How Google bought Android(arstechnica.com)
arstechnica.com
How Google bought Android
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/08/excerpt-the-history-of-android-as-written-by-a-longtime-android-developer/
161 comments
Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so far ahead... excerpt:
> This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.
> This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.
Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember running gdb targetting a Handspring/Palm way before the ARM transition, late 90s or the like. In fact m68k gdb was the only option available if you couldn't pay the big compilers. Damn gdbpanel.
Not to mention that in 2005 Nokia already had the 770, which was basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device, with Gtk+, Gnome and everything. You could run gdb on the device itself.
Not to mention that in 2005 Nokia already had the 770, which was basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device, with Gtk+, Gnome and everything. You could run gdb on the device itself.
> Which is a ridiculous assertion
To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world. I always take claims of being first with a grain of salt for this reason.
That said, I completely agree. I definitely used remote debuggers and on-device debuggers on mobile before Android/iOS existed.
To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world. I always take claims of being first with a grain of salt for this reason.
That said, I completely agree. I definitely used remote debuggers and on-device debuggers on mobile before Android/iOS existed.
> To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world.
Then one would say 'it was the first i've seen'
We have language for a reason. Despite what you hear on daytime talk shows about 'your truth', back in reality, actual truth is objective
Then one would say 'it was the first i've seen'
We have language for a reason. Despite what you hear on daytime talk shows about 'your truth', back in reality, actual truth is objective
Isn't that what everyone is saying. To say otherwise would mean you have a perfect understanding of something static.
It is the first they know about. It may be defined differently.
You cannot claim absolute truth on most things you can't can't claim absolute understanding of the language people use to express things.
If you expect absolute truth in a variable world you're in for disappoinment.
It is the first they know about. It may be defined differently.
You cannot claim absolute truth on most things you can't can't claim absolute understanding of the language people use to express things.
If you expect absolute truth in a variable world you're in for disappoinment.
I agree with parent. Speaker is a famous technical expert making public comments, people are gonna take him seriously. He should check that what he's saying is true.
Yeah that's completely ridiculous. BlackBerry in the x86/C and ARM/Java eras could be attached to a workstation and debugged with Visual C or the later RIM JDK, setting breakpoints and single-stepping on real hardware live and on the air. Was debugging on the BlackBerry 857 over serial port attached to PC in 1999.
> Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember running gdb targetting a Handspring/Palm way before the ARM transition, late 90s or the like.
From the description it sounds as if gdb was running off-target (same as it would for debugging Palm), except perhaps it connected via gdbremote-over-TCP instead of a 68k debug stub via RS232 or similar. And in this case, the phone's TCP stack is running over the phone's radio.
> basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device
From the sound of it, this device likely could have matched these claims.
From the description it sounds as if gdb was running off-target (same as it would for debugging Palm), except perhaps it connected via gdbremote-over-TCP instead of a 68k debug stub via RS232 or similar. And in this case, the phone's TCP stack is running over the phone's radio.
> basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device
From the sound of it, this device likely could have matched these claims.
The full couple of paragraphs is kind of lengthy to paste here but I think the main "coolness" is that while debugging, the phone rang. Not sure if in the other cases people are mentioning, the phone couldn't run. Also the development turn around time was much faster for Android's case apparently.
> ...whereas the engineers that other companies, they had the big breadboard prototypes, the big full sized prototyping board, and the phone would run on that, and it was not connected to a radio so they couldn’t actually use it as a phone.
> ...whereas the engineers that other companies, they had the big breadboard prototypes, the big full sized prototyping board, and the phone would run on that, and it was not connected to a radio so they couldn’t actually use it as a phone.
> except perhaps it connected via gdbremote-over-TCP instead of a 68k debug stub via RS232
(he clearly says "plugged in" in the audio track, which does not hint to a over-the-air solution).
(he clearly says "plugged in" in the audio track, which does not hint to a over-the-air solution).
Just gonna mention, that Windows Mobile had that feature too probably since its conception as Windows CE.
Disclosure: I worked, through a subcontractor, for Nokia from 2006 onwards.
According to the people who deviced [no pun intended] the 770, it was never meant to be a product. It came originally as an internal prototype / developer machine, to make ongoing evaluation and development for maemo platform and its common applications easier. Nokia was obviously planning a polished consumer tablet. Someone high up decided the investment in hardware and supply chains for a developer-only system was not financially sensible, but if it was a product that could be sold to cover at least some parts of the setup cost, that would change the picture. (Incidentally, I believe, but can not prove, that it was also to gauge interest in tablet devices in general and to lay the ground for the future Nxxx series market.)
Let's keep in mind, Nokia's consumer facing business was a PHONE company. We'll get back to that.
The first consumer grade Nokia tablet was the N800. I vividly remember fixing its media player UI and working around various set-in-stone roadblocks in the GTK+ middleware. I also remember how our entire team were on a crunch schedule to get the feature completeness and bug rates to an acceptable level for going gold. The launch date had been set. We actually were told a few weeks before the internal deadline to stop working on all changes: our latest weekly progress report showed we had passed the launch requirement and the PMs didn't want to risk regressions from otherwise benign bug fixes.
N800 had an FM radio. It had wireless internet and Bluetooth. It had a surprisingly functional front-facing video camera. It did not have phone capabilities. Neither did its upgrade, N810.
The N8xx devices were incredible pieces for what they did, at the time. Techies loved them. The rest of the world didn't. Nokia was a phone company, and consumers associated the brand with the ability to make and receive calls.
The first member of that family to have the missing capability was N900. Based on rumours and drunken vents in a sauna, the certification process to get that type of device with a baseband modem accepted was not a pleasant experience.
----
To this day, one of my proudest achievements in the maemo projects was to hunt down the root cause for a really nasty UI lag problem in the media player. Nokia was a design-heavy company, and someone in the design team had mandated a very specific type of GTK+ element to use in the problematic section of the player UI. The element did not support the necessary actions or properties, so in order to satisfy both the UI specification and the latency requirements, Nokia would have had to patch in a whole load of additional functionality to the element itself. This was a public API, and supporting that kind of bastardisation in a core library would have been an absolute nightmare.
This bug was present in the run-up to N800. It was still there for N810, and it got bounced to me because I had argued about the infeasibility before the N800 launch. Once I had laid out the full technical details of the root cause, with a list of possible ways to fix it and the associated costs of each, I got the most satisfying resolution:
"WONTFIX. We do not dare fix this bug."
According to the people who deviced [no pun intended] the 770, it was never meant to be a product. It came originally as an internal prototype / developer machine, to make ongoing evaluation and development for maemo platform and its common applications easier. Nokia was obviously planning a polished consumer tablet. Someone high up decided the investment in hardware and supply chains for a developer-only system was not financially sensible, but if it was a product that could be sold to cover at least some parts of the setup cost, that would change the picture. (Incidentally, I believe, but can not prove, that it was also to gauge interest in tablet devices in general and to lay the ground for the future Nxxx series market.)
Let's keep in mind, Nokia's consumer facing business was a PHONE company. We'll get back to that.
The first consumer grade Nokia tablet was the N800. I vividly remember fixing its media player UI and working around various set-in-stone roadblocks in the GTK+ middleware. I also remember how our entire team were on a crunch schedule to get the feature completeness and bug rates to an acceptable level for going gold. The launch date had been set. We actually were told a few weeks before the internal deadline to stop working on all changes: our latest weekly progress report showed we had passed the launch requirement and the PMs didn't want to risk regressions from otherwise benign bug fixes.
