Charitably, they design their own main processors, their phones, their OS's, and many apps. From a hardware perspective, they are definitely less vertically int

Charitably, they design their own main processors, their phones, their OS's, and many apps. From a hardware perspective, they are definitely less vertically integrated than Samsung, but they have vertical integration in the SOC/firmware/software/apps chain. It's not clear whether that actually drops their costs much, though, which was the original point of the comparison.