Bring back The Clones!!!!!!!!
LOL. I bet 2/3 of those Android "activations" will be no-name whitebox Chinese e-waste.
In 5 years or so, "Android" will have been permanently fragmented and forked:
Samsung fork: The de-facto standard, because of Samsung's dominant share of the Android market. Samsung will spend a few years optimizing their proprietary fork of some down-rev release of Android for their own hardware. Something they wouldn't want to waste their time doing to the yearly generic Android release.
The "Samsung fork" of Android will tide Samsung over as they work on Tizen, which may or may not replace Android as their mobile OS. Either way, Google's profit layer will be stripped out (Google Play, all those mobile ads obviously, and possibly the spyware as well.) Thus all those Samsung activations will mean zero revenue for Google. But that won't stop Google from touting the numbers.
Amazon fork: Same as it ever was and ever will be. Frozen in time like a fly trapped in prehistoric amber. No need to try to migrate their users to anything beyond their proprietary fork of Android 2.3 "Gingerbread," circa 2010.
Works just fine for Amazon's at-home retail point-of-sale devices they call Kindles. Why spend any time at all updating the OS when their customers would never notice it anyway?
Motorola fork: Google will be desperate to make back something, anything, of the $12.5 billion they dumped into their
Motorola Money Pit (tm). That's roughly 1.5 years of profits down the drain, by the way.
So Motorola will need to differentiate themselves from Samsung in an attempt to crawl out of the "other" slice of the Android market share pie. And that means keeping new features and optimizations to themselves and their Motorola hardware branch before releasing the source to their (remaining) hardware partners. (Of course, Samsung won't care about any tweaks that Google gives only to Motorola because they have their own dominant fork of Android anyway.)
Come to think of it, maybe this is why Andy Rubin stepped down and/or was forced into a "lateral promotion." Maybe he still thought that Android should be given to all of Google's hardware partners as-is. Including Motorola. And maybe Google's top brass thought that Motorola desperately needed special treatment. You know, to help recoup that massive investment. The patent portfolio angle certainly didn't justify the expense.
The generics: Send in the clowns, er, clones. Android is "free." (Ask Rubin for that git URL if you're interested. I'm sure he still remembers it.) That means any unscrupulous hardware maker out for a quick buck will mash up quick-and-dirty iPhone and iPad copies running Android. Just to sell counterfeit iPhones and iPads to gullible consumers who either haven't learned how to spell "iPhone" and "iPad" yet or are so blinded by low pricing that they just can't help themselves.
And, as we've seen, Google can't or won't do anything about "the generics." Don't care. Can't be bothered. Not their fault if consumers get junky copies-of-copies. And anyway, the bottom feeder consumers wouldn't pay for a name-brand Android device (just Samsung 5 years from now). So Google isn't leaving any revenue on the table. And revenue is what it's all about. $12.5 billion in the hole and counting.
There you have it. Your mileage may vary.