N800 had an FM radio. It had wireless internet and Bluetooth. It had a surprisingly functional front-facing video camera. It did not have phone capabilities. Neither did its upgrade, N810.
The N8xx devices were incredible pieces for what they did, at the time. Techies loved them. The rest of the world didn't. Nokia was a phone company, and consumers associated the brand with the ability to make and receive calls.
The first member of that family to have the missing capability was N900. Based on rumours and drunken vents in a sauna, the certification process to get that type of device with a baseband modem accepted was not a pleasant experience.
----
To this day, one of my proudest achievements in the maemo projects was to hunt down the root cause for a really nasty UI lag problem in the media player. Nokia was a design-heavy company, and someone in the design team had mandated a very specific type of GTK+ element to use in the problematic section of the player UI. The element did not support the necessary actions or properties, so in order to satisfy both the UI specification and the latency requirements, Nokia would have had to patch in a whole load of additional functionality to the element itself. This was a public API, and supporting that kind of bastardisation in a core library would have been an absolute nightmare.
This bug was present in the run-up to N800. It was still there for N810, and it got bounced to me because I had argued about the infeasibility before the N800 launch. Once I had laid out the full technical details of the root cause, with a list of possible ways to fix it and the associated costs of each, I got the most satisfying resolution:
"WONTFIX. We do not dare fix this bug."
Indeed, it was the handset Ericsson who paid for a bunch if that development in the 90s
Here's the podcast and a transcription:
"The Untold Story of SQLite"
https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
"The Untold Story of SQLite"
https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
I think that's just a case of someone being relatively ignorant of how things work in embedded contexts. gdbserver has been a thing since well before 2005, and remote debugging was not at all new, even then.
If nobody at Motorola, Symbian, or Nokia could do (specifically) that, it just means that they didn't have GDB ported to their OS. But they absolutely certainly had other remote debugging tools; it's preposterous to suggest they didn't.
If nobody at Motorola, Symbian, or Nokia could do (specifically) that, it just means that they didn't have GDB ported to their OS. But they absolutely certainly had other remote debugging tools; it's preposterous to suggest they didn't.
I was at Nokia back on those years and also didn't get his point.
Definitely give Losing the Signal - The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry[0] a read if you're interested in the genesis of mobile. In many ways Google was actually late in comparison to Apple, but was able to leapfrog the ecosystem by focusing on abstracting to the operating system platform/layer that is Android.
This is also why I personally believe Microsoft failed but Google was ultimately able to succeed in competition with Apple.
[0]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_the_Signal/oE-TB...
This is also why I personally believe Microsoft failed but Google was ultimately able to succeed in competition with Apple.
[0]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_the_Signal/oE-TB...
One of the big thing was that it was a perceived as a career upgrade to go from BlackBerry to Apple or Google. But the opposite was unheard of.
definitely taking a look at this book - spent a short part of my career as a blackberry OS developer - worst dev experience of my life, so I'm glad they're dying a slow and excruciating death for it.
Why do you say that? (Worst dev experience)
It was a few things all tied in together:
1) their "device simulators" could not be relied upon
2) certain devices running certain versions of their OSs would have APIs function or not (i.e: a library call may work in one OS version and not in another, but only on one type of device)
3) every time you wanted to run any code on a device, it needed to be signed by blackberry's signing servers - which were often down or slow (waits of 40-60 seconds were common). (it no longer exists, but we had http://isthesigningserverdown.com to help us know)
4) sometimes the devices just restarted, either when you tried to load something or sometimes when you made certain API calls. Blackberry devices took MINUTES to start.
5) logging infrastructure was basically non-existent... logs went to a hidden log page, (ctrl+lglg to access it and view/scroll on the bb device) - we wrote our own network logger lib to basically `tee` to the builtin logger and back to our desktop consoles.
the first 3 points combined meant you often had to iterate on real hardware, waiting 40-60 seconds to deploy each time, only to have it explode in your face by restarting and then frustrating you by not being able to figure out what was going on.
I'm sure i've forgotten much more.
1) their "device simulators" could not be relied upon
2) certain devices running certain versions of their OSs would have APIs function or not (i.e: a library call may work in one OS version and not in another, but only on one type of device)
3) every time you wanted to run any code on a device, it needed to be signed by blackberry's signing servers - which were often down or slow (waits of 40-60 seconds were common). (it no longer exists, but we had http://isthesigningserverdown.com to help us know)
4) sometimes the devices just restarted, either when you tried to load something or sometimes when you made certain API calls. Blackberry devices took MINUTES to start.
5) logging infrastructure was basically non-existent... logs went to a hidden log page, (ctrl+lglg to access it and view/scroll on the bb device) - we wrote our own network logger lib to basically `tee` to the builtin logger and back to our desktop consoles.
the first 3 points combined meant you often had to iterate on real hardware, waiting 40-60 seconds to deploy each time, only to have it explode in your face by restarting and then frustrating you by not being able to figure out what was going on.
I'm sure i've forgotten much more.
Maybe BB saved you from Symbian though?
MeeGo ended up being not too bad, it used Qt.
https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/13567772811889377...
https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/13567772811889377...
It's funny that BB10 was in many ways similar to MeeGo, it also used Qt/QML and had a similar UI. I went to BB10 after wanting the next closest thing to the Nokia N9 I had before.
BB10 was QNX-based, otherwise I wonder if RIM and Nokia could've pulled their efforts along with other big guys (Samsung and Intel who went on to do Tizen) to set up a compatibility layer between their respective platforms to allow an app ecosystem to flourish.
MeeGo was nothing like Symbian. It was a Qt/Linux stack and quite sweet in many ways. N9 was the only phone I ever owned that got me excited.
It was probably the best phone OS at that point in time. It was just a little too late for Nokia and they disastrously threw their lot in with Microsoft.
I spent 6 years slogging through Symbian work. The whole "C++ but not quite" approach was infuriating, and the system level API's weren't much better. It was very difficult to work with. The original iOS SDK felt like a revelation in comparison.
The interesting thing is that the company Google feared might push them out on mobile was Microsoft.
>Google worried that if Microsoft made it hard enough to use Google search on its mobile devices and easy enough to use Microsoft search, many users would just switch search engines. This was the way Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet Explorer in the 1990s. If users stopped using Google’s search engine and began using a competitor’s such as Microsoft’s, Google’s business would quickly run aground.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
>Google worried that if Microsoft made it hard enough to use Google search on its mobile devices and easy enough to use Microsoft search, many users would just switch search engines. This was the way Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet Explorer in the 1990s. If users stopped using Google’s search engine and began using a competitor’s such as Microsoft’s, Google’s business would quickly run aground.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
That was the era when everyone thought Microsoft was un- defeatable. Including myself. Little did I know how Microsoft was totally incapable to execute anything. Windows Mobile ( Or heck Pocket PC ) was there years before Android was even founded.
And Bill Gate blame it on Anti-Trust and monopoly lawsuit against them.
And Bill Gate blame it on Anti-Trust and monopoly lawsuit against them.
> Windows Mobile ( Or heck Pocket PC ) was there years before Android was even founded.
