Most people, from a person on welfare to all celebrities and almost all CEO’s, including Elon Musk, use iPhones. The Pixel and Android in general is simply not cool like the iPhone. Google has been making their own phones for over 10 years now and they’ve barely made a dent. What’s Google’s goal here?
Samsung, which uses Android, is the most popular phone brand in the world. Google doesn't need Pixel too be as sucessful as iPhone because Android dominates the iPhone and come pre installed with multiple Google products which is where the money is made for Google.
Their objective is simple, get the hardware in place, so they can force-feed Google Search, YouTube and Google Gemini.
Yes it's true, iPhone are popular, but it's a US-centric answer, because most of the rest of the world runs Android (Android has a 70.69% market share worldwide).
So Google has a really valid plan there.
Google claims their target is the "next billion people".
Also iPhones are very expensive, just relatively less expensive in the US (due to wages, low taxes, less intermediaries, etc).
Even a poor US citizen is often some sort of rich citizen in other parts of the world.
Of course, there are exceptions, for example, Kim Jong Un uses iPhone and MacBook Pro.
maybe use it to have a controlled product in the market to test Android?
I had one Google Pixel 8 and couldn't regret more. It broke (my mistake) so I'm already free of it.
