The recent history of such things would suggest that the side you pick might be gone faster than you might imagine.
Eight years ago, what was the most common smartphone OS? Apple? Nope. Ah, you say, Blackberry’s OS, of course!.. nope. Android barely existed then.
It was “Symbian,” common on Nokia phones. Within four years it was gone.
Blackberry WAS huge, of course, and now it’s damn near dead. It is now almost hard to believe that Blackberry was once bigger than Apple in the smartphone market and a seemingly invincible master of their domain, but it is so. In 2005, I think it was, they hired Aerosmith to play the company party. A few years later they had a double bill of Van Halen and The Tragically Hip. Nowadays I don’t know if they could afford a decent tribute band.
Never hire a band with the word “tragic” in their name to celebrate something. The Fates do not like being taunted, and they *will *have the last word.
Market share also depends on how you stratify the market.
Apple has a small share of the entire mobile phone market, but their market share goes up rapidly as the price point rises. I don’t have numbers but last I heard they have more than 50% of the high-end phone market (I think that was >$500 but am not sure). Of course that is the best place to be as far as profit goes.
I think it could be in general all this just has to do with the fact that the term iPhone has broader name recognition, due to the early foothold on marketing the iPhone got. People who don’t know anything about how different smartphones compare tend to default to “iPhone,” because they at least know what that is (it’s what everyone talks about). I work with a lot of refugees, and as newcomers they–overall–tend to get sucked into bad phone plans with iPhones disproportionately more than the general population, probably because it’s a recognizable name that seems safe–not a status thing.
I wonder if some people assume what they’re seeing is an iPhone, when it’s really another smartphone (Samsung Galaxy, for instance)? If you’re not familiar with them, you might not notice the difference.
Even if those numbers are counting the entire ecosystem, that’s how you get to be a plurality, not a majority, and certainly not a 91% majority. If there’s approximately the same amount of profits in the iPhone ecosystem as in the Android ecosystem, then Apple would be at 50% of the ecosystem profits.
And if we’re just talking hardware, the iPhone is comparable in price to the Galaxy. I’d assume that the cost to make them is also similar, so they’d have the same amount of profit per unit. Even if we completely ignore all of the cheaper phones (which are 0% Apple), there’d need to be ten times as many iPhones as Galaxies, and based on what I’ve seen of suburban teenagers, it’s nowhere near that.
It’s possible, I guess. They were the go-to for mp3 players for a while including some cheaper ones which might still be lingering around junk drawers. My son once got an iPod Nano from an Easter Egg hunt which is still floating around the house somewhere so I guess we technically qualify for the 66% even if all our computers are Windows based and our mobile devices Android.
I think the problem is your assumptions are off. It’s tough to get like-for-like sales data between Samsung and Apple, but the gist is that Apple sells considerably more high end phones at higher margins. Samsung sells a lot more total smartphones so you do see them all over the place, but the low end/low margin ones make up a significant chunk.