It was. I used it. They ported the Win95 desktop (right down to the task bar and start button) to WinCE and a screen the size of a couple of thumbnails. The GUI was horrid, but evolved rapidly. At the end WinPhone pretty, very uniform even across 3rd party apps, faster, and used less power than either iOS or Android. I'd say they executed WinPhone GUI framework extraordinarily well.
WinCE on the other hand never worked reliably on any device I came across. They stuck with it till well after iOS and Android had left them in the dust, and then transition to NT made the Python3 transition look well done - you had to bin your old device. WinCE blue screened more than Win95; a remarkable achievement. This was true for Microsoft's but doubly so for OEM's as MS made getting the source as exercise in pain, so debugging why an interrupt disappeared up it's own arse was basically impossible - you spent 1/2 your time reverse assembling MS's machine code so you could decode the stack.
I suspect the fate of WinPhone can be put down to that. iOS and Android went with robust, mature base OS's (BSD and Linux), that came will all the batteries required in the box and had all their rough edges knocked off by being ported to every platform under the sun, where Microsoft stuck with their home baked embedded OS, WinCE, which felt like a multitasking version of MSDOS / CPM, and they had to develop everything themselves. By the time they fixed that mistake, it was too late.
I'd say open source crushing all comers in the new mobile space is when it came of age, which is to say everyone from C levels down decided it was here to stay. That had nothing to do with technological superiority. When the largest software corporation on the planet pitted their embedded solution against open source, and was wiped from the floor, even a banker could see what the new lay of the land was.
It was. I used it. They ported the Win95 desktop (right down to the task bar and start button) to WinCE and a screen the size of a couple of thumbnails. The GUI was horrid, but evolved rapidly. At the end WinPhone pretty, very uniform even across 3rd party apps, faster, and used less power than either iOS or Android. I'd say they executed WinPhone GUI framework extraordinarily well.
WinCE on the other hand never worked reliably on any device I came across. They stuck with it till well after iOS and Android had left them in the dust, and then transition to NT made the Python3 transition look well done - you had to bin your old device. WinCE blue screened more than Win95; a remarkable achievement. This was true for Microsoft's but doubly so for OEM's as MS made getting the source as exercise in pain, so debugging why an interrupt disappeared up it's own arse was basically impossible - you spent 1/2 your time reverse assembling MS's machine code so you could decode the stack.
I suspect the fate of WinPhone can be put down to that. iOS and Android went with robust, mature base OS's (BSD and Linux), that came will all the batteries required in the box and had all their rough edges knocked off by being ported to every platform under the sun, where Microsoft stuck with their home baked embedded OS, WinCE, which felt like a multitasking version of MSDOS / CPM, and they had to develop everything themselves. By the time they fixed that mistake, it was too late.
I'd say open source crushing all comers in the new mobile space is when it came of age, which is to say everyone from C levels down decided it was here to stay. That had nothing to do with technological superiority. When the largest software corporation on the planet pitted their embedded solution against open source, and was wiped from the floor, even a banker could see what the new lay of the land was.
I had a few devices running Windows Mobile 2003 and later before Android came out, and they were pretty stable and easy on the battery. The later though was probably due to the lack of 20+ apps, that would constantly try using GPRS. It was mostly Outlook, Opera Mini, a book reader, and a RSS client.
Yea he blamed it on antitrust lawsuit and said that Microsoft lost $400bn because of missed mobile OS opportunity or in another words because Android beat Microsoft and its Windows Mobile/Phone.
I suppose the antitrust stuff might simply have been too big of a distraction to allow enough focus on early mobile platforms like the Pocket PC, which could have been a much bigger competitor to Palm than it actually was.
But that still really would be the antitrust suits themselves since 1) MS got themselves into that mess in the first place and 2) Bill Gates shouldn't have let it distract him so much from potentially vital projects. 3) employee accounts of the internal politics at the time pretty much meant that most new products were doomed to fail from the outset if management on the Windows teams thought they were even the least bit of threat to them.
But that still really would be the antitrust suits themselves since 1) MS got themselves into that mess in the first place and 2) Bill Gates shouldn't have let it distract him so much from potentially vital projects. 3) employee accounts of the internal politics at the time pretty much meant that most new products were doomed to fail from the outset if management on the Windows teams thought they were even the least bit of threat to them.
Maybe antitrust distracted them but not so much to miss huge mobile OS opportunity. They were destined to make mobile OS because they had so much knowledge about operating systems and they had so much resources to do it. I also read somewhere that Gates wasn't excited about mobile phones and thought that PCs will rule the world forever. On the other hand he was excited about Xbox that's why they invested much more effort and resources into gaming hardware than in mobile phone.
Gates even admitted he messed it up and lost $400bn with mobile operating system. https://youtu.be/W5g4sPi1wd4?t=709
Gates even admitted he messed it up and lost $400bn with mobile operating system. https://youtu.be/W5g4sPi1wd4?t=709
>On the other hand he was excited about Xbox that's why they invested much more effort and resources into gaming hardware than in mobile phone.
There is a different story/side to this statement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25576859
There is a different story/side to this statement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25576859
> Little did I know how Microsoft was totally incapable to execute anything <<mobile>>.
Fixed that for you.
Fixed that for you.
> ... what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process
Exactly.
> ... it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.
That's sort of hinted at in the article:
When Android met with Google, Larry Page observed that it would make sense for Google to acquire the small company, to help them build a platform that would enable Google to enter the mobile market.
Perhaps we all need to buy the book to find out ...
Exactly.
> ... it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.
That's sort of hinted at in the article:
When Android met with Google, Larry Page observed that it would make sense for Google to acquire the small company, to help them build a platform that would enable Google to enter the mobile market.
Perhaps we all need to buy the book to find out ...
>it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal
Motivation was that Microsoft at the time was developing Windows Mobile or whatever it was called and Google got scared that they will put Microsoft Bing as a default internet search engine on millions of Windows Mobile phones that were suppose to conquer mobile phone industry.
It's funny how Steve Jobs was mad at Google because Android was chipping away Iphone's dominance but in the reality Android was about and against Microsoft not Apple and Iphone.
Search for an article on HN or Google I can't find it atm. But the article talks about just like I said how Google was developing competition for Windows Mobile then famous 2007 Iphone presentation happened and Google engineers realized touch UI and UX is the future not QWERTY plastic keyboard and then they pretty much copied most of the Iphone and iOS features.
Edit: here is the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
Motivation was that Microsoft at the time was developing Windows Mobile or whatever it was called and Google got scared that they will put Microsoft Bing as a default internet search engine on millions of Windows Mobile phones that were suppose to conquer mobile phone industry.
It's funny how Steve Jobs was mad at Google because Android was chipping away Iphone's dominance but in the reality Android was about and against Microsoft not Apple and Iphone.
Search for an article on HN or Google I can't find it atm. But the article talks about just like I said how Google was developing competition for Windows Mobile then famous 2007 Iphone presentation happened and Google engineers realized touch UI and UX is the future not QWERTY plastic keyboard and then they pretty much copied most of the Iphone and iOS features.
Edit: here is the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
I worked in mobile video in 2009-2010 and was chummy with our CEO who was hobnobbing with all the mobile device manufacturer executives. We did headline work for HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, etc. and sold to HTC in late 2010.
