Alex Smith
Jul 27, 2017 · 1 min read

“Why the hell would Google work with Apple? They are competitors.”

Apple make no significant part of their profits by selling advertising.

Google make no significant part of their profits by selling hardware.

In fact Google make no significant part of their profits by doing anything other than selling advertising.

Google bought and pursued Android because they believed that mobile would become an important medium for them to spy on advertisees and on which to sell adverts. And they could see that Apple was not likely to leave iOS exploitable enough for Google to do that.

(Think Google bypassing traceability features in Safari)

But Apple are perfectly happy to let users use Google services if they choose to, provided that it is open and above board. They were even happy to sell Google default search site status.

And even today, while there are far more Android devices in the world that iOS devices…

  1. Google has to subsidise the Android market to keep the device makers locked in and producting.
  2. Google actually makes more money of iOS devices than it makes of Android devices, simply because the desirability to advertisers of iPhone users is so much higher than that of Android users.

Google and Apple aren’t competitors. They are completely different philosophies.

This stems from the fact that Apple’s product are it’s devices and services and it’s customers are it’s device and service users. Whereas Google’s customers are the advertisers and its products are the users of it’s devices and services.

    Alex Smith

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