from InfoWorld article
by Matt Asay - currently Head of Developer Ecosystem at Adobe

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..Worried that Apple would own the growing smartphone market, Google bought Andy Rubin’s Android, Inc. in 2005 and shipped Android in 2007, with the first Android-based device hitting the market in 2008. Roughly a decade later, Android is everywhere; recent Gartner data shows that 85.9 percent of smartphones sold globally in 2017 ran Android, versus 14.0 percent running iOS..

In fact, Android keeps gaining market share, climbing 1.1 percent over the past year. All told, Android’s active installed base tops 2 billion users now.

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..but the ecosystem around Android is nowhere near as profitable—or big—as Apple’s iOS ecosystem, even though Android devices outsell iPhones 6:1. By some estimates, even Google makes more money (through Google services particularly search) from iOS than from Android. Four times as much...

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Nor is Google alone in this. According to App Annie data, the average mobile app makes four times as much on iOS than Android. In fact, despite having half as many downloads as the Google Play Store, Apple’s App Store generates twice as much revenue for developers. There may be a variety of reasons for this—Android tends to dominate in lower-income markets—but the outcome remains the same: Apple’s ecosystem generates a lot more developer revenue than Google’s Android ecosystem.

What’s true for third-party developers is also true for the primary mobile combatants: Court documents in 2016 revealed that Apple made more on mobile in one quarter than Google had made in the entire history of Android.

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Meanwhile, Apple’s services business (like Apple Pay) has exploded, a total of 240 million paid subscriptions, growing by 30 million in the last quarter alone. With an active installed base of 1.3 billion, Apple is printing money as those cash-rich customers spend on apps, music, retail (Apple Pay), and more.

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Android has more users, but they spend less money, attracting fewer developers. App developers default to iOS as their first platform, Android second. Consumers demonstrate 92 percent loyalty to the iPhone, according to Morgan Stanley data. Android? Just 77 percent at the high end (Samsung), and closer to 50 percent for LG and others.

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In sum, ... It may well be that the fault is Google’s for too tightly controlling Android, but Apple’s tight control of iOS seems to be having the opposite effect.

Indeed, in the rapidly evolving smartphone market, a tightly controlled, premium experience seems to be the winning strategy, one that the not-quite-open-nor-closed-enough Android can quite pull off.



Last edited by FsFOOT; 03/10/18 02:28 AM. Reason: grammar