The way he explained it, the mobile phone industry in many markets, particularly the US, used to be such that the customer was owned by the carrier.
iPhone changed the status quo in 2007: Apple could pick and choose carriers on their terms, the smartphone class device became a primary network interface for the customer, and the customer was effectively owned by the device manufacturer. This was a huge threat to Google, but also the carriers.
Android launched in 2009 as Google's hugely successful ally in their response to commodify their complement.
Google politically aligned themselves with carriers and the status quo and maintained a 'half-open' rapid-change policy which has created constant API and language churn. Great potential futures from recent smartphone history like Samsung Dex (phone-based dockable Linux workstations), wireless mesh networking as a first-class connectivity paradigm and standards-based IOT control never had a chance to mature.
By now we could be running UUCPesque media feeds over local ad-hoc wifi with free educational resources, reliable dockable workstations in our pocket and a self-organizing community economy rewarding social and environmental values. Instead we pay for VPNs and watch TikTok while our right to repair, understand or modify are wholly eroded under the auspices of an "open" platform shepherded by well-paid corporate lawyers and doublespeak.
The phone industry is absolutely terrible now. It's like a conspiracy against society focused on capturing consumer attention, surveilling consumers, using them as intelligence nodes for building global wireless infrastructure maps and media OSINT and actively preventing off-carrier cooperation among the population. We desperately need open mobile hardware.
The way he explained it, the mobile phone industry in many markets, particularly the US, used to be such that the customer was owned by the carrier.
iPhone changed the status quo in 2007: Apple could pick and choose carriers on their terms, the smartphone class device became a primary network interface for the customer, and the customer was effectively owned by the device manufacturer. This was a huge threat to Google, but also the carriers.
Android launched in 2009 as Google's hugely successful ally in their response to commodify their complement.
Google politically aligned themselves with carriers and the status quo and maintained a 'half-open' rapid-change policy which has created constant API and language churn. Great potential futures from recent smartphone history like Samsung Dex (phone-based dockable Linux workstations), wireless mesh networking as a first-class connectivity paradigm and standards-based IOT control never had a chance to mature.
By now we could be running UUCPesque media feeds over local ad-hoc wifi with free educational resources, reliable dockable workstations in our pocket and a self-organizing community economy rewarding social and environmental values. Instead we pay for VPNs and watch TikTok while our right to repair, understand or modify are wholly eroded under the auspices of an "open" platform shepherded by well-paid corporate lawyers and doublespeak.
The phone industry is absolutely terrible now. It's like a conspiracy against society focused on capturing consumer attention, surveilling consumers, using them as intelligence nodes for building global wireless infrastructure maps and media OSINT and actively preventing off-carrier cooperation among the population. We desperately need open mobile hardware.
> We desperately need open mobile hardware.
There's no money in it. It's dead on arrival.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
There's no money in it. It's dead on arrival.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
Yes, it's easy to say it will never work. I believe if we commodify the hardware, like the PC era, then we can create a platform which is both cheap to innovate for, more environmentally sustainable and more commercially competitive. It can work.
A commercial challenge is that everyone wants the slim integrated thing as a faux-fashion accessory and there's significant costs and there are power and waterproofing concerns with mobile hardware which are technically more difficult to guarantee with a modular architecture.
OTOH, as consumers increasingly demand a right to repair and get sick of forking out for the same phones with slightly better specs every 2 years, it might just begin to work out...
A commercial challenge is that everyone wants the slim integrated thing as a faux-fashion accessory and there's significant costs and there are power and waterproofing concerns with mobile hardware which are technically more difficult to guarantee with a modular architecture.
OTOH, as consumers increasingly demand a right to repair and get sick of forking out for the same phones with slightly better specs every 2 years, it might just begin to work out...
> By now we could be running UUCPesque media feeds over local ad-hoc wifi with free educational resources, reliable dockable workstations in our pocket and a self-organizing community economy rewarding social and environmental values.
You can build your dream on Android right now. It provides all the basic infrastructure to make it possible. The reality is that not enough people share your dream to make it viable.
You can build your dream on Android right now. It provides all the basic infrastructure to make it possible. The reality is that not enough people share your dream to make it viable.
Look harder and you will find that the base permissions model and connectivity paradigms within Android greatly frustrate this range of outcomes and the political will amongst the project for changing this does not exist as it runs counter to the centralised monitoring and personalized advertising income stream of Google. Attempting to simultaneously cajole multiple large-scale device manufacturers to add a non-standard addition at breakneck hardware and OS release pace would be virtually impossible. The fact that drivers are bundled with OS releases thus making third party system upgrades extremely tedious to create for any given hardware revision is not an accident but a designed process element to better aggregate control. Therefore, while the outcome is objectively barred, corporate can still doublespeak an "open" platform. Google is evil.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
> Look harder and you will find that the base permissions model and connectivity paradigms within Android greatly frustrate this range of outcomes and the political will amongst the project for changing this does not exist as it runs counter to the centralised monitoring and personalized advertising income stream of Google.
In what way? Everything you said can be built on Android right now.
> Attempting to simultaneously cajole multiple large-scale device manufacturers to add a non-standard addition at breakneck hardware and OS release pace would be virtually impossible.
This is not necessary to implement the idea.
> The fact that drivers are bundled with OS releases thus making third party system upgrades extremely tedious to create for any given hardware revision is not an accident
You don't have to use that hardware. Android supports hardware that has open drivers.
In what way? Everything you said can be built on Android right now.
> Attempting to simultaneously cajole multiple large-scale device manufacturers to add a non-standard addition at breakneck hardware and OS release pace would be virtually impossible.
This is not necessary to implement the idea.
> The fact that drivers are bundled with OS releases thus making third party system upgrades extremely tedious to create for any given hardware revision is not an accident
You don't have to use that hardware. Android supports hardware that has open drivers.
Also left out in the content was how far Larry & Co were privy to iOS development and that they realized the existential threat if they don't get into the mobile market.
Anyways, Those who appreciate the openness of Android it seems like Brian Swetland[1] is the MVP in that regard.
>From Korea, the team flew to Taiwan, where they met with the CEO of HTC, Peter Chou. Nick remembered the meeting: “Peter mentioned something about exclusivity for our first device, which Brian overheard. By the time we got back to our hotel room, Swetland had threatened to resign because ‘I didn’t join Android to become another Danger.’ I was concerned because Brian was so critical to our success, but when I saw him the next day everything was fine.”
>(Swetland said, “I don’t recall the discussion, but certainly believe it could have happened.” His memory of Danger was fresh and strong at that time. The dynamic at Danger of being beholden to the carrier and manufacturer for product decisions was not something he wanted to repeat. He was strongly in favor of Android’s vision for an open and independent platform. He threatened to resign several times during his time on the Android team over decisions that would have resulted in a closed platform.)
[1] https://twitter.com/dnaltews
Anyways, Those who appreciate the openness of Android it seems like Brian Swetland[1] is the MVP in that regard.
>From Korea, the team flew to Taiwan, where they met with the CEO of HTC, Peter Chou. Nick remembered the meeting: “Peter mentioned something about exclusivity for our first device, which Brian overheard. By the time we got back to our hotel room, Swetland had threatened to resign because ‘I didn’t join Android to become another Danger.’ I was concerned because Brian was so critical to our success, but when I saw him the next day everything was fine.”
