I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices.
Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani...
It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance
Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded.
Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.
Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.
As an independent OEM, they were selected by Google to build the G1, the first Android phone. But the touch smartphone market at the time was only in the millions. That's the scale HTC could handle.
When the market started exploding in 2010 onwards, HTC couldn't scale up, so Samsung, LG and Huawei took advantage.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...