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I don’t think there’s all that much more money to be pulled out of Android, since (a) it’s available under a very permissive license and (b) it’s used all over

I don’t think there’s all that much more money to be pulled out of Android, since (a) it’s available under a very permissive license and (b) it’s used all over the world by people who don’t have much more money to spend on their phone. Google already barely has influence over the OEM’s that choose to use it, case in point their recent spat with Samsung over the fact that Samsung keeps patching the kernel in ways that introduce security vulnerabilities. Samsung hasn’t stopped, Google has just started publishing the vulnerabilities to shame Samsung into maybe doing something about it. Is this a scenario where it looks like Google is leaving money on the table? And if this is all the money available from Android that spells bad news for an independent company, since we know from the Google v Oracle filings that Android has made Google something like $10B total over all the years it’s been operating. Android might break even, but I assume it’s operating at a loss so that Google can benefit in a bunch of less direct ways from the fact that it exists.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
> [...] we know from the Google v Oracle filings that Android has made Google something like $10B total over all the years it’s been operating. Over the last year and a half, Google has made over $46b in app revenue ($29.3b 2019 [1] and $17.3b H1 2020 [2]) which at a 30% cut is around $14b. That's just apps on Google Play — not counting other forms of media, Pixel sales, Android licenses (they can always re-license if it's too permissive), etc. Do you have a source for that $10b figure? I imagine some specific part related to the suit has made much over its lifetime. It seems like Google's Android business as a whole has made much more. [1] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-2019 https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-2019 [2] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-2020 https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-20...
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  The $10B figure is for Android licensing and hardware sales, and doesn’t include app revenue or the play store, which OEM’s don’t have to include e.g. in China where Google’s services are all banned. If the Play store went with Android to a new spinoff company that would certainly be a more financially viable company, but that’s a much, much more invasive dismantling of Google than separating out Android the OS and hardware platform. Once a proposed division gets deep enough to be partitioning datacenters it becomes less a discussion of spin-off companies and more a discussion of abolishing Google and seeing where the pieces fall.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    I think it’s reasonable to assume that in this hypothetical scenario, the app part of Google Play would get split off and follow their Android business.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

> [...] we know from the Google v Oracle filings that Android has made Google something like $10B total over all the years it’s been operating. Over the last year and a half, Google has made over $46b in app revenue ($29.3b 2019 [1] and $17.3b H1 2020 [2]) which at a 30% cut is around $14b. That's just apps on Google Play — not counting other forms of media, Pixel sales, Android licenses (they can always re-license if it's too permissive), etc. Do you have a source for that $10b figure? I imagine some specific part related to the suit has made much over its lifetime. It seems like Google's Android business as a whole has made much more. [1] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-2019 https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-2019 [2] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-2020 https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-20...

dodobirdlord 6y ago
The $10B figure is for Android licensing and hardware sales, and doesn’t include app revenue or the play store, which OEM’s don’t have to include e.g. in China where Google’s services are all banned. If the Play store went with Android to a new spinoff company that would certainly be a more financially viable company, but that’s a much, much more invasive dismantling of Google than separating out Android the OS and hardware platform. Once a proposed division gets deep enough to be partitioning datacenters it becomes less a discussion of spin-off companies and more a discussion of abolishing Google and seeing where the pieces fall.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  I think it’s reasonable to assume that in this hypothetical scenario, the app part of Google Play would get split off and follow their Android business.