>(Swetland said, “I don’t recall the discussion, but certainly believe it could have happened.” His memory of Danger was fresh and strong at that time. The dynamic at Danger of being beholden to the carrier and manufacturer for product decisions was not something he wanted to repeat. He was strongly in favor of Android’s vision for an open and independent platform. He threatened to resign several times during his time on the Android team over decisions that would have resulted in a closed platform.)
[1] https://twitter.com/dnaltews
I don't get why investors would have doubted that all it took is money after Microsoft made Windows such a success looong before. I also cant think of any motivation for google bigger than their competition with MS.
Worked so well for windows mobile !
Greed is overwhelming in MS. Its success made it into a very different company.
In hindsight the camera OS was also a brilliant idea. I primarily use my phone to take pictures, make calls and send text messages. SMS can do that well enough.
In hindsight the camera OS was also a brilliant idea. I primarily use my phone to take pictures, make calls and send text messages. SMS can do that well enough.
> This time, there were more people in the room, and Google was ready to talk specifics. Andy and his team had assumed they were coming to give an update on the company’s progress since the last meeting. But in the middle of the presentation, Nick remembered, “They just said, ‘Let us interrupt you there. We just want to buy you.’”
> Google turned what Andy’s team thought was a meeting of Android pitching to Google into a meeting in which Google was pitching to them instead.
> Google turned what Andy’s team thought was a meeting of Android pitching to Google into a meeting in which Google was pitching to them instead.
This was a very interesting time in the development of mobile technology and as was mentioned you clearly could see the writing on the wall but the challenge was how to get to a useful mobile platform from all the crap that predated Android / Iphone. When I was at Orange I hacked on all sort of devices: Symbian / UIQ, N60, Windows mobile, etc. They all sucked in one way or the other - mostly due to crappy tooling and crappy devices. Or completely broken understanding of software ecosystems which doomed Symbian and others. We all knew that there was going to be an explosion of cool things and a better platform was critical.
There were some other companies doing interesting things - one was a startup called Savaje that had a complete java based phone environment up and running. However, they weren't a silicon valley company and didn't have Andy's connections (or reputation) from Danger.
There were some other companies doing interesting things - one was a startup called Savaje that had a complete java based phone environment up and running. However, they weren't a silicon valley company and didn't have Andy's connections (or reputation) from Danger.
I worked with Series 60 teams. For Nokia Series 60, an external developer was not a stakeholder, but a thread clamped down with NDAs and horrible permission system. Apple App Store changed this mentality and was what truly changed the mobile industry.
I got to play with that original Android demo; it's floating around Google and I even wrote an internal Google doc tour of what I found before I left. For those that work at Alphabet you may find it interesting to search that out. The demo itself is basically a bunch of JavaScript.
Fun fact: The original, original demo (pre-acquisition) was Lua based. Andy was skeptical that enough people would know what Lua was so I shifted it over to Javascript. So for a while we were Javascript + 2d render engine. Smells a bit like WebOS or Flutter (though much less fancy in that early sketch).
Shifting from Lua to JS is not trivial! What JS engine did you use?
And can you tell us a bit more about the choice of Java to create apps? Wasn't it frustrating for all the C++ coders in your team to use such a "slow" language for apps?
And can you tell us a bit more about the choice of Java to create apps? Wasn't it frustrating for all the C++ coders in your team to use such a "slow" language for apps?
At the time (very very early) there was only a small amount of code and small amount of native bindings, so it only took a couple days to rebuild the lower layers and I recall Chris got the "framework" running again in js pretty quickly after that was done. I think maybe we used spidermonkey? It's been 15+ years... somebody at Google with access to the fadden demo should be able to figure it out quickly enough.
As for Java, it worked well enough for Hiptop at Danger on a 24MHz ARM7TDMI platform. We felt we could use a similar approach (use Java more for "business logic" and do the heavy lifting in native libraries and services) to get sufficient performance on the 200MHz+ ARM9 platforms we were looking at, and take advantage of having a real MMU for process protection and eventually supporting native code (the latter, more contentious).
As for Java, it worked well enough for Hiptop at Danger on a 24MHz ARM7TDMI platform. We felt we could use a similar approach (use Java more for "business logic" and do the heavy lifting in native libraries and services) to get sufficient performance on the 200MHz+ ARM9 platforms we were looking at, and take advantage of having a real MMU for process protection and eventually supporting native code (the latter, more contentious).
Everyone basically did Lua back in that era since it was so damn small. I had it running on 400kb of memory on the PSP, used it for multiple UI frameworks around that era on mobile hardware.
Someone still hasn't built an equivalent to LuaJIT. Quickjs is in the same spirit but still interpreted, the way LuaJIT does C FFI is just pure awesome[1].
[1] https://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutorial.html
Someone still hasn't built an equivalent to LuaJIT. Quickjs is in the same spirit but still interpreted, the way LuaJIT does C FFI is just pure awesome[1].
[1] https://luajit.org/ext_ffi_tutorial.html
I'm seeing more of this in HN where folks hint at something that's available only if you're an employee at one of the tech giants. I feel like it used to be gauche and isn't now. (No jab at you specifically tdeck, just a trend I'm not fond of.)
Sorry about that. I love computer history and put a lot of work into documenting the demo and want people to be able to learn about it, but it's very unfortunate that people outside Google (including me) can't see it. Basically it was a collection of screenshots and some notes on the code / commit log iirc.
I feel lucky to hear these stories and "hang out" with these engineers, even if I can't personally get access to what they're discussing.
I think it's absolutely awful that you and others in this thread are actively discouraging this kind of wonderful discussion.
I think you are going against the hacker ethos and the Hacker News ethos.
I think it's absolutely awful that you and others in this thread are actively discouraging this kind of wonderful discussion.
I think you are going against the hacker ethos and the Hacker News ethos.
It's overwhelmingly a Google thing in my experience, because they're used to everyone else being part of their own insular club (and ignoring the rest of the plebeians incapable of getting a job there).
It's still gauche, you're not going crazy.
It's still gauche, you're not going crazy.
The original commenter is not working at Google or part of that "club"; the comment states that they left that job.
They're still part of it because they were there.
Xoogler is a term. How many other companies have a term like that? They even have a website internally for people who leave and they call them “alums”. Nobody thinks I’m impressive or worthy of respect because of where I work, but people like OP continue to promote an elitist view of the world.
> people like OP continue to promote an elitist view of the world.
Please explain specifically how I've done that if you've going to throw around accusations.
You seem to be reading a lot into the fact that I worked at Google in the past, but I didn't design the hiring process, the data access rules, the cultural vocabulary, or any of the other things you seem aggrieved by. People at giant companies don't have influence over those things, and if you go through my comment history you'll see that I have mixed feelings about working there.
If the mere mention that someone worked at a particular company gives you a feeling of inadequacy, I can certainly sympathize. But you need to realize that those feelings are coming from your own issues and not something I wrote in my comment. It's not necessary or sufficient to work at Google to have a fulfilling career, it's only necessary in this case since the codebase I reviewed is not public.
Please explain specifically how I've done that if you've going to throw around accusations.
You seem to be reading a lot into the fact that I worked at Google in the past, but I didn't design the hiring process, the data access rules, the cultural vocabulary, or any of the other things you seem aggrieved by. People at giant companies don't have influence over those things, and if you go through my comment history you'll see that I have mixed feelings about working there.
