Android & Friends — A collaborative Ecosystem

Google leverages a decentralized organization to manage the Android brand and product. This can be considered a form of product extension of the Android brand through partnerships with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) like HTC and Samsung.

The goal is of these partnerships is to lean on collective resources (e.g., distribution, marketing, and data in some instances) to grow the overall market share against the #1 competitor, Apple’s iOS. In other words, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

This approach differs from other product extensions because there are far fewer substitute products available. Over the years, most substitute products have been deprecated (e.g., Amazon Fire Phone) or fall short of consumers’ standards created by iOS and Android OS (e.g., Blackberry OS). That said, to fend off the main competition, Apple, creating an ecosystem through partnerships is the root of product the strategy.

Google’s OS product extension leans on third-party partners, such as Samsung, FitBit (now acquired), to expand the growth of the Android platform by allowing third-party developers to build on top of the vanilla Android OS. Per McKinsey on Platforms & Ecosystems, a platform is a business model that allows multiple participants, such as developers and consumers, to connect to it, interact with one another, and create and exchange value.

Google’s Brand & Product teams facilitate the environment for partners to allow for this value exchange while leaning on both B2B and consumers participants to grow the platform. This is a core strategy of Walmart in the retail space to combat Amazon’s acceleration towards the #1 retail.

Android’s open-source environment flourishes with moderate consumer-centric regulation, affording new use cases to be discovered, resulting in additional product extensions nested within the Android platform, such as Chrome OS. Chrome OS, similar to the vanilla android operating system, is the OS for Chromebooks and tablet devices.

However, there is less focus and user consistency with this brand strategy approach. Consumers will have different experiences on Google Pixel phones vs. Samsung Galaxy vs. Motorola phones, leading to consumer frustrations since the perception is an “android phone.” This, in turn, requires more education and resources dedicated to correcting fragmented user misconceptions. This is where Apple wins in product usability and assurance; there is only one variation of their OS system controlled by Apple and not by its manufacturers.