The mobile platform war between Google and Apple continues to rage on – but is that really a smart move for Google? According to a new report from The Guardian, Google earned a whopping four times as much revenue from Apple’s iOS platform than their own Android platform over the past three years!
While Google obviously does not profit directly from the sales of iOS devices (as they do from the sale of Android-based devices), they do profit through advertisements from the use of Google Search and other services used on iOS devices, as well as through services made available through the iTunes App Store.
What’s also interesting is that Google makes more revenue per device on Apple’s hardware than from Android devices, which require manufacturers to pay a license fee directly to Google. While around 200 million Android devices were activated through the end of 2011, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced at their March iPad event that they’ve shipped a total of 315 million devices.
The report is based on Google’s settlement offer to Oracle from yesterday:
The $2.8m offer, at a combined rate of 0.515%, suggests that Android’s total revenue from the launch of handsets at the end of 2008 through to the end of 2011 was $543m. That also means that Android could generate more than $1bn in advertising revenues this year; last year, Google’s total annual revenues were around $38bn. Google lets manufacturers use Android for free, but to achieve “certification” they have to include services such as Google search, maps, YouTube and other functions.
If you factor that $543 million dollars into the $2.5 billion that Google CEO Larry Page said the company has earned in revenue from mobile devices, Android suddenly doesn’t seem to be nearly as profitable a venture for Google as it would otherwise seem.
