Apple didn’t decide to design their own chips because they sold a lot of phones, it was a differentiation play not a volume play. Designing their own chips means they can offer unique features it’s hard for their competition to replicate, like the machine learning acceleration stuff and hardware enabled security features.
The Android OEMs are trapped in a perpetual race to the bottom, so they can’t afford to invest in premium hardware features. Google has realised the only way for them to compete head on with Apple on hardware enabled features is to design their own hardware because nobody else is going to do it.
> Android OEMs... can’t afford to invest in premium hardware features.
I think there are a lot of android phones that have had premium features: e.g. foldables, 90-120 Hz refresh rates (Apple only recently caught up), Vivo x70 Pro Plus w/ an amazing camera that beats the best iPhones (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0r2rENgvwY), etc.. I think there's just a perception that Apple hardware is better, but I feel like they put in above average hardware overall w/ good polish. These are all hardware features. Sure, the performance of Qualcomm chips lag Apple's, but that's because Apple's engineering team is better than Qualcomm's (IMO). I am sure that Samsung, etc. would buy a faster chip for their flagships if it was available. E.g. Samsung, etc. typically fill their flagships with crazy amounts of RAM and Storage.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employers.
It’s true that Android has had some competitive devices but you’re usually getting one good feature and a bunch of sub-Apple features: great camera but a slow CPU or years shorter software support, etc.
The problem is that Apple is the hardware vendor getting recurring revenue from usage. Qualcomm needs you to buy a new phone to see anything more, only Google gets a cut of you buying stuff on the Google Play store, etc. That gives Apple both much larger revenues per customer and an incentive to keep your old phone working as long as you’re buying stuff with it. Google trying to get into that model seems healthy from the perspective of getting better competition but worrisome for the level of resources needed to compete.
acdha addressed the feature issue very well I think, it's not just about one or two features and when Apple does execute a feature they often do it better. ProMotion actually saves battery overall by often clocking the display down fo static images. Qualcomm's engineering team is just fine, the problem in their economics don't work for making truly high end chips. It's the most expensive engineering they do, but only a tiny fraction of the Android handsets sold carry flagship chips. Meanwhile all iPhones are effectively flagship devices.
A lot (but not all for sure) of the A-series chip performance advantage comes from a massive on-die cache for example. That's not fancy engineering, just brute force transistor count. Qualcomm engineers could absolutely do that, but Android handset economics won't support it.
Because if I don't, people end up alleging potential bias in their replies to my comment, even though I feel there's no connection. So, I just throw it in there pre-emptively.
The Android OEMs are trapped in a perpetual race to the bottom, so they can’t afford to invest in premium hardware features. Google has realised the only way for them to compete head on with Apple on hardware enabled features is to design their own hardware because nobody else is going to do it.