Woz suggests Apple make Android phones
With the iPhone already having done quite a bit of business in the United States and internationally over the past few years, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak spoke up this week about how the company should – but probably won't – delve into Android. Suggesting that there's nothing holding Apple back from creating an Android device technically, Wozniak speaks with Wired on how Apple could enter a secondary market alongside the iPhone.
While Wozniak – aka "Woz", does not work with Apple's daily flow, so to speak, he's still extremely vocal about what he thinks the company – and a whole lot of other companies, for that matter, could or should be doing with their assets. In this case, he's suggesting that Apple's manufacturing prowess could defeat opponents with Android running inside.
"There's nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.
We could compete very well. People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time." – Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak
Of course it's true that Apple could, if they wanted, run Android on a smartphone of their own creation. This would require no approval from Google, only licensing fees if they wanted to work with the Google suite of applications – this includes Google Maps, the Google Play app store, and Google Now.
ABOVE: You're seeing the newest version of the "Goophone", a device made by a group that effectively copies and clones iPhones and other popular devices and runs their own Android-based operating system inside.
Amazon does this without Google's apps – their Fire OS is based in Android and they've done extremely well for themselves with their whole Kindle Fire line of devices. Another up-and-coming company running their own flavor of Android is Meizu – the Meizu MX3 runs an Android 4.2-based OS called Flyme. They license apps from Google, however, while it'd be far more likely that Apple would push their own.
In all likelihood though in the end, Apple is nowhere near a point at which they'd create and Android-based device. Instead they'll run their own mobile operating system iOS on its own for the foreseeable future.