Pretty much every company is perpetually suing every other company. If a company didn't exert all the legal advantages they can get, the other companies still will and you will end up at a disadvantage when you otherwise wouldn't be.

Apple is considered to be the most valuable company in the entire world right now. Not exactly a company that is an underdog.

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/41473211/Apple_Is_Most_Valuable_Compa...

Google isn't suing any competitors. Apple can see the writing on the wall, Android is beating them fair and square, no matter how much they supposedly overinvest in their supply chains (the touchscreen supply thing happened a couple years ago but for some reason people keep bringing it up) they are losing in the marketplace so they're bringing the courts into it. And of course their hype machine is in full drive.

By what metric? Phones activated? Apple doesn't care about having a large percentage of the market, as we have seen with OSX/ Macs over a long period of time. Each phone purchase/activation has far greater lifetime average profit than what Google get for each android activation.

Saying apple doesn't care about market share is ridiculous considering we're in the middle of a smartphone land grab. It's also ridiculous considering they're suing their competitors.

I don't buy it. Sure, Apple hasn't much cared for market dominance when it comes to MacOS, but it's not clear that they feel the same way about the mobile market at all.

Can you provide some metrics to back-up that comment?

Google revenue on Android is through advertising revenues built into google search being the default.

What is Apple total lifetime device revenue vs. Android?

Horace Dediu's latest article ("A new way to value Apple", http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/18/a-new-way-to-value-apple/) gives some suggestions that Macs, iPhones, and iPads represent upwards of $225 recurring revenue per user to Apple. All iOS users are worth about $150/year/user (http://www.asymco.com/2011/06/30/how-much-is-an-ios-user-wor...).

Finally, his Rawr Chart (http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/18/the-rawr-chart/) shows profit per phone sold. The picture isn't pretty for non-iOS devices. It's not quite answering your question, as it doesn't break out Samsung's "feature" vs Android vs Bada (as an example), but the best example is HTC -- which appears to be just under $60 profit per phone (and IIRC HTC is mostly Android, isn't it) with less volume than Apple (which makes ~$275 per iPhone sold).

EDIT: small clarification. The Rawr chart doesn't break out handset maker profits by phone classification, so only Apple and RIM are the only ones who have profit for smartphones only, and maybe HTC. The others have diluted information because they sell more than just smartphones.

That is a great resource halostatue, and they do a great job of explaining the revenue per device figures for iOS.

Compared to this article http://aseidman.com/2010/05/65000-new-android-devices-ship-e... which estimates that each iOS/Android user is worth only $2.64/year/user. Though I'm not sure I trust the authors methodology, and that number seems extremely low.

Your right I don't have the figures and would be interested to see them myself. Generally search marketing is very much a volume thing, each user makes a small amount but having something like a billion users creates a lot of money overall.

With Apple they get a nice markup on the device itself and 30% every time you buy an app or take up a subscription.

Google isn't not suing because they're more noble or more intent on pure competition, but because they can't sue. They don't have a deep portfolio of patents. Simple as that.