ATTENTION APPLE FANS: Samsung Blowing Past Apple To Become The Biggest Smartphone Vendor Is Not Good News
For the past couple of years, Apple fans have responded to the Android threat with an evolving series of arguments about why Android isn't a threat:
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days before this piece ran, The Loop published its takedown of Samsung's smartphone shipment numbers, arguing the quarterly figures overstated what they appear to show. Business Insider's counter-frame is aimed at Apple partisans rather than at the data: it catalogues the evolving arguments used since roughly 2009 to dismiss Android as a non-threat, and treats Samsung's confirmed move past Apple in smartphone volumes as the moment that position stops being defensible.
The timing matters because Apple is not standing still on product: the iPhone 4S has just rolled out in a second wave of 22 countries with 1-2 week pre-order backlogs, even as Apple engineers personally contact owners about the device's short battery life — a problem rumored to trace to iOS 5 location services polling cell-tower data too often. Separately, Apple has confirmed acquiring 3D mapping firm C3 Technologies, its first visible step beyond the Apple-built Google Maps app that has shipped on iOS devices since 2007.
First-order effects
- Samsung now holds the world's largest smartphone vendor title by shipments, forcing Apple supporters to shift from arguing Android isn't a threat to disputing how the ranking is measured — exactly the ground The Loop staked out on October 28.
- Apple enters the holiday quarter defending the 4S launch against a battery-life complaint serious enough that its own engineers are contacting affected owners directly.
Second-order effects
- If Samsung's share of Android keeps growing, Google's influence over its own platform becomes increasingly mediated by one hardware partner whose interests need not match its own — a dependency the search giant has no equivalent lever against.
- Apple's C3 Technologies purchase signals a push to replace Google Maps on iOS, loosening the last major Google service baked into every iPhone and sharpening the two ecosystems' separation.
Third-order effects
- Vendor rankings are becoming contested terrain between shipment-volume and per-unit-profit framings, with each camp citing whichever metric favors its preferred maker — expect the dispute over what 'biggest' means to persist as long as Samsung leads on units and Apple on pricing power.
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone market consolidates into a two-firm structure — Samsung scaling Android hardware, Apple controlling an integrated stack — squeezing mid-tier vendors and giving both leaders incentive to own more of their supply chains and software layers.
The trend: Smartphone leadership is splitting into a volume-versus-value contest, with Samsung's Android scale challenging Apple's premium integrated model and pushing both to deepen control of their respective stacks.