Google: Android will outsell Apple iPhone

Google has been taking a swipe at fellow mobile operating system purveyors Apple. According to IT Week, at a conference last week, Google’s mobile platforms manager Rich Miner said:

“Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. There’s a single manufacturer, it’s targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide.”

Miner probably has a point here: the Android platform is going to be available to any number of device manufacturers making both high and low end devices. As a result, there’s definitely a far larger potential market for Android. But, that said, Apple’s iPhone was never a mass-market play – it was always going to be aimed at those with a bit of cash to spend – so the two aren’t necessarily rivals to start with.

As a footnote, it’s not all trash-talking: Miner also said if he were a developer, he’d be working on both platforms.