Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt believes Android's war with Apple's iOS has seen the former come out on top.
Speaking to Bloomberg in an interview, Schmidt said Android's battle with iOS "is of the scale of 20 years ago -- Microsoft versus Apple." In his opinion, Google is "winning that war pretty clearly now."
Statistically, Android has outpaced iOS for several consecutive quarters. With the emergence of several budget-priced smartphones that boast a variety of screen sizes, Q3 shipments saw Android accounting for 72.4 percent of the worldwide market, while iOS settled for a distant second place with a 14.9 percent share. It's also a similar outline for the former's tablets lineup.
Commenting briefly about Facebook, the Google chairman stressed that he believes Google+ is a "viable competitor to Facebook." That statement was echoed by the latter's VP of product, albeit through a more direct approach, who stated that the former is a "social network of the past".
Current Google CEO, Larry Page, lately discussed the search engine giant's relationship with its rival, with the two companies discussing regularly due to their search ties. As for Apple, meanwhile, the firm recently suffered its largest share price drop in four years due to Android's continued dominance.
Contact Us for News Tips, Corrections and Feedback
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Zak Islam is a freelance writer focusing on security, networking, and general computing. His work also appears at Digital Trends and Tom's Guide.
-
keither5150 Will the iphone eventually end up with 6% market share like mac?Reply
I have used both and find that ios is simple and lacking features. Android is much cooler, no matter what any judge says. -
victorintelr So Google says that Android is winning, in other news: Apple says that iPhone is winningReply -
victorintelr Looks like the story is repeating again: just like 20 years ago after IBM started producing the PCs and there were a bunch of clones using OS and while Apple would be exclusive and only exclusive to their designs, the clones took over the market......Reply -
jhansonxi While I don't think it's a good thing to have any particular company control the market I'm not expecting RIM or WP8 to change the current trends. WebOS and Firefox OS are even less likely without some major vendor and developer support.Reply -
mman74 I think the entire smartphone industry can stand up and applaud Google for what they have done. Without them phone OSes would have proliferated and fallen ever further behind iOS. Eventually a good many of them would have gone out of business and we would all be using iPhones.Reply -
robochump Surprising Google would say this (/sarcasm) but def doing a good job with the Droid OS but is open to any mobile device company out there, iOS is not. Considering Android borrowed heavily from iOS it is not surprising it is accepted as the #1 mobile device OS.Reply