The phone in your pocket is probably an Android device, and if you live in a western country, it is almost certainly running the Google version of Android and thus is bristling with Google’s services: Gmail, YouTube, Docs and more.
The raw figures for Android’s market share make it look as though Google dominates the smartphone world: of the 301.3m smartphones shipped in the second quarter of this year, 84.7 per cent were Android devices, up from 79.6 per cent in 2013, according to analysts IDC. But those figures hide a more complex story about how difficult it is to build an ecosystem and bring customers into it.
The next biggest player on the mobile OS scene is Apple, which in September made a bold bid to draw users further into its clutches with the launch of a wearable device, the Apple Watch, and, more importantly, its Apple Pay system.