Why doesn't Apple let other companies use iOS?

Letting other companies use iOS would tarnish the image of iOS and decrease iPhone and iPad sales.

The Galaxy S8 is an amazing phone. It is a high-end, premium phone. However, iPhone is the clear winner in the premium market.

Why? Image

Samsung, in addition to their premium models, releases some cheap Android phones. These phones tarnish the image of their premium phones.

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Why do I say all that?

If Apple licensed out iOS (Like google does to Samsung), the cheaper iOS phones would ruin the premium reputation of iPhone.

iPhone currently rules the premium market because of its amazing image. If low quality iOS Phones were sold, the iPhone would lose its premium phone market share due to image degradation.

In addition to tarnishing the Apple’s image of being a company that creates premium, high-end phones, the licensing of Apple’s software to other device manufacturers would make the iOS quite clunky.

What separates a phone like the Iphone

from a phone like a Samsung

s that Apple’s internal hardware is optimized to run iOS efficiently, without lag, and quickly. This wouldn’t be true if Apple were to license their software to device manufacturers like Sony and HTC.

In order to make up for this loss in performance, Apple would need to license some of its hardware (like the Apple a10 processor) to manufacturers. As a result, this increases the cost of having to manufacture the chipsets and broadens the availability of Apple hardware, making it easier for their competitors to adopt and copy technology from the company.

I’m sure that Tim Cook wouldn’t let that ever happen…….

tl;dr: lack of optimization, manufacturing costs, and possible adoption of technology by competitors

iOS is the main selling point of iDevices.

iDevices sell because they work well.
They work together like magic, and there are very few bugs outside of the beta builds. The entire reason why this is true is because it has to be adapted to run on very few different hardware configurations. When you know what hardware your software has to run on, it’s easy for you to adapt it to run smoothly. It’s also easy to iron out all the bugs.

The challenge Android faces is that it is one operating system running on a thousand different hardware configurations. It’s not easy to do that, and Google should be given more respect for it that it is.

If Apple licenses out iOS to other companies, bugs will arise due to inadequate testing, and the entire ecosystem will gradually degrade.
Not only that, but Apple will adopt a brand image similar to HP’s. A company that makes a ton of shit, and none of it is good.

All in all, Apple doesn’t let other companies use iOS because it is an important part of Apple’s company that cannot be put at stake.

Because this would mean giving up their key competitive advantage. What Apple sells, is not a device, it’s a bundle of hardware (iPhone) + software (iOS).

You can’t pick just one. If you like the iPhone because of how it looks, you will have to use iOS. If you like iOS because it’s easy to use, you will have to get the iPhone.

There are several reasons why they’re doing this. One of them is that OSes are doing a much better job at locking people in than a sole physical device can. They create high switching costs that retain users.

If you have always used an iPhone, you got used to the user interface (i), you took a lot of time to add all your contacts and useful files (ii), and you have all your favorite apps on it (iii). You could do the same things on any Android device, but it will take you some time and effort to do it all over again.

This is preventing you from switching to the competition even though Android phones’ design look increasingly more like the iPhone (cf. OnePlus 5 below). But what if you could get iOS to run on a cheaper Android phone tomorrow? Then you would be much more likely to churn because you could just import everything from your iPhone and move on. Switching costs would be dramatically reduced.

See, it’s very easy for Apple’s competition to offer a design that is very similar to the iPhone’s. What they can’t do, is to offer a phone that has the exact same OS. Giving them this advantage doesn’t make sense from Apple’s standpoint as it would kill their market share.

70–80% of Apple’s revenue is earned through the iPhone. Apple makes most of the chips used inside the iPhone(most because Samsung makes some too) and assembles the iPhone to give the user a complete mobile usage experience.

The way iOS is made, it utilizes memory and disk space in such a way that it optimizes the functioning of apps by freezing up memory from apps no longer needing them. Android, on the other hand is not very efficient at memory management. That is the reason new iPhones score much higher on benchmarks like AnTuTu even after having a third of the RAM and much less processor power in terms of sheer numbers.

Having said all this, if Apple makes iOS open to other mobile phone companies, it won’t be long until phones with much higher memory(primary) and processor capability start performing better than the iPhone. Imagine how lovely iOS would look and feel on an AMOLED display instead of the traditional LCD display used on iPhones till now.

I think I’ve made my point.

Because Apple has learned their lesson.

In the 80s, there were hundreds of clones of the Apple II, which were actually illegal, as they copied the firmware. Those ate into Apple’s sales, as much as IBM saw their PC being copied by everyone until today.

When they created the Mac, the firmware was way more complex than that of a 70s computer such as the PC or the Apple II. In fact, a good part of the original Mac OS functionality was enclosed in something called “Toolbox”. This made copying one of the first Macs very difficult.

In order to make a Mac clone without pirating their software, one would have to go to a very difficult process of reverse engineering the whole Mac OS. This happened twice: From a Brazilian company called Unitron, which had a full clone of the Macintosh 512, and an American company called Nutek, which had a semi-compatible machine. I am not aware of any of them being ever sold.

Some companies made cheap Mac clones which used Apple’s ROM from old machines (yea, you had to remove some old Mac’s rom to sell that crap). Later, Apple started licensing their rom for a while. This was discontinued when they switched to PowerPC.

Some five years later, with Steve Jobs out, some beancounters decided that having more market penetration would be a good thing, and in the mid 90s, Apple decided to make a quick buck by licensing both the rom and Mac OS. Some companies started making official clones, and Apple would get some money from each clone sold.

Of course, the clones were way cheaper, and were eating into their core business: selling computers with a high profit rate, especially on the high end, with the best margins.

As soon as Jobs comes back to Apple, he decided to stop the licensing thing. Turns out that the licenses were tied to the OS version, so they released a new Mac OS, with all the niceties they have been building with IBM at that time, and which ended the clone program. (oh, and it came with HFS+, the default file system on Mac OS 8 until Mac OS 10.12 Sierra, and all version of iOS until version 10.

There is a long history of Apple and their operating systems in other machines, one that goes back some 40 years. Now that they are the biggest company in the world, they are sure as hell to never license their stuff ever again.

f Apple let's other phone companies use iOS then they are gonna change the entire image of what iOS is by modifying it so much that iOS will seem different on different phones.

It will also ruin iPhone's premium phone market by providing iOS in cheap and low spec phones.

So, Apple doesn't let other companies use iOS because they don't want to ruin what iOS is.