If the mere mention that someone worked at a particular company gives you a feeling of inadequacy, I can certainly sympathize. But you need to realize that those feelings are coming from your own issues and not something I wrote in my comment. It's not necessary or sufficient to work at Google to have a fulfilling career, it's only necessary in this case since the codebase I reviewed is not public.
> It's not necessary or sufficient to work at Google to have a fulfilling career, it's only necessary in this case since the codebase I reviewed is not public.
That's clearly the subtext here, and here [0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28172705
Ya'll clearly think people like me aren't worthy of being "in the know" (and probably of living at all to be honest) for describing this particular doc. Openly flaunting your immense privilege is usually considered gauche, for the record.
That's clearly the subtext here, and here [0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28172705
Ya'll clearly think people like me aren't worthy of being "in the know" (and probably of living at all to be honest) for describing this particular doc. Openly flaunting your immense privilege is usually considered gauche, for the record.
> Ya'll clearly think people like me aren't worthy of being "in the know" (and probably of living at all to be honest)
If this is your read on the situation, you have problems. First of all "y'all" is multiple different people on a website who don't know each other. You can't cite a comment by one person to support your claim that another person believes something, and "that's clearly the subtext" isn't clear to me from any comment in this thread.
For the benefit of other readers, I'll just state it explicitly: this doc describes a TAR file that was shared with me when I worked at Google, that includes source code owned by the company that was never released. That's why the doc isn't public, it's not because I decided you "weren't worthy of being in the know" or of "living at all" - that interpretation is completely ridiculous. There are docs I've written at my current job that aren't public either, and that's not because I believe my colleagues constitute some kind of master race.
The key takeaways for me were:
- The UI looked like an old fashioned flip phone, as in the screenshot from that article
- Everything was JS, as discussed elsewhere
- The functionality wasn't particularly impressive to me, it had a half-finished calendar, contacts app, etc... And some graphical 2D demos
What was most interesting was just poking around the screenshots and commit log which I obviously don't have.
If this is your read on the situation, you have problems. First of all "y'all" is multiple different people on a website who don't know each other. You can't cite a comment by one person to support your claim that another person believes something, and "that's clearly the subtext" isn't clear to me from any comment in this thread.
For the benefit of other readers, I'll just state it explicitly: this doc describes a TAR file that was shared with me when I worked at Google, that includes source code owned by the company that was never released. That's why the doc isn't public, it's not because I decided you "weren't worthy of being in the know" or of "living at all" - that interpretation is completely ridiculous. There are docs I've written at my current job that aren't public either, and that's not because I believe my colleagues constitute some kind of master race.
The key takeaways for me were:
- The UI looked like an old fashioned flip phone, as in the screenshot from that article
- Everything was JS, as discussed elsewhere
- The functionality wasn't particularly impressive to me, it had a half-finished calendar, contacts app, etc... And some graphical 2D demos
What was most interesting was just poking around the screenshots and commit log which I obviously don't have.
I don't think he flaunted it at all and I say that as someone who'll never make it into Google. lol
It's because more than 100,000 people work at Google. If I had written a comment saying "if you're ever in [small city], you might want to check out [thing]" I suspect nobody would have a problem with that.
You can walk into a city. You have to be judged to be in the top 1% of intelligence to work at Google.
People like me are untermensch to folks like you.
People like me are untermensch to folks like you.
I promise you that you have a vastly higher opinion of people who work at google than people who work at google do.
They definitely think they're innately superior to people like me. If anything I'm underplaying it.
When you're given everything from peer bonuses to spot bonuses to first class flights to Hawaii to unlimited external validation from everyone else - it's not surprising.
When you're given everything from peer bonuses to spot bonuses to first class flights to Hawaii to unlimited external validation from everyone else - it's not surprising.
Judging by your username and comment history, you seem to think getting into Google is some sort of intelligence test that only a select few can ever pass: it’s not. You just prepare for it and do well as you’d do for any other exam. Getting into Google doesn’t mean you’re inherently smarter than everyone else.
This feels like a cope. I don't think it's true at all. I've studied for years and I haven't gotten into any Google-tier companies. It's all IQ, and people like me aren't chosen to be part of the elite class.
How is that cope? Is it not more cope to just give up and assume you can't ever get in? I honestly believe that almost anyone could do this given the right direction–feel free to reach out (email's in my profile) if you are legitimately interested in trying.
I'll take you up on this.
It's titled "A Tour of the Original Android Demo"
Isn't it weird to name it "ORIGINAL android demo" since that implies that the author new that in the future there would be other android demo.
It'd be like asking a solider in 1915 what war they were fighting and they respond "WW1" (as if they new in advance that there would be a second world-war 30 years later).
It'd be like asking a solider in 1915 what war they were fighting and they respond "WW1" (as if they new in advance that there would be a second world-war 30 years later).
Since I wrote most of this doc in early 2020, it takes a look at the demo from a modern point of view.
In fact, when I was using the demo it felt like the color flip phone I used to have around the mid 2000s, and in retrospect it's hard to tell why Android became what it did today. There wasn't much unique "smartphone" functionality in that demo from today's perspective, although I didn't see the original materials about how it was positioned.
In fact, when I was using the demo it felt like the color flip phone I used to have around the mid 2000s, and in retrospect it's hard to tell why Android became what it did today. There wasn't much unique "smartphone" functionality in that demo from today's perspective, although I didn't see the original materials about how it was positioned.
The Danger Hiptop. Wow, I'd pretty much forgotten about that but it was probably the first phone I owned that I would consider a smartphone. Unfortunately I got it primarily for (very) basic web browsing and the area I was in at the time was fairly spotty on data coverage. Eventually I upgraded to a Treo 650 on Sprint which was a little better, but it really wasn't until the iPhone 3g that I was happy with a smartphone's mobile browsing capabilities.
(But that was the last time I purchased an iPhone: I lost $hundreds when it got bricked and Apple said the moisture sensor was triggered so they wouldn't replace it. It never came close to getting wet, and I later got a minor settlement through a class action because the sensors were faulty, meaning anyone in the unfortunate coincidence of a broken phone still under warranty & a faulty triggered sensor got screwed.)
(But that was the last time I purchased an iPhone: I lost $hundreds when it got bricked and Apple said the moisture sensor was triggered so they wouldn't replace it. It never came close to getting wet, and I later got a minor settlement through a class action because the sensors were faulty, meaning anyone in the unfortunate coincidence of a broken phone still under warranty & a faulty triggered sensor got screwed.)
> But handset manufacturers were not experts in software platform development and didn’t have the skill set or interest in providing the increasing capabilities required to differentiate their software from that of their competitors.
This was my experience as a software dev starting out at trad. hardware companies in early 2000s. Software actually drove much of the potential upside, but traditional management was slow to realize this, having perhaps made their millions making hardware. They just didn’t get software, we’re fairly software illiterate. Software became an afterthought to a hardware centric dev process, but actually was what could make or break a product.
This was my experience as a software dev starting out at trad. hardware companies in early 2000s. Software actually drove much of the potential upside, but traditional management was slow to realize this, having perhaps made their millions making hardware. They just didn’t get software, we’re fairly software illiterate. Software became an afterthought to a hardware centric dev process, but actually was what could make or break a product.
