Android is not winning because of the ecosystem. The real reasons Android is "winning":
(1) it came close to parity with the iphone quickly.
(2) the flexible licensing model allowed Android to leverage supply perfectly and compete at every price point from $700+ superphones down to sub $100 budget phones and everything in between all the time with new releases every week on any carrier in the world. If you can only build X million iphones in quarter x and the smartphone market is 100 million phones that quarter you can only get X% at best. It looks like X was around 15-20%.
Now for the 80%+ of the market Apple couldn't even hope to address:
WebOS beat Android by a couple months at (1) but failed miserably at (2). By launching a CDMA phone on Sprint only you're fighting over a tiny slice of a tiny slice of the pie (low single digit percent of the entire world).
Microsoft took 18 months too long to deliver (1) but brings most of (2) (supposedly they are targeting high end only but Android currently out high ends them). Many have written them off I'm not one of them.
RIM had arguably the best brand pre-Aple but they are only now (and only on tablets) starting to deliver on (1) and were just as limited as Apple on (2).
Nokia had all the supply they could want but categorically failed at putting out an iOS/WebOS/Android/WP7 quality product.
So looking again at those hypothetical 100 million devices, 15%+ Apple, 15%+ RIM, Less then 10% total WebOS/WP7/old Windows Mobile/other and the other ~60% started with Nokia and month by month was slowly eaten by Android (prolly 40-20 Android by now)
Android is winning just because of the free license. If Samsung, Motorola, and HTC could load iOS on their own hardware, Android would be dead tomorrow.
I think price is going to be key in the long term. Right now there's not that much difference in price between an iPhone and a comparable Android phone, but at the rate the hardware is improving, it will soon be possible to sell very capable phones at a very low price point. Apple is going to have a very hard time competing at that end of the market and, as usual, I expect the low end will eventually come to drive the high end.
Even today you can get a very capable Android phone for a quarter of the price of an iPhone. Phones like the ZTE Blade, Samsung Galaxy Mini and SE Xperia X8 are perfectly capable phones. Sure non of them can go head to head with the iPhone, but for a quarter of the price they certainly hold their own.
The interesting question is will the person who bought a Galaxy Mini upgrade to a Galaxy SIII or an iPhone 5 in a couple of years time.
"I think price is going to be key in the long term."
I think long term platform is irrelevant, for the most part your phone (and computer and tv and everything) will just decode an HD video stream from the cloud where datacenters crunch everything and send it at low pings over true 4G or mesh networks. ARM processors are already good enough to do this, the networks are "a few" years away. Google's got a huge lead over everyone at cloud but they're giving the OS away. Apple will make money because they will continue to make easy to use software (and poss good looking hardware).
I think it's just because smartphones are now just normal phones, and using Android for free is the best option for all those phone makers who were going to keep making phones in some capacity regardless of how well the iPhone did.
And Apple is manufacturing at full capacity - the prices suggest that there is still lots of pent up demand for iOS devices, but they cannot produce enough to meet that demand
(1) it came close to parity with the iphone quickly.
(2) the flexible licensing model allowed Android to leverage supply perfectly and compete at every price point from $700+ superphones down to sub $100 budget phones and everything in between all the time with new releases every week on any carrier in the world. If you can only build X million iphones in quarter x and the smartphone market is 100 million phones that quarter you can only get X% at best. It looks like X was around 15-20%.
Now for the 80%+ of the market Apple couldn't even hope to address:
WebOS beat Android by a couple months at (1) but failed miserably at (2). By launching a CDMA phone on Sprint only you're fighting over a tiny slice of a tiny slice of the pie (low single digit percent of the entire world).
Microsoft took 18 months too long to deliver (1) but brings most of (2) (supposedly they are targeting high end only but Android currently out high ends them). Many have written them off I'm not one of them.
RIM had arguably the best brand pre-Aple but they are only now (and only on tablets) starting to deliver on (1) and were just as limited as Apple on (2).
Nokia had all the supply they could want but categorically failed at putting out an iOS/WebOS/Android/WP7 quality product.
So looking again at those hypothetical 100 million devices, 15%+ Apple, 15%+ RIM, Less then 10% total WebOS/WP7/old Windows Mobile/other and the other ~60% started with Nokia and month by month was slowly eaten by Android (prolly 40-20 Android by now)