Android outsold iPhone for the first time in 2010 at which time the iPhone had been out for 3 years. In 2012 they sold 50% more phones in 2012 which while significant is hardly the type of dominate market position your talking about. If you look at the iPhone growth in the US it's mostly a question of increasing the number of carriers vs increasing the market share at any one carrier, so no Google had little impact on promoting iPhone sales.
I'm talking about impact, not sales. I started off using sales as a measure of impact, so I can see where the misunderstanding came from. That's a possible measure of impact, but probably not useful here.
Android made it easy to make a good smartphone by removing the biggest hurdle. What matters in the history books is who had a lasting impact. Will the future look like Android where the basic software is free to duplicate and modify? Or will it look like Apple's tightly controlled system?
History doesn't seem to favor Apple's way of doing things. Apple's way can never create as diverse a market as Google's has.
I guess what he meant in essence was - would Android exist at all if iOS hadn't shown the world how great smartphone OSs could be? Just like Apple showed the world how good PC OSs could be back in the 80s.
Very important not to underestimate the polish and usability that iOS brought to the table. I remember looking into developing an app for symbian and realising how tricky it would be (tools, guides, lack of examples, crappy devices, etc).
I guess it's an overreaction to the more zealous of Apple customers. They want to give Apple all the credit when their contribution was to create a significant stepping stone. I know most people who use Apple's products see the company as an important part of an enormous mix of players all doing something important.
Given that Google bought Android in 2005 and was reasonably far along when the iPhone came out, I'd say it is safe to say that Android would have existed whether or not iOS did.
Would it have been significantly different today? Sure. But by that standard, iOS would have been significantly different today without Android, too.
