Īnd Android’s share has exploded in recent years, while Apple’s share has shrunk from the glory days following the iPhone’s upending of the mobile phone market in 2007. Globally, handsets running Google’s Android operating system absolutely dominate the smartphone market, with somewhere between 80 percent and 85 percent market share. Google’s Android dominates in market share …įirst, the market-share facts. Both have been very successful, but by different metrics and different skills.Īnd each of these heavyweights is facing serious challenges, though rather different ones. In fact, the two contestants are playing different games, in which success isn’t mutually exclusive.
So, game over.īut, as with most conventional wisdom, this example is oversimplified and ignores many nuances. The conventional wisdom is that, of the two players who count, Google, via its Android platform, has soundly trounced Apple, via its iOS platform. When thinking about smartphones - the most important digital devices today - it’s customary to think of the business as a simple market-share contest.
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