Quote:
Originally Posted by kjk
That is pretty amazing. I'm pretty sure development costs of Windows Phone 7 and iOS4 are pretty material to Microsoft and Apple. Shows how much the open source community is contributing, not just to the ecosystem, but to the core development.
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My take of that article is that Google's CFO was pointing out they don't absorb the majority of the costs involved in developing for Android. They don't pay for the hardware development or the app development.
They manage the app store and are responsible for the OS (which is at least partially developed by talented volunteers). However, that's just a small fraction of the cost of the whole Android experience.
As was pointed out lower down in the comments section, the point to being the middle men is they get to datamine the users more thoroughly than companies have been able to datamine phone users in the past.