It's interesting that pre-acquisition Android seems like it was very much tailored to high-end feature phones. There was no touch screen support, and even "apps" themselves seemed to be a bit of an afterthought, although of course better planned than the 'J2ME profiles' mentioned in OP. The closest thing to it today would probably be KaiOS, even pure Linux on phones is aiming quite a bit higher. (Albeit with sxmo https://sxmo.org/ https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sxmo being a bit more minimalistic, even that is way above most feature phones.)
high-end feature phones
This kind of classification only makes sense in retrospect. Blackberries and Danger Hiptops were pretty much the best phones you could get in 2005. Sure, keyboardless phones existed but they weren't necessarily better.
This kind of classification only makes sense in retrospect. Blackberries and Danger Hiptops were pretty much the best phones you could get in 2005. Sure, keyboardless phones existed but they weren't necessarily better.
It's really useful to look at the context of the market at the time. High-end phones ran a mobile variant of Windows, or were Blackberries. Screen sizes were getting larger and having data coming to your phone at all was still considered a bit exotic but was starting to happen. Touch, if there was any, was usually on a non-capacitive screen and was generally pretty terrible. The integration of sensors, data, GPS, etc. was starting to happen, but wasn't ubiquitous.
The market was also incredibly fragmented both on the hardware and software side. The hard divide between feature phones and smart phones hadn't yet been delineated in a general sense (the Windows phones were just kind of clunky and weird, and Blackberry basically had it's own market segment and represented "smart phones" in the press). Phones just kept getting higher and higher end, and adding more and more features.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/
The most anticipated phone for 2007 was Nokia's N95, the press called it a "multimedia device". It came with GPS, quad-band, 5MP camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, an accelerometer, a Web Browser, a big screen, apps. It looks vaguely like an older iPod, but has a pop out numeric keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
At the time it was considered one of the best phones ever released and sold 10 million. At the time it was sometimes called smartphone, but I think today we'd call it an advanced feature phone.
Android thus came out in this market, and the phones it originally targeted looked more like the N95 than the iPhone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they rethought the form-factor and simplified it, getting rid of most buttons and making touch not suck. But functionality-wise the iPhone was about on par with the N95, and so was Android. However, the first iPhone didn't support user apps, had limited connectivity and sold only 6.1 million devices.
When Android started supporting phones with iPhone-like form factors, it wasn't a given that it would become the predominant form factor for phones. The first few generations of Android phones still features lots of vestigial keyboards and buttons and rollers and sliders and such carried over from the N95 and blackberry style phones that Android devices were also looking like. Once the iPhone style form factor started leaving everybody else in the dust, Android phones (and the OS) simply dropped that stuff also.
The market was also incredibly fragmented both on the hardware and software side. The hard divide between feature phones and smart phones hadn't yet been delineated in a general sense (the Windows phones were just kind of clunky and weird, and Blackberry basically had it's own market segment and represented "smart phones" in the press). Phones just kept getting higher and higher end, and adding more and more features.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/
The most anticipated phone for 2007 was Nokia's N95, the press called it a "multimedia device". It came with GPS, quad-band, 5MP camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, an accelerometer, a Web Browser, a big screen, apps. It looks vaguely like an older iPod, but has a pop out numeric keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
At the time it was considered one of the best phones ever released and sold 10 million. At the time it was sometimes called smartphone, but I think today we'd call it an advanced feature phone.
Android thus came out in this market, and the phones it originally targeted looked more like the N95 than the iPhone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they rethought the form-factor and simplified it, getting rid of most buttons and making touch not suck. But functionality-wise the iPhone was about on par with the N95, and so was Android. However, the first iPhone didn't support user apps, had limited connectivity and sold only 6.1 million devices.
When Android started supporting phones with iPhone-like form factors, it wasn't a given that it would become the predominant form factor for phones. The first few generations of Android phones still features lots of vestigial keyboards and buttons and rollers and sliders and such carried over from the N95 and blackberry style phones that Android devices were also looking like. Once the iPhone style form factor started leaving everybody else in the dust, Android phones (and the OS) simply dropped that stuff also.
The high-end Symbian phones ticked all the boxes for "smart" I can think of. Not sure how they'd get bucketed as "feature phones." Browser, apps, fast cellular, GPS, camera... several things (like local filesystem management and access for apps) considerably before the iPhone.
It was all just a bit of a pain to DO. Mount on a PC, copy video or ebook files over to certain directories, operate through the numeric keypad, etc... the cumulative friction of all that compared to the iPhone was pretty groundbreaking even if it in a lot of ways it was just a lot of things being "a little bit" easier.
But I still held on to it for a few years because it took a while for the iPhones to really be able to do all the same things.
It was all just a bit of a pain to DO. Mount on a PC, copy video or ebook files over to certain directories, operate through the numeric keypad, etc... the cumulative friction of all that compared to the iPhone was pretty groundbreaking even if it in a lot of ways it was just a lot of things being "a little bit" easier.
But I still held on to it for a few years because it took a while for the iPhones to really be able to do all the same things.
It's the app ecossystem that really changed things and makes a true smartphone. Symbian could technically install and run apps. I think there was a Nokia/Symbian app store, but it only had like 10 crappy apps. I never had any idea where you would even start if you wanted to build one of your own or get it on the store. I'm pretty sure even power users of those phone never had more than one or two aftermarket apps. Rumor was that the development experience was terrible. I used Symbian phones for like 10 years I think, and never saw any improvement whatsoever in the app situation.
Apple and Google now both run app store hosting millions of apps, they both maintain their own development environments and adopted more advanced languages to make it easier. It's easy to submit apps (relative to Symbian days) and even nontechnical users commonly install and use dozens of them. The development tech and available APIs are being added and improved at breakneck speed, relatively speaking.
Apple and Google now both run app store hosting millions of apps, they both maintain their own development environments and adopted more advanced languages to make it easier. It's easy to submit apps (relative to Symbian days) and even nontechnical users commonly install and use dozens of them. The development tech and available APIs are being added and improved at breakneck speed, relatively speaking.
One other thing that played a huge part is how Jobs beat AT&T over the head to provide an unlimited data plan. We don't think much of this today, but in those days data was expensive. It put a huge cognitive load on any kind of data operation. Merely turning on the data modem was a "will I be able to eat through payday" kind of decision. It was very stressful! And suddenly Jobs comes along with the cool new phone AND takes away this barrier. Now you could have data always on, not worry about how big the app was you were about to download. You could browse the web and go to any website, with images turned on, without fear.
I remember the day this was announced and even though I never bought into the Apple ecosystem I remember feeling that it was a game changing move.
I remember the day this was announced and even though I never bought into the Apple ecosystem I remember feeling that it was a game changing move.
> and the OS
At least as of Android 8, the OS still supports hardware keyboards (and likely the rest); my current phone has one and can scroll by swiping on the keyboard.
At least as of Android 8, the OS still supports hardware keyboards (and likely the rest); my current phone has one and can scroll by swiping on the keyboard.
iPhone changed everything.
Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone.
I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.
I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.
Yup, Apple made software and UX important. And had the clout to ship their device with their software and ignore the carriers' obsession with random checkbox features.
Which, in the end, helped us a ton with Android -- post iPhone announcement everyone wanted to compete with that, nobody knew how, and the carriers eased back a bit on their absurd requirements documents full of random features nobody cared about (WAP?).
