Nielsen says Apple is holding onto the smartphone lead for now

@FeakNasty

As I mentioned in the post, the article brought up profitability with the statement: "but many analysts continue to predict Apple will remain number 1 in profitability" .

Depends how one defines success. I think being number one in profitability is a pretty good measure of success when you are talking about phones sold or distributed into the marketplace.

As others have pointed out many Droid companies/and or carriers frequently offer BOGO sales.

So lets assume 2 stores are side by side one sells Droid the other store is an Apple store.
The Droid store offers a BOGO sale on a Droid phone. By virtue of that they distribute /sell 100. and collect money for 50.

At the same time Apple store sells 50.

Who is doing better? Droid moves 100. They lead by sheer numbers.
Apple moves 50 and makes much more money than the Droid manufacturer.
So as an Apple stockholder Apple is ahead.
So it's not spin it's reality.

Market share vs profitability?

If it was your company selling your widgets, your only source of income, and you could only have one or the other, would you rather make more money or be able to tell people that you have more product out in the marketplace?

I prefer the cash.

What profit does for the end user in Apple's case is provideApple with the funds for R&D and also to invent and build components of their products to suit their products rather than just using off the shelf items.

It also enables them to buy components in the largest quantities at better prices than other companies can. That allows them to still make a profit with competitive pricing. It permits them to fund, build and maintain a huge and growing ecosystem that allows users to have a consistent and good experience and smooth relationship between all iOS devices and Macs.

That ecosystem includes iTunes, iBooks and the App store from which Apple also derives significant income and all of this working together causes more people to become consumers of Apple products, all of which adds to Apples profitability and cash flow, which is very attractive to developers.

App developers make much more money from the sale of Apps in the App store than they do selling Apps anywhere else. As a result of the ecosystem, the cohesiveness of the App store, the easy updates, the growing number of iOS devices, and users and the greater profitability for App developers those developers are incentivized to make better and more useful apps. That attracts more customers etc.and the cycle continues.

Another advantage to developers of this ecosystem is that it is not fragmented and they need only build for the current and prior generation of devices, unlike Android where there are not only many versions of Android to contend with but also many non uniform devices and non uniform carrier regulated updates.

So Apple's greater profitability is a benefit to both stockholders and end users.

Sweet!

Not to mention the "buy-one-get-one-free" phone deals for a lot of the Android based phones, basically doubling the number of users for every android-based phone. I don't recall a del like that for an iPhone.

I don't think any Android smart phone maker is remotely close to Apple in profits and profitability iOS vs Android.

Google makes zero on the sale of each phone.

Why is it so hard to grasp that Apple has ONE phone with a couple of different memory sizes and sells 100% of the IOs phones whereas there are how many (100's) of different Android phones running 10's of versions of Android.... Android is nice, but it is different from device to device. iPhone runing IOs is, well iPhone running IOs . . . apples and oranges.

shouldn't they add windows phone to the survey?