Apple, Samsung and the Battle for Platform Control (Premium)

While Apple and Samsung are battling for supremacy in the smartphone market using different strategies, the two tech giants do share one important goal: Total control over their entire platform stack.

Maybe they're not so different after all.

Apple's level of control over iOS is so well-understood it's basically infamous: This is a firm that doesn't partner very well, and it's made no apologies for its cannibalistic strategy of stealing ideas from its own community so that it can improve the core platform. Apple's approach is simple: If it's that good, it belongs in iOS.

Apple's control over iOS is generally understood to be mostly software and services-based. But in recent years, Apple has stepped up its control over the hardware as well. By which I mean the components that go into its iOS devices, like iPhone. (Apple has obviously always designed its device's look and feel, sometimes with disastrous results. Cough, iPhone 4.)

When the iPhone first launched in 2007, Apple utilized third-party ARM processors and chipsets, much like other mobile companies do. But it quickly snapped up an ARM chipset design firm and brought those efforts in-house, perhaps inspired by the problems it had had previously with PowerPC on the Mac. Today, Apple's A-series processors are widely regarded as being among the best ARM-type mobile processors in the world.

But it's not just the SoC: Apple has also designed other unique components in its hardware devices, including the M-series motion sensors, the Touch ID sensor, and the Taptic Engine that sits behind that part and the display on newer iPhones. And this week, we learned of its latest component ambitions: It will reportedly use its own GPU, or graphics processing unit, design in future iOS devices too.

And in cases where Apple can't (yet) control a component, or for whatever strategic reason doesn't feel the need to do so, the firm very aggressively pushes its own partners to compete with each other. For example, Apple now sources certain mobile chipsets from both Intel and Qualcomm.

For its part, Samsung started with a different strategy---partner on the OS, design the hardware---and has evolved in different ways from Apple. Samsung is of course the biggest maker of Android handsets in the world, and in addition to its highly-publicized flagship S and Note devices, it also sells a bewildering array of other Android phone models around the world.

For a long while, Samsung was hell-bent on simply copying Apple's hardware designs, but it has always offered a unique take on the Android software stack. And today, Samsung's special flavor of Android---which includes Samsung-designed launcher, icons, apps, lock screen, keyboard, supporting services, and more---is as much a differentiator as its curved screens.

This desire to own as much of the software stack as possible creates a strange friction with Android creator Google, I would think. On the one hand, Samsung sells more Android d...

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