Google's Pixel doesn't stand a chance against the iPhone X

If you’re going up against Apple and Samsung in the smartphone market, you better have something exciting and get it out there first. Google on Wednesday is announcing its next big hardware foray — a pair of Pixel phones to come out soon — but it looks like they’ve already lost any advantage they might have had over the competition.

With Apple reportedly struggling to produce enough of its much-hyped iPhone X ahead of its release date on Nov. 10, there was a window of opportunity for Google to launch its own flagship smartphone and get it to market ahead of its rival.

But a report out Monday said that while the run-of-the-mill Pixel 2 will launch on October 19, the flagship Pixel 2 XL won’t be available until Nov. 15, five days after the iPhone X — meaning Google will lose any potential advantage it had over Apple.

And at the moment, Google needs all the advantages it can get.

“Google is on a different planet, scale-wise, from pretty much every major player in the smartphone market,” Jan Dawson, an industry analyst with Jackdaw Research, told VICE News. “Unless it grows its sales massively this year from last year, it’s basically a rounding error in the context of the overall smartphone market.”

Last October Google launched the Pixel and Pixel XL, the company’s first smartphones built to Google’s own specifications and designed to show off the best of what Android has to offer. Despite rave reviews — particularly for the Pixel XL — Google shipped just 2.8 million of these smartphones since launch. In the same period, Apple has sold close to 200 million iPhones.

With Android, Google is already a major player in the smartphone world, but in terms of hardware, it’s a minnow.

Part of the problem for Google is that unlike Apple, it does not have the expertise in scaling manufacturing in order to meet demand. Last year, the Pixel XL was positively received by reviewers, but Google struggled to keep it in stock for months after it launched.

Google is also lacking when it comes to getting its smartphones in front of consumers. “To really compete, it is more about distribution in the U.S. and of course if we’re talking worldwide, they need more reach,” Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst at Creative Strategies, told VICE News.

Google also missed out on the entire Chinese market — one of Apple’s most important markets — because the company’s services are blocked there.

To change this situation may simply come down to how much money Google is willing to spend. “If Google wants to change this, it will need to spend an eye-watering amount of money on marketing and also adopt an extremely aggressive pricing strategy,” Ben Wood, an industry analyst with CSS Insights, told VICE News.

However, a report this week suggests the new phones will cost $650 and $850, respectively, around the same as Apple’s new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.

But besides the delay, the lack of scale and the issues with distribution, Google’s phones could suffer from being just a bit boring.

Leaked images of the new phones show designs much like last year’s models, and while they will almost certainly have best-in-class processors, sensors and screen resolution, these aren’t the things that consumers get excited about.

Part of the problem could be that Google simply doesn’t hype itself up in the same way Apple has been doing for years.

“Google has the brand already, but they need to market their technology better to consumers to be recognized,” Annette Zimmermann, vice president of research at Gartner, told VICE News. “They have so many assets, and some of them are certainly better than those from the competition.”

One of those assets is Assistant, Google’s answer to Siri, which has proven to be a much more powerful tool than Apple’s offering but has yet to capture the imagination in the same way.

Assistant is likely to be a key part of Wednesday’s announcement, based on the teaser video released by Google, which suggests its new products will solve a range of problems including battery life, blurry photo, running out of storage, and crucially, getting your phone to understand what you mean.

Google says it is “betting big” on hardware in the long term, and its recent acqui-hire of thousands of engineers from HTC backs that up.

But unless it can boost its ability to scale its manufacturing, improve distribution and market itself better — along with spending a lot more money — Google is likely to remain a minnow in the smartphone hardware market for now.