Who will win the smartphone wars: Google or Apple?

Apple.

In one way, the smartphone wars are a replay of the PC wars from the 80's with Google playing the part of Microsoft and focusing building software that run on many vendor's hardware and Apple playing the same role as the vertically integrated provider. Microsoft won in the 80s because PCs had increasing returns to scale - the more people using windows the more valuable it became for everyone and Apple remained the high cost provider. Eventually, there were enough people using Windows that Apple became irrelevant.

This time Apple has many advantages. First, there are no real increasing returns to scale for smartphones with the possible exception of the relative size of the AppStores - but Apple had first mover advantage and their store remains much more profitable than Android's. Additionally, Apple makes the vast majority of the smartphone industry's profits - they have plenty of room to compete on price if they need to.

I don't think there will be a single winner. These two vendors are already winners. I do like having hardware and OS from a single vendor. And I own an iPhone. However, Apple has been a bit slow adopting new features such as support for HSPA+ or LTE.

I am interested to see what will come of the Microsoft/Nokia combination. Perhaps this will be the 3rd of the big 3. Unfortunately, I think RIM may be on its last leg. They have owned the high end of the market for a long time. They just stopped innovating and now are losing customers rapidly to Google and Apple.

I agree with Andrew’s perspective. However, it does not answer the question of who will win. Ultimately it is the consumers that win do to competition. The gap is closing between the iPhone and the numerous Android phones. This applies to the iPad and Android based tablet phones. Apple is currently ahead of the Android group of phones, but by a narrow margin. Apple is way ahead on tablets. I think the difference will be found in the application space. Apple keeps their app store more tightly held than does Google. There is more flexibility for developers of Android apps. In one year, the market share shifted from iPhone to Android based phones in a significant way, for the reasons that Andrew point out, apple keeps a closed platform. Android will be the winner, but Apple will stay a significant player due to their quality and innovation.

Steve Olson

It is unclear. Apple has the highest customer satisfaction and command the highest price. However, Apple's latest releases has shown a willingness for them to move down market somewhat. That being said, Android can move down much further since there isn't a promise of a fully unified system that everyone is on.

I would suspect that we will end up with a situation very much like desktops. Where Apple gets almost all of the net profits and the Android manufacturers get a huge percentage of the market share.

Hmm, most posts seem to be considering the US Consumer space only.
Like many on LinkedIn I'm more interested in business usage.

From a Business standpoint, remote management features and return receipt features are invaluable for Corporate users, edge Blackberrry. From the IT executive perspective, non-corporate user experience is irrelevant. Our company does not provision corporate users based on ability of the phone to stream TV or watch Netflix. The iPhone also has good business integration, some of that being due to its telco partners, AT&T and Verizon (soon to be the only telcos). Re HSPA, see the Android developer thread about disabling access to greatly improve battery life. The "3G only" phones currently have limited coverage, when I'm on the road I carry a second phone with fallback capability.

The highest growth in handsets falls into non-business users (kids, spouses, etc), and the Asian market c.f. Nokia's worldwide dominance. If we are just looking at total number of worldwide handsets, the future would seem to belong to Indian (2 Billion SOI users) or Chinese (3.5 Billion users) providers.

Four out of four Android 2.3 phones on two numbers since May have all been worthless. Some of them have gone as long as three days without requiring a reset, and all four of them have required several resets on the same day on way too many occasions.

A missed or dropped call is bad enough, but all four of those Android phones have gone out to lunch and the only way we knew was when trying to make a call it would show ringing, ringing, ringing, forever. Hitting the red hangup button would turn it gray forever and then reboot was required. Sometimes the power switch worked and sometimes the battery had to be removed. Not until restarting was there any clue that voice and text messages were pending. That has been as many as three times the same afternoon. Should users have to make an outbound call every 15 minutes or so just to see if the phone is out to lunch?

A raft of lesser problems add insult to injury, such as the alarm clock's snooze button working most of the time, but at least a few times / month after pressing the snooze button the alarm still shows on but it never again rings.

Google has a lot of smart people on the payroll and someday Android might be ready for prime time. It's not yet.

