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Generally speaking, when your market share increases, so do the amount of devices you have in service. The more devices you have in service, the higher the percentage of failed devices. It's math, not magic.

http://www.eurodroid.com/2011/04/26/stats-android-now-10-ahead-of-iphone-in-us-smartphone-market-share/

http://www.techi.com/2011/08/android-ios-approach-70-combined-smartphone-market-share/

Still, in terms of growth, while Apple profit doubled, HTC profit tripled.

Or to put it in better context. HTC profit "soared" from $170 million to $511 million.

http://www.eurodroid.com/2011/04/htcs-profits-triple-thanks-to-androids-rise/

Apple's year over year profit went from

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii

$3.074 Billion 1st quarter 2010 to $5.987 Billion.

HTC's profit went up $337 million year over year. Apple's profit went up $2,913 million during the same time period.

The CEO of Motorola Mobility said he expects a loss because of the iPhone coming to Verizon.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-26/motorola-mobility-predicts-a-loss-this-quarter-as-competition-increases.html

So two of the big 3 big Android makers (the third being Samsung) are not doing that great.

I can't see anyone else mentioning one important fact, so I'm wondering if people are not aware of it.

For 2010, Apple took in $1.78 billion in worldwide sales from its App Store, a leap of 132 percent from $769 million in 2009. And while it lost market share to some of its mobile rivals, Apple still captured 82.7 percent of the app store market last year, down from 92.8 percent the prior year.

Emphasize mine. From http://www.eurodroid.com/2010/09/android-market-expands-paid-app-support-32-countries-may-now-buy-apps/ :

We have been hard at work on this and it is my pleasure to announce that effective today, developers from 20 more countries can now sell paid apps on Android Market.

Emphasize mine. I live in Norway, and Android market sales here was effectively $0 until October 2010, because it wasn't available here until then.

So while Android might have the largest world wide user base, it clearly did not have the largest world wide app market user base. I think that pretty much explains the low numbers, and therefore I expect 2011 to bring a radical change for Android Market sales.

Google already derives $1bn/yr in revenue from Android, that figure can surely only grow.

That's not Google's tablet, that's a "Google Android Tablet" ("Google" as part of the OS name, not the physical tablet's branding.)

That's somebody else's tablet hardware running what looks like a seriously stock Android installation. (I mean, would Google go to all the trouble of designing a tablet with the same minimalist home screen as a mobile phone? Or a 600 MHz CPU when their phone sports a 1 GHz grinder?)

Waitasec, scam alert: here are some threads questioning whether this device actually even exists (commenters posting about unfulfilled orders for this very same "Google Android" tablet device.)

Here's a video for a "Smit MID-560" with a 5" *resistive* touch screen (rather than capacitive), speculated to be the hardware of this fakey "Google Android Tablet" that is not sold by Google.

Nice try buddy ... looks to be utterly bogus.

That could be a valid argument, IF this Vodafone app store was indeed "to fill in the European gaps where Google hasn't yet launched the official Android app store" -- as the summary says.

But that's false. According to TFA, ALL of the countries targeted by Vodafone are ALREADY supported by Google Market. That is (from TFA): The Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and the UK.

Android apps can be downloaded in an executable format, just like desktop apps. So why the need for an app store?

Answer: Every good MBA is salivating at the thought of owning the eyeballs, billing, becoming the search engine, and slapping their brand on top of other people's apps. Remember the early days of the web when a gazillion "portal" sites tried to copycat Yahoo? It's the same situation here, a land grab of wannabe Apple iTunes imitators. To them, it doesn't matter that they are late to the party -- they propose some incremental benefit over Google's store and try to get everybody to come to the party at their house.

The actual innovators in mobile are the app developers, who are flat-out competing on ingenuity in a very difficult marketplace. Yet these overlapping app stores are trying to pit developer against developer in an attempt to control the market. It's a classic divide and conquer strategy, and the big loser is the user.