Unless you’ve been on a desert island for the last 6 or 7 years, it’s impossible not to have heard about all the smartphone wars that have been going on. They are everywhere in the news, you see articles in the newspapers, you hear people talking about them on the subway. Hardly a week goes by without another demand in the world of smartphone technology. Have you ever stopped and wondered why? What is your angle? What are they trying to achieve? Obviously, the answer can only be one: they are trying to take over the stack, to control the four layers that make up the entire universe of smartphones. It is simple; the more they control, the more ways they have to extort money from you, the average Joe.

Above, I mentioned the four layers of the stack. The smartphone “universe” is made up of these 4 very important parts: Carrier networks (i.e. AT&T, Vodafone, Verizon, etc., which provide the data connection that smartphones use), Devices, and their manufacturers (the actual smartphone made by HTC, Samsung, Nokia, running on carrier networks), mobile operating systems (representing the foundation of the software running on the devices), and last but not least Importantly, we have the apps and the app developers (which consist of all those little programs that run on the devices inside the operating system). systems. As we tried to explain, all these layers integrate and depend on each other. Whoever is lucky/smart enough to control as many layers as possible has a lot of control over the consumers and naturally over the revenue stream. control is easily exercised through licenses, agreements, trademarks, copyrights and different patents.

These constant skirmishes go back a few years, with the first generation of smartphones between Symbian, BlackBerry and the first versions of iOS. At that time, the mobile operating system, Symbian and Windows Mobile were not as widely adopted. The hardware was also not mature enough, nor was the price. In those days, companies preferred to simply build huge portfolios of tens of thousands of patents. It was very much a cold war, with missiles pointed at each other and if anyone made the slightest mistake, the entire smartphone universe would explode to pieces. Exactly like the “Mutual Assured Destruction” of the Cold War, the companies knew that the best way out of that situation was to negotiate, because simply put… if you shoot, I shoot back, and as a consequence, everyone we are dead. The path of judgments and settlements was preferred to that of mutual destruction.

With the release of the Android OS, things got even more complicated, because this OS enjoyed huge success and rapid adoption, which left room for an all-out war to start. It didn’t take long for Microsoft to sue HTC for infringement on its various Android phones, and at the end of the day, the Taiwanese company decided to settle by paying Microsoft a small fee for each phone it makes. The same thing happened between Microsoft and Samsung, and now, Microsoft apparently makes twice as much money from these two deals as it does from its own Windows Phone 7 smartphones. a global world, as it takes place in courts of law from Africa, to most of Europe, India, China, Japan and the US The Cupertino-based company The company is suing Samsung alleging copyright infringement and patent infringement of many of his designs, such as the iPhone and iPad. In turn, Samsung also sued Apple around the world, but they don’t seem to be as successful. Regardless, the vast majority of these types of patent lawsuits typically end with a cross-licensing agreement and perhaps even a financial settlement. What this means is that the parties involved agree to share those patents and thus cannot be used against each other.

Now that I’ve summed up the whole idea behind these smartphone wars, let’s take a look at how they affect us as customers. Basically two things tend to happen; First of all, when competition decreases and its slowdown facilitates monopoly, which obviously means bad news for the customer. Also, money spent on lawsuits has nothing to do with improving products or services, and it’s not like these areas don’t need improvement. That huge amount of money could lead to significant improvements in research and development of new and better products for people. At this rate, we will end up paying more for less. The smartphone war is bad, because it doesn’t allow entitled people to make their own decisions. Instead, companies prefer to compete against each other in court, which means that a small number of people will choose for all of us. Sounds a bit communist, don’t you think?