Not really in this case: I paid money for my smartphone. The manufacturer might not have paid anything for Android, but that's a problem of Google spending insane amounts of money outcompeting and destroying the entire mobile OS market, not a problem of me not wanting to pay.
I take some issue with this argument. Not necessarily to say that it's false, just to say that it's not a strong argument or at the very least holds little foresight.
As an example I recently downloaded Words With Friends on the Android, became immediately annoyed with the ads and was at a loss when I tried to find a pay version. I emailed them and although they replied within hours (fantastic!) they said they don't have a paid version at the moment (it's in the works).
I'm reminded of John Carmack's ad-hock survey of iOS and Android users to find how many people would have spent at least $20 for apps[1], and then he explains in more detail why we won't be working with Android at that time. His reasoning is solid, but that survey puts an exclamation on the same point you're making, which is unfortunate.
It's easy to claim nobody pays for things on Android if there's nothing there worth paying for. It seems to me this would make Android a prime market rather than a poor one.
I've personally spent at least $40 on Android apps in the last year or so (mostly games) and will spend plenty more as developers come and give me reason (or at least a chance) to give them money.
But you don't get Android from google, you get a fork from the vendor which produced the phone you bought.
So you are paying (in many ways) for companies you payed getting it for free...
And maybe the cheapest level of phones would get more expensive.
But for many (most) Android phones (sold in the EU) the price increase if Android isn't free should be fairly small. (Especially given that google still gets a lot of other benefits from people using Android, I mean e.g. Google Play is still the default App store.)
That said, I mistook your comment as disdaining Android users - not saying that they were a market you were not interested in, which is more reasonable and I should've understood that initially.
No, it just means that Android is not a good environment for companies that want to charge money for what they do. Apple is far from the only company that experiences this.
I'm an Android user and I pay for things (?) and apps. Are you saying that I'm the only Android user who pays for apps and "things"? Or is your statement just a gratuitous cliche?
It's my understanding that the payments to Google are for access to their built-in apps and services (without which an Android phone seems like something less).
Android proves nothing of the sort. People don't necessarily buy Android because they like it, but more because because it is pushed to them by the parties that directly make money off it: the carriers and their data plans and contracts. Google makes money from the ads people see on those phones (which, apparently, it shares with the carriers, so you can see how the incentives line up.) The hardware makers get the scraps (which are still plenty, as Samsung demonstrates).
Note that the parent is also wrong: Linux PCs typically cost more than their Windows equivalents because there's no crapware to subsidize the cost.
Maybe there should be a poll: Would you actually pay for an android app from the marketplace? I get the impression, from most of my android-wielding friends, that the answer is no. [yes, i know, there is an element of selection bias involved].
Not really. The price of iOS is baked into the (usually higher) costs of the hardware. The parent comment is presumably referring to the fact that Android phone manufacturers are allowed to put Android on their devices for free, as Google instead makes money on the advertising/service revenue they get from your usage of the OS.
People are spending even less on cheaper android hardware. So it might even be the opposite, that since you bought an expensive hardware you can at least pay a couple of dollars for that app that you could also get for free. You don't buy the cheapest tires on your expensive car ;)
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