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0 pointsoblio3y ago0 comments

Well, this thread is in the parallel universe in which Google would have sold only its own Android devices. So no Android + LG, Sony, Samsung, Huawei, etc.

If you look at Google's hardware's capabilities, Android would have flopped immediately.

As bad as the org level issues were with Windows Phone, it would have still beaten Android-on-Google-hardware-only.

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kernal3y ago

Microsoft actually charged a license fee for Windows Phone OS which is just one of many reasons OEM's abandoned the OS. Google also would have undercut their licensing fees to ensure their failure. Additionally, the absence of any Google apps would have also ensured a quick death for Windows Phone. Its failure was inevitable and justified for what they did to their customers and OEM's.

Apocryphon3y ago

In this hypothetical Android apps are far less relevant with that ecosystem only being present on Google phones.

I wonder without AOSP or some other major FOSS mobile operating system to shake things up, if smartphones would be more like the PDA industry in the 1990s, with proprietary OS's from OEMs competing with each other. Maybe Palm sticks around and webOS gets a long lease on life. Maybe Samsung, Intel, the Linux Foundation, and co. try to get mass adoption of Tizen, with hilarious results. Though perhaps if Nokia sticks around, MeeGo as based on the Harmattan design in the N9 gets wider use, delaying the need for a successor like Tizen. In any case, with only Apple and Microsoft as their mobile competitors and without Android devices cutting at their margins, BlackBerry still has a fighting chance.

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