The smartphone business has never been more cutthroat than it is right now. It's particularly difficult if you're an Android phone manufacturer since low-cost competitors have made it very difficult to make any profits. So why do companies bother to sell Android phones if they can't make any money?
Here's a quick survey of the traditional Android device manufacturer landscape: Samsung is doing alright, LG and Sony could be doing better, HTC doesn't know what it's doing, and Motorola is done. Smartphones have grown to be the most essential piece of modern technology, and yet the industry manufacturing them has backed itself into a corner where only two companies, Apple and Samsung, are generating any reliable profit.
The quarterly earnings reports keep painting the same bleak picture, with most phone makers barely breaking even in spite of increasing shipment numbers and constantly improving products. It seems a Sisyphean task, and it's been going on long enough to invite the question of why so many companies bother making Android phones at all.
It still costs a great deal of time and effort to build a great smartphone, but making a decent one is now easy. Android, even without any retouching or enhancements, is a first-class mobile OS, so all a manufacturer needs to do is figure out how to produce and sell the most attractive possible device at the cheapest possible price. History will record the names of Palm, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia's device division as the victims swept aside by this rising Android tide.
What remains now are Apple and Samsung's tightly integrated monoliths at the top and a sea of Chinese competitors who seem hellbent on destroying each other (and, if they're lucky, Samsung too) through a rabid price war. The motivations of those market participants can still be related to profit with relative ease — whether it be some small sliver on big volumes of cheap phones in China or the prestige premium commanded by Apple worldwide — but what of everyone else?
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