RIP Android 2008-25

The 2025 iPhone will finally kill its biggest competitor.

- DAVID PRICE

Like a soft-hearted boxer trying to give the crowd value for money, Apple has done its best for years to keep Google standing in the smartphone ring. If it truly exerted itself, we always felt, the Cupertino Crusher could put the Mountain View Mangler on the canvas in short order. But the company could never quite bring itself to apply the coup de grâce.

The reason, of course, has nothing to do with charity-Apple simply doesn't want to release an iPhone that's better or more expensive to manufacture than it needs to be. It has numerous advantages over the various Android hardware vendors: It has more money to spend on research and development; it can control and optimize hardware and software together; it has better customer trust and brand recognition; and its business model isn't based on advertising and data capture. But while an "insanely great" iPhone might kill Android as a realistic alternative, it would cut into profit margins and leave Apple with nowhere to go the following year. A better long-term strategy is to release phones just enough better than the previous generation to shift some units...and Google is welcome to stick around in the meantime.

Nevertheless, you can't keep up this sort of thing indefinitely. In fact, it looks like 2025 will be the year when the iPhone finally establishes a clear and indisputable lead over its rival. I'm not saying Android is going the way of BlackBerry and Windows Phone quite yet, but I suspect that by this time next year the writing will be on the wall and the graphs will all be going in a direction that makes Tim Cook happy.