The latest global smartphone shipment numbers are in, and you know whose name doesn’t come up once in this Q3 2018 Counterpoint Research report? That’s right, Google’s. That’s despite the fact the Mountain View-based search giant has been selling its own mobile devices since 2010, first by merely slapping a logo and ordering a certain Nexus design from a third-party manufacturer.
Then came the Pixel program, which included higher-end smartphones “made by Google”, at least for marketing purposes. The first Pixel generation was (silently) manufactured by HTC, but Google grew more ambitious and independent, bringing in external talent to closely monitor and handle more aspects of the production process in-house.
