Comment by PakG1
6 years ago
It seems pretty clear that in almost all cases, what was most sorely missing was someone with both the power and the taste to make an overall assessment of UX and say "no, this is shit, come back with something acceptable"; maybe to even make a few hirings or acquisitions if necessary to get someone competent on the problem.
By all accounts I've read, that someone was Steve Jobs. After Rubin saw what iPhone was, he apparently completely pivoted Android to go the same way. Before aiming for the full-handset touchscreen paradigm, Android was supposed to be able to handle all types of handsets, including foldables, keyboard slideouts, Blackberry paradigms, etc, all depending on what manufacturers wanted to make. Seeing the iPhone changed the game, so much that Steve Jobs had his "going thermonuclear" rant about Android stealing his stuff. Ironic for a guy who once claimed that Apple was shameless about stealing other people's stuff because great artists steal.
Android could and did handle all kinds of handsets. It wasn't Android that took the industry in the iPhone form factor, it was the OEMs. People tend to think Android had way more power over the mobile industry than it actually did back then. Android got all kinds of dumb stuff put in it because a major carrier or OEM i.e. customer wanted it there.
That also constrained Android's innovation significantly. Some people say Android copied iOS, which is only partly true, and of course iOS has also copied Android over time. But when I was at Google I did encounter quite a few stories of cases where the Android team came up with something really clever and it was shot down by carriers and OEMs who said "we want what the iPhone does". They had no vision at all.
In fairness to carriers though, T-Mobile's QA effort on the G1/G2 were pretty intense. At the time Android's QA was near non-existent and the carrier testing procedure found tons of bugs.