A lot of us who are developers tend to think of Android as a monolith. The developer's experience is to choose "Android" as a platform; then (at least in theor

A lot of us who are developers tend to think of Android as a monolith. The developer's experience is to choose "Android" as a platform; then (at least in theory), our product should be able to run on a sufficiently recent Android phone from any manufacturer/carrier. The fact that consumers don't even necessarily know that their phone runs Android, due to Google and others' branding decisions based on past damage to the brand from certain manufacturers, is not obvious -- or at least, it wasn't obvious to me before I read the article. Consider a somewhat analogous market: the PC market. In my experience, even the most ignorant users tend to know if their computer's a Dell, Lenovo, or HP, but are also aware that they run Windows, since retailers, manufacturers and Microsoft all prominently feature the Windows brand. (And Mac and Linux users tend to be more conscious of their OS's than the unwashed masses of Windows users -- sometimes to the extent of openly bragging, recruiting, and fighting flamewars for their OS of choice.) The fact that (the Android portion of) the cellphone market is different from the PC market is also not obvious, and potentially important. Especially from the standpoint of the typical HN'er: A technically literate person, interested in business concepts but not necessarily an expert at marketing, who is personally acutely aware of the OS used on the phone(s) and/or tablet(s) they own, and whose years of experience in the PC market prior to the mobile explosion may have strongly ingrained an instinctive belief that "consumers are always aware of their OS."