The reason is they simply cannot do it. It's very different shipping a high end phone in units of 100 million vs shipping a high end phone in units of 500,000.

This is why most android high end devices are really tiny market share.

They can't compete with Apple-- AT VOLUME. Apple's supply chain is where they are hugely competitive. This goes for Samsung etc.

So on android, genuinely high end phones are prestige items to make android look good, but the mass of android phones are low end cheap phones that can easily be mass produced.

Apple has been known to buy 10,000 prototype modeling machines and put them into production because they were the only ones on the market that could do a particularly manufacturing step that was needed for that model... google is never going to do that.

In fact, I don't think google has ever made any phones (excluding Motorola) themselves-- all the Pixels are rebrands of other makers devices.

The Nexus line are the phones that are manufactured by various other device makers. I think the Pixel is actually made directly by Google.

The Pixel is made by HTC.

But we still don't know (do we?) who made that pixel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook_Pixel

Google made that one.

My understanding is that it is not enough to ship the device to a country, you also need an very large ad push and deals with local operators in order to actually sell it.

However, it should be mentioned that the pixel was sold in even less countries than the previous generation ..

Google really need to step up its game.

Not having an ad campaign is an extremely poor reason to refuse to ship EU-wide when they ship to Germany. The operator excuse is not valid in the EU. The EU is supposed to be a single market.