Microsoft doesn't have the number of apps, but it was a much more reliable phone even before 7.5 "Mango", which made it even better. If Microsoft can get developers to produce production quality apps while Google is still getting its act together it could be a three horse race. Unless Mr. Jobs' "thermonuclear war" against Android is posthumously successful and courts kill Android over patent violations.

And for the moment webOS is in a coma but not dead yet. I wouldn't rule out a slim chance of revival by HP, now that they've come to their senses about PCs, and certainly HTC could take it as a defensive move against Motorola having real or perceived Android advantages. Samsung has said no way, but it isn't over until it's over. Which it might be. I'd lay slim but not zero odds of a webOS revival.

Opening Android's code was a great move from Google; and that was after the appps sales were already leveled. Apple is going to have to be extremely creative and come out with something really revolutionary in order to regain momentum. Better or not, right now the momentum is on Android's side and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Google will win.

The hardware side will eventually work it's self out, OS will too. Soon, for the most part both will have acceptable reliability. (and relatively quickly at the rate technology advances). What will be the consumer demand that decides the ultimate winner will be the Apps a phone can run. the more apps, the easier to create new apps, a phone OS can handle, will decide the winner. Just like the PC/MAC race, Apple made the mistake of not being open, PC supplied the consumer with the most apps (software), lowest cost hardware and won. Apple is still making the same mistake all over again. It takes us 10 times as long and therefore greater cost to get an App on Apple than it does Droid. (Some, Apple is deciding if app is worthwhile instead of letting consumers decide like Droid does. Which makes me want to lean towards Google and forget Apple. If they didn't currently hold the market share.) But Apple's lead will change soon enough. :)

I've got to agree with Steve Youngblood's comments. There doesn't have be a definitive winner. It's kind of like the American Auto Industry in the 50s and 60s. There were three players - Ford, Chrysler and GM. GM was the biggest but they were all winners. The reason was that the market was not saturated.

After WWII, the number of people who did not have cars at all was still high so there was tons of room for growth. In the 60s urban sprawl forced the concept of the 2-car family.

Market saturation of smart phones is a long way off so there's plenty of room for Google and Apple for years to come.Microsoft has been trying to become a strong player for a while - maybe they'll break through and we'll have Ford, Chrysler and GM.

Apple's iPhone to make up more than half of Q4 smartphone sales across top-3 U.S. carriers," states one headline. Apple may have experienced a dip in iPhone sales in its last Q3 quarter, shifting 17 million units, but it's explained by buyers waiting for an updated device. And with Apple sitting on $80 billion in cash in the bank, confident predictions about its future sales figures, and hugely positive public reaction to its strong public image, it's hard to say that Apple has "lost" the smartphone war.

THINK OVER IT

Although Android app downloads have recently surpassed Apple's, the fact that there are so many more Android handsets out there mean that on the whole each owner is downloading fewer apps. The notion that consumers also, on average, spend more on iOS apps still holds true, and this is a fantastic draw for app developers

Android crashes everywhere ? Someone must have forgotten to tell my Evo that I've had over a year now. I also have an iPhone 4 for work, and beyond the 'elegance' of the design, I much prefer the functionality of the Android phone. Not to mention the 'open' nature of the Android. Ironically Apple exercises the same Big Brother control over their iPhone as they were warning about in their 1984 Macintosh advertisements.

But to answer the question BOTH Android and Apple win... there is enough for both to be successful.

If the question is one of winning companies, then Google is in a hard place. Microsoft appears to make more money from Android today than Google itself does.

If the question is one of platforms, then that is different. However, the duration of the war should be considered. Today's winner might not still be the winner 2 years from now, much less 5 years from now.

At one time, Palm owned the PDA space, of which smartphones are but a logical extension. And, RIM has had its dominance here as well. Time changes everything.

I don't know what we will have a definitive winner or loser, while we will certainly have different vendors or platforms in the front-runner position for different stretches of time.

In 18 months, the smartphone landscape is likely to be very, very different than today. Microsoft should not be overlooked here, and it is too early to say what the potential impact of an opensource WebOS will be.

-ASB: http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker

Google will win - they have the cash to buy or trash apple,