It shares a lot of similarities with linux. That linux hasn't become dominant on the desktop can (to a large extent) be attributed to the entrenched desktop market where people and organizations use the same system (and applications) over many years.
Mobile doesn't have that yet. People switch phones every year or so and are used to them all being different. Vendors can therefore pretty much pick a new OS every few years (I'm simplifying this, of course).
When selecting a new OS, vendors will evaluate two main elements - price and control. Pricing usually being bound to licenses (a form of control held by a third party), it usually just boils down to control.
And what does Android offer? Control over everything vendors care about. For the companies involved, software development is cheap, but not so cheap that they can just build an OS from scratch (hi there Palm!). Also, Android is low on legacy and fully web-ified (sorry for using that word).
Sure, you love your iPhone. Spare me the feedback. I get forwarded loads of links telling me how crap Android systems are compared to Apple's stuff. But that's just Apple with Apple hardware, Apple software and hard contracts for the carriers. All the other vendors are hell-bent on breaking that. With Android Google (who is not a vendor in this space) is basically flooding that market with free, top-of-the-line R&D on the software end. Of course people building the hardware are going to pick that up.
Its inferiority in most arenas of modern desktop usage explains its failure better.
> When selecting a new OS, vendors will evaluate two main elements - price and control. Pricing usually being bound to licenses (a form of control held by a third party), it usually just boils down to control.
I agree that vendors will look at price. But it's less obvious to me that control is important to them. I would think that software people are willing to pay a lot of money for would be more valuable.
> top-of-the-line R&D
Almost. Almost top-of-the-line. As you mentioned, iPhone is _the_ top of the line.
> Of course people building the hardware are going to pick that up.
I don't necessarily agree with all the points you used to reach this conclusion, but I will say that there's compelling empirical evidence that hardware manufacturers are going to buy in to Android. I don't think that this conclusion though supports your initial claim ("Android will become a dominant mobile environment"), unless you meant dominant in the less common "not dominant but at least better than Windows Mobile" sense.
