Sure, they make money on other things like computers, but the iphone and associated services are the real cash cow.

Google looks at Android costs and revenue as a small piece of their balance sheet, and certainly neveras a primary profit source like Apple.

Apple is a hardware company that primes the market with hardware to sell software and tunes.

Google is a marketing company that works with partners to get them to adopt its platform in order to have a wider reach for its marketing. Sometime the partners are too slow and it has to step in, but it prefers not to.

Google would prefer the phones and software are given away for free if it increases their marketing target audience.

Sometime when you want to follow the money you need to go a bit "wider".