Competition for profit share or market share? Globally Apple has a marketshare of about 26%. Even in the US, Apple has just over 50% marketshare. The fact tha

Competition for profit share or market share? Globally Apple has a marketshare of about 26%. Even in the US, Apple has just over 50% marketshare. The fact that they are capturing the majority of the profit is reflective of business strategy and priorities. Apple makes a lot of money from the smartphone itself. Other providers are making their money by selling out their users. You would either need to go head-to-head with Apple on price and quality of the device and OS and distribution, or compete with Google in terms of selling out your users. Or you would need to find a back-end monetization strategy based on paid services that, so far, seems elusive. Mostly, I think, because it requires a huge portfolio of services (e.g. a "Netflix phone" won't cut it). As an aside, I've long felt that that latter strategy could be applied in the browser market. Make a browser with a subscription-based services package. ChromeOS+Workspace is mostly there, except for the focus on crap devices and poor distribution and the never ending customer exploitation (Google's product playbook: crap sold at flea markets with AI support). The challenge folks like Canonical face is that they try to compete with Google on price and distribution, and compete with Apple on privacy alone. So they skip out on both proven ways of making money. That's just not going to scale. Such players will always be niche players, and there are plenty of them out there toiling away without a scalable business model. Which is fine, if you accept them for what they are.