(This slide is taken from my presentation 'Mobile is eating the world')

At this point Apple advocates can risk getting a little carried away. 'Aha!', they say, 'Apple may only sell 10% of phones but it gets well over the half the profit, so it's winning the platform wars, or at least not losing.'

Well, up to a point. The objective of any hardware maker is indeed to make a profit, and Apple's doing pretty well there. But it can't really take credit for the poor economic health of so many other OEMs - if anything that's down to Samsung. If there was some consolidation then those companies would be more profitable and Apple and Samsung's profit share would fall - that wouldn't mean their performance was deteriorating.

More importantly, the point of a platform war is the health of the platform itself, not necessarily the OEMs. Apple's Mac was soundly beaten by Microsoft, not by Gateway 2000 or any of the hundreds of forgotten failed PC clone makers.

That is, it doesn't matter to Google or to Android that Android OEMs are mostly much less profitable than Apple, so long as good Android phones keep getting brought to market (and they do). And the unprofitability of most Android OEMs tells us little or nothing about how much it matters to Apple that there are now a lot more Androids than iPhones out there.

And then again, all the data we have about the systemically lower engagement of Android users means that 'platform market share' is also an unhelpful metric.

To put this another way, looking at 'smartphone share' or 'profit share' or 'platform share' all tell you something about the industry, but all three metrics mislead you if you try to treat them as a way to see who's 'winning', because 'winning' means different things for Apple, Samsung or Google. After all, Google may well still make more money from searches on iOS than it does from searches on Android. There's no easy way to fit that into any of these charts.