Comment by millstone
11 years ago
> Google was terrified that Apple would end up ruling the mobile space. So, to help in the fight against the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile foothold whatsoever, it was decided that Google would buy Android. And Android would be open source.
This is blatantly false. Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
> Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
Not only, as has already been pointed out, did the UI change, but if you look at the Android architecture it's clearly evolved along an very different path to iOS.
I remember when the first Android SDK came out the programming manual made it very clear to developers that we weren't to expect devices to always have discrete GPUs or touch-screens.
Android clearly went in a different direction post-iPhone.
Agreed.
All those videos of Android demo or prototype units clearly showed Android was a Blackberry clone (just look at that tiny touchpad for navigating around Android OS) and changed its design direction after iPhone made its appearance.
nonesense. Android is a software platform that companies can build sofware and devices on. Android is not a device, and it's not an "operating system" in the sense that people use this word today. It is a fundament that you can build an operating system with, and a cross platform that allows applications run on different software, as long as this software is based on Android.
If you want to show off what Android can do, you put it on all kinds of devices that people are using at the moment. If everyone has a Blackberry, you want to show that you can make a software for Blackberrys based on Android. If everyone is hyped on digital cameras, you show a software and ui for such a camera.
Android used to have 3 prototypes in its early stages: a blackberry type, a tablet-type device, and the device that later became the Tmobile G1, the first android phone. The platform never changed course, and it clearly never was a Blackberry clone.
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Almost exactly a year after they bought Android, Schmidt joined the Apple board of directors.
The iPhone certainly was in development some time prior to its announcement.
Schmidt joined the Apple board August 29th 2006: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric...
Public iPhone announcement was January 9th 2007: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-th...
Even with a conspiracy angle, a three month head start isn't much.
In fact, Google was concerned about Microsoft more-strongly binding Windows Mobile (Windows Phone came later) to their Web ecosystem. Microsoft was working on Windows Live Search, which would later be replaced by Bing.
At the time, Windows Mobile was the epitome of a modern mobile OS. It had a real(ish) browser and a VM-based app runtime for a modern (C#) language (albeit optional and not nearly as tightly integrated with OS middleware as in Android). Google saw that an ecosystem such as Windows Live is much more critical to a mobile device than it is to a desktop PC. The nature of Android more closely reflects the threat from Microsoft than from iPhone.