Why is Bada (developed in-house, costing Samsung money) cheaper to deploy than Android (developed by others, free to use)? Why would a Bada phone be cheaper?
Citation please? Is that a recent change? Otherwise a $15 fee seems at least an order of magnitude off.
Android hit 200 million activations in November 2011. It hit over 500 million in September 2012.
Assuming the $15 fee was in effect when Android hit 200 million, then Google got roughly $4.5 billion in licensing fees in less than a year. Even Google (earning roughly $2.8 billion last quarter) would probably have trouble hiding that much pocket change in an earnings statement.
A year or so ago I was contracting with a military supplier. The company makes rugged Windows CE handhelds and was looking at jumping to Android. $15 per device was the quote they got from Google.
Now that you mention the number of activations, it's obvious Samsung is not paying that price.
That tracks with something else I heard about recently via Twitter: Indian Android OEMs releasing devices without Google Play because they had problems with Google's terms/fees. That was confusing because the only thing I'd seen about Android's economics ( http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/13/android-economics-an-introd... ) said that the money flowed in the other direction: Google paying OEMs for search traffic, etc.
However, if Google is discriminating between OEMs then that makes more sense. The typical terms (that, say, Samsung or HTC gets) might be quite generous, but the Indian OEMs don't get the same deal. I find it a bit surprising that Google couldn't come up with better terms for the huge but poor Indian market, but maybe there were non-export clauses or something similar that got in the way.
For for low-volume products like that, I'd expect a high per-unit cost. The support overhead will vastly outweigh the money Google might make in purchases via the Play store.
How many people are choosing to buy a phone because it has Android? Gingerbread accounts for 48% of Android devices because many Android users just want a cheap or "free with contract" phone.
Nah, Gingerbread is on 48% of devices because of the broken model where the carrier and phone maker get to decide if the phone gets Android OS updates or not and they have no direct incentive to provide updates (because unlike Apple they aren't making money on the app side to justify the OS update costs), in fact they have incentive not to provide updates in order to persuade users to upgrade to new devices as soon as their contract is up.
This combined with the fact that ICS was only released a little more than a year ago (half the term of most people's cell phone contracts) and Honeycomb was never officially put on to phones.
While some of those Gingerbread phones were in fact just "cheap phones" a lot of them were also high end (and everything in between) for the time they were sold.
In the third world, price is a bigger concern than ecosystem. People will buy the cheapest phone that offers some smartphone features. Right now, this product selection is limited to Bada and the lowest-end Android phones. Nobody else caters to this market.
