Google now has a multibillion-dollar hardware business, has paid $80B to Android app devs

“We have no idea how much money Google makes from hardware,” Marketwatch wrote two years ago. That’s no longer entirely true — the company’s hardware division is a “multibillion-dollar” business, the company revealed during parent Alphabet’s Q4 earnings call (via 9to5Google).

That suggests that hardware rakes in at least $2 billion, but could theoretically be a bit more: Google’s hardware businesses are lumped together with subscription services like YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium in Google’s “Other” category, all of which added up to a total of $17 billion of revenue in 2019.

Even if we knew how much of that was hardware, it’d be hard to say which devices are leading the charge, be they Pixel phones and laptops; Nest...

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