In terms of units, no, but in terms of profit...

I think the reason parent leaned on that sub-group is that it is easy to move a lot of units at the very low end with minimal or even negative profit, and that was definitely Samsung's (to name one company) approach in years past. They would sell many, many Android phones at something like $100 each, in some cases losing money on every sale, and very, very few of the higher-margin profitable phones that most people on HN think of when they think of Samsung Android phones.

That's how, for example, iPhone accounts for 75% of all profit in the smartphone market worldwide, despite a low 13% market share[0].

When it comes to the big numbers, most people aren't really comparing Apples to apples.

0. https://www.imore.com/apple-takes-75-smartphone-profits-desp...

1. For profit companies are in business to make money, not “market share”

2. Having access to the premium market is important enough to Google for them to pay Apple $18 Billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices

3. Do you think developers are advertisers care more about “market share” or who has disposable income?

1. For-profit companies are easier to hit with antitrust regulation than a variety of competing manufacturers.

2. Airing out Apple and Google's dirty laundry doesn't make either of them look good. If anything, it just confirms that Apple is hopelessly addicted to advertising/promotional money and is willing to put a price on degrading the user experience and giving Google access to your data.

3. Developers care about money, same as Apple does. Long-term, they will not invest in a platform that fleeces them in one hand and exploits them with the other. There are dozens of pain-points where this is showing it's face (payment-processing, app distribution, browser control, file control, background process control, entitlement documentation, double-standards/undertable deals with FAANG, etc.)

Even the web is a smarter target than a native iOS app, because at least you get to keep your profits. That's why the web is winning.

For #2 what would the alternative be? You definitely don’t want an Apple search engine to replace Google’s it would be a much worse experience. Although Apple does have its own search engine powered by AppleBot that is used in some parts of the interface.

But it’s not a general purpose search engine.

> Even the web is a smarter target than a native iOS app, because at least you get to keep your profits. That's why the web is winning.

This is a horrible take. It came out in the Epic trial that 80%+ of App Store revenue came from games an in app purchases from “whales”. Not the poor little Indy developer.

Most of the popular non game apps don’t even allow in app purchases like Netflix and Spotify and others allow you to purchase the service either in or out of the App Store

1. ...a variety of competing manufacturers who are either running a single operating system with a single defendant, or are a rounding error in market share, profit, or any other way one cares to slice it.

2. Setting Google as the default, and easily changed, search engine does not equate to giving Google access to your data.

3. How long-term are we talking about? Because since 2008, 14 years so far, most investment seems to have been made into the iOS App Store, with more than $260 billion[0] paid to developers so far.

The web is a great target platform, I'm glad we agree! You give up a lot in terms of discoverability and potential promotion, and you have to do some extra work to manage payments and so on, plus you have to overcome the natural distrust for paying a new vendors, but you absolutely do get to keep 100% of whatever you can convince people to pay you, for sure. Or even better, don't charge! That's why the web is... an alternative that isn't losing, let's say.

0. https://www.businessofapps.com/news/apple-paid-out-260-billi...