This is entirely true, and it's omitting the worst aspects of the situation relating to revenue and platform momentum. As someone that has overseen tens (possi

This is entirely true, and it's omitting the worst aspects of the situation relating to revenue and platform momentum. As someone that has overseen tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of installs driven off the Play Store in my time it pains me to admit that economically speaking Android does not make sense at all today. My impression is many of the HN crowd are in denial about this. Two or three years ago things did look very different. Reflexively I often like to blame poor stewardship for the situation, but in more sober moments I've come to think that the way Android is distributed and the OHA operated is structurally unsound. The surprising aspect of it is just how successful Apple have been at cultivating an audience composed of the vast proportion of valuable customers, and had they not had such success then the open source Android may have worked out better. This pisses me off massively because Android makes all sorts of more technically interesting end user apps possible, but with a business hat on if it can't also be made to work on iOS it's not worth doing.