It’s not economical in the sense of cheap parts, rather it’s economical in that Apple uses the same part in all devices. This can simplify supply chain and engineering efforts, so makes sense when possible.

The comment is looking to explain why all the Apple devices failed; they were all affected by the same sensitivity to helium.

Android devices tend to use a multitude of different parts to each other, so while some may have been affected you wouldn’t expect them all to fail in sync like the Apple devices did.

The investigator reported that they couldn't find any Android with the error.

>>There were also a lot of Android phones in the facility at the time, none of which were impacted.

Somehow, all these commodity vendors all used designs that were resilient against helium.

I agree that it's interesting they found no android devices that failed. Would love to see a more comprehensive study, looking at which devices fail at what levels, etc.

Not that this is necessarily 'Not Invented Here' syndrome for Apple, as I think they may have compelling reasons to design and procure a bespoke component, the benefit of using something off the shelf is that it is battle tested by other people. You get a component tested not just on your use cases and failure modes, but everyone else's, so that if your needs or environment changes it's more likely for the component to keep working.

I would also love to know more about how the enclosures used affects helium sensitivity; is helium pervasive enough that it gets everywhere anyway, or can some phone bodies etc keep it out.

Any android is not the same as any android in the facility. There must be a minuscule amount of different androids in the facility compared to the world market. I wouldn't think that designs vulnerable to helium are common enough to find one in a small sample, but the fact that Apple needs the same design for their ubiquitous phones makes the small chance of this happening take a big effect.

Apple does large enough volume that they have bespoke parts made. That could explain it.