Apple's in-house chip design is the 'secret weapon' behind industry-beating performance

AppleZulu said:
This should be unsurprising, because it’s at the heart of Apple’s business model, and is the same concept as Apple’s exclusive relationship between its hardware and operating systems. Boiled down, it’s about limiting unnecessary variables. 
Honestly, it’s surprising how few people seem to get that, and even more surprising that no competing company has tried to replicate that approach. 

Samsung tried and failed, notably on the software side with their Tizen operating system. Of course they design continue smartphones and Exynos SoCs. And yes, they do have some of their own services like the Galaxy Store (smartphone apps).

Google's business model is to track everything you do and sell that data to advertisers. They would benefit the most by having control over smartphone hardware which is evidenced by their continued work on Pixel smartphones. In fact, recent Pixel models are now using a Google Tensor G4 SoC which is now their fourth generation silicon.

My guess is that there are a couple of companies who have prototype smartphone SoCs in their labs. I know little about the Chinese smartphone market but most likely there are several companies (like Huawei) working on it.

It's possible that Amazon is trying to develop their own silicon for handhelds but it may never see the light of day in a shipping device.

Microsoft completely blew it. They were a dominant smartphone platform before the iPhone emerged on the scene. Microsoft fumbled it all away and now they are destined to stand on the sidelines and wistfully watch others lead the way. Consumer technology innovation hasn't been driven by PCs for well over a decade. Remember that Apple was not designing their own smartphone silicon when the iPhone debuted in 2007.

Facebook partially blew it. There was a Facebook smartphone but Facebook abandoned further development over a decade ago.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopped/

And now there is evidence Meta is trying to develop custom SoCs mostly for their cloud servers. But rather than be a major player in the smartphone industry, Meta is basically a few apps/services that are popular in some markets and relatively unpopular in others. There's plenty of evidence that shows that Meta's focus is misdirected. They sunk a lot of money into a VR blackhole and their inane "metaverse" B.S. instead of trying to make a dent in smartphones.