Brad Stone and Jenna Wortham comment on the possibility of Verizon NOT needing the iPhone in the NY Times article: Even Without iPhone, Verizon Is Gaining on AT&T.
One of the biggest questions floating around the mobile consumer market is: When will the iPhone come to Verizon? Verizon is the largest cellphone carrier in the US. It sounds like a winning combination to place the hottest cell phone with the top carrier. However, Stone and Wortham question the necessity of this combination due to Verizon's increasing winning partnership with Google Android.
AT&T has been the exclusive carrier of Apple's iPhone since it's launch in 2007.
Since 2008 until this past May, Verizon's smartphone market share has increased by 26%. During that same period, AT&T's smartphone marketshare has slipped from 45 percent to about 40 percent according to comScore (excluding iPhone 4 data).
It is precisely the collaboration of Verizon with Google that produced six phones running Android OS, which poses one of the greatest threats to Apple's iPhone. This collaboration has helped to give Google's OS 13 percent of the smartphone market. Apple's mobile OS has a 24 percent of the smartphone market.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/technology/15verizon.html