in my humble and unwarranted opinion (see also not having run a vc company or a company for that matter) profits should have been the idea from the get go: all of this effort to get large and then use economies of scale to defeat rivals and then start making a profit is just wrong
Consider that you want to make an App store where you add value by manually validating every app available through your store and build trust with your customers by only serving the best apps.
How can you compete with the Apple App store? You can't. At least, not without creating a hardware/software ecosystem with millions of users.
You could shortcut that buildup of scale by only targeting android users but then your competition against the Apple App store will be entirely dependent on the strength of Android ecosystem.
