How to Understand the Google-Apple Smartphone War

[Commentary] The Google-Apple smartphone war is much more complex competition than simple market-share numbers suggest.

Globally, handsets running Google’s Android operating system absolutely dominate the smartphone market, with somewhere between 80 percent and 85 percent market share. It’s important to recognize that Apple and Google aren’t direct competitors in the smartphone market. Google doesn’t make phones, it licenses a no-cost mobile operating system -- Android -- and produces apps for that system and for Apple’s. Apple, instead, makes money on the phones themselves, which are a combination of its hardware, software and cloud services. So far, it looks as though both Google and Apple can thrive with these different models.