Is the iPhone in danger of being overtaken by Android?

[Liquorpuki]

And? Are you saying that a company can't offer a free product?

Android objectiva was not being a source of direct revenue, it was a defensive move against someone having too much power on mobile devices.

Defensive move against who and in what market

Ironically all Android has resulted in is Samsung gaining too much power in the smartphone market and Amazon using it to own the budget tablet market. Now Google has to go spend 12 billion on Motorola and get into the phone hardware market to fight Samsung, whose rise it helped subsidize

Google is not a traditional company and does not intend to become one. Larry Page said it almost 10 years ago. If they only focus on direct revenue, you will not get Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Calendar, Android, Google Glass, Google Driver, Driverless cars etc. They are extremely successful because they think different.

Companies that offer free products monetize their input costs through those products' complements. Apple offers iCloud for free, which costs money to develop. It also underprices its software. Both of them strengthen the Apple ecosystem, so it's worth it for Apple to take the hit because it makes back iCloud and software input costs through increased hardware sales.

All those Google services - Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, etc - are products that complement Google's primary revenue source - online ads. It puts them out for free so a ton of people will use them, they all lead back to ad revenue which cover the dev costs of YouTube etc in addition to creating profit.

Android does not do this to any substantial degree. Only thing it's done so far is benefit OEM's who no longer have to spend money to develop their own mobile OS or license one, which is why Samsung has gotten rich off Android and Google hasn't

 

[McCool71]

Apple offers iCloud for free, which costs money to develop. It also underprices its software.

On the other hand they overprice their hardware like no-one else, which is of course a big part of the total calculation since you need Apple hardware to run their software.

 

[batting1000]

This is something I worry about. I loooove my iPhone, but I see more and more people switching to Android. This makes me worry that the iPhone will be overtaken by Android or eventually become irrelevant (see RIM Blackberry). Do you think this might happen in the next 5-10 years? Or is iPhone vs Android simply the Mac vs PC of the smartphone world, with no winner really emerging, just 2 separate choices?

This is what you worry about?

 

[roxxette]

I dont see the big problem, you used RIM as example but people keep buying those phones and they still release new ones honestly the best thing that can happend to iOS is to crawl back to the shadows so the merge of the 2 apple OS never happend

 

[marc11]

OP wait until you have a job, kids, mortgage and other fun things life throws at you to understand the true meaning of worry and realize just how unimportant your choice of phone is. Just go enjoy yourself now the future will be along faster than you wish possible and at that time which os or device maker is number one will not matter.

In fact to be honest it really doesn't matter now.

 

[adder7712]

Because it costs $$$ to develop and that $$$ belongs to shareholders

Android is mostly open source.

 

[Liquorpuki]

Android is mostly open source.

Open source or not, Google's Android engineers don't work for free