At the time iPhone was announced we were already running on the prototype of what became G1 (Dream), with multitouch. We just expected it would be the second form factor to ship, after a more "traditional" blackberry wedge sort of thing (Sooner). Post-iPhone it seemed silly to ship such a device first (you can imagine the reaction), so we skipped it and shifted focus to Dream.
Which, in the end, helped us a ton with Android -- post iPhone announcement everyone wanted to compete with that, nobody knew how, and the carriers eased back a bit on their absurd requirements documents full of random features nobody cared about (WAP?).
At the time iPhone was announced we were already running on the prototype of what became G1 (Dream), with multitouch. We just expected it would be the second form factor to ship, after a more "traditional" blackberry wedge sort of thing (Sooner). Post-iPhone it seemed silly to ship such a device first (you can imagine the reaction), so we skipped it and shifted focus to Dream.
> WAP
WAP made sense for its time: limited computing power, limited bandwidth, super low data caps.
WAP made sense for its time: limited computing power, limited bandwidth, super low data caps.
Sure, but it made a lot less sense on a device with a much faster data network and full featured web browser... even so carriers had their lists of all the features required for phones to be certified on their networks and it was very feature-phone-centric at that time.
> Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone.
I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree that it would have changed the world.
Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it interesting even in its fairly primitive form.
Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no one knew how to use.
I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree that it would have changed the world.
Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it interesting even in its fairly primitive form.
Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no one knew how to use.
> Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential
Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in different world.
Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in different world.
Nokia pissed off too many US carriers around this time. They were pushing a preinstalled VoIP client, and US carriers responded by dropping their phones.
Even if they had something great, the US focus of tech media would have made it hard to see, and the US/EU frequency differences would have made it hard to use in the US unless Nokia made a US version, but lack of distribution makes that less likely.
Even if they had something great, the US focus of tech media would have made it hard to see, and the US/EU frequency differences would have made it hard to use in the US unless Nokia made a US version, but lack of distribution makes that less likely.
You left out the rest of that...
> or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives
Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and so I don't believe it would have had the technological impact the iPhone did.
> or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives
Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and so I don't believe it would have had the technological impact the iPhone did.
That's a good point. Maybe you're right, who knows.
It may look like that in hindsight, and given advances in hardware, something with lots of sensors would have been built, but I’m not sure how similar it would have been.
The removal of the keyboard, in particular, was far from universally perceived as a good idea at the time.
I also think it would have been quite a while before anybody would have had the guts to not provide a slot for memory cards or to not have removable batteries.
The removal of the keyboard, in particular, was far from universally perceived as a good idea at the time.
I also think it would have been quite a while before anybody would have had the guts to not provide a slot for memory cards or to not have removable batteries.
I dunno, touch-only had been done before (Newton, Palm), and I think it would have surfaced again. The UI/UX Apple built on top of the technology that was in everyone's (manufacturers) hands, I still think, was the biggest factor in pushing things forward industry-wide.
As important was Apple's brand power. Everyone already had an iPod in their pocket and loved it. That gave them legitimacy to set terms with carriers.
Both had a stylus. Possibly, we could have ended up with many humans embedding a tiny piece of hardware in their index fingers, so that they wouldn’t have to carry a stylus around ;-)
Everything is "pretty much inevitable" if you have the power of hindsight.
No one else was working on a capacitive touchscreen device.
Easy there, rewriting history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
> It was first announced on 12 December 2006.
> It is the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen.
> The LG Prada was announced shortly <<before>> Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007.
> After the release of the iPhone the head of the LG Mobile Handset R&D Center was quoted saying he believed Apple had stolen the idea from the KE850 after it was announced as part of the iF Design Award.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
> It was first announced on 12 December 2006.
> It is the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen.
> The LG Prada was announced shortly <<before>> Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007.
> After the release of the iPhone the head of the LG Mobile Handset R&D Center was quoted saying he believed Apple had stolen the idea from the KE850 after it was announced as part of the iF Design Award.
Not really. It was going to happen with or without Apple. The first touchscreen smartphone was in 1992. Microsoft had touchscreen Windows devices from the late 90's through the 00's. Symbian and BlackBerry were things. And the LG Prada which was released before iPhone.
iPhone just did what Apple's good at, taking existing technology and packaging it nicely, but it would have happened with or without them.
iPhone just did what Apple's good at, taking existing technology and packaging it nicely, but it would have happened with or without them.
The biggest thing the iPhone did was come up with a user interaction method that made using a mobile computer/phone intuitive.
>Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
“What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
Android was nearly ready to launch as a Blackberry clone when Jobs demoed the iPhone.
>Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
“What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
Android was nearly ready to launch as a Blackberry clone when Jobs demoed the iPhone.
> The biggest thing the iPhone did was come up with a user interaction method that made using a mobile computer/phone intuitive.
What is that method you are referring to?
What is that method you are referring to?
But Apple had a two years leap in front of everyone else shipping a useable touch interface.
I remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first touch screen phone by RIM launching at the same time as the iPhone 3G. No Wifi, slow janky scrolling, no apps (well, sure, if you don't mind downloading some random .jar that have to be recompiled for the custom fork they ran on that device). Felt like a rushed beta.
Meanwhile the iPhone just worked. Smooth scrolling, fast browser especially on Wifi. You could get apps from the AppStore, no friction.
I remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first touch screen phone by RIM launching at the same time as the iPhone 3G. No Wifi, slow janky scrolling, no apps (well, sure, if you don't mind downloading some random .jar that have to be recompiled for the custom fork they ran on that device). Felt like a rushed beta.
Meanwhile the iPhone just worked. Smooth scrolling, fast browser especially on Wifi. You could get apps from the AppStore, no friction.
The thing I remember about non-iPhone touchscreens in those days is seeing the little mouse icon jump to where you pressed, and tiny scrollbars. And having to get out the stylus to better hit the targets. And seeing the cross-hatch X-windows background while the phone was booting up. It felt like using a handheld oscilloscope. At least the UI was not done in Tcl/Tk :-)
The reason I left my Treo for the OG iPhone was the data plan. No one could touch that unlimited data at the time. To me that is what sold the iPhone. I don't know that it ever would have taken off if it had been constrained per KB as was popular at the time. Also the data plan was a bit of a requirement considering the first iPhone was all webapps. I was so pissed when I found out it lacked copy and paste.
iPhone's capacitive touchscreen was new and revolutionary. Microsoft had some success in the early 2000s with Windows Mobile but they inexplicably stopped investing into it after 2005. Without Apple it might have taken many more years before the mobile revolution kicked off in earnest.
LG released a capacitive touchscreen phone before Apple by a month. The technology was out there and was always going to get used by someone.
Here's a modern review of the original LG Prada, from the noted iPhone lovers at Android Authority. You be the judge.
https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/
>The LG Prada was the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but there are reasons why you don't remember it.
https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/
>The LG Prada was the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but there are reasons why you don't remember it.
Didn't say the iPhone wasn't an improvement on the status quo with regards to UI. All I said is that it didn't invent the form nor the hardware.
In my first post on this thread, I said Apple improved the packaging of smartphones (ie. form, UI, ecosystem).
In my first post on this thread, I said Apple improved the packaging of smartphones (ie. form, UI, ecosystem).
You must also think Apple invented the notch, fingerprint scanner, capacitive touchscreen phone, music playing device, the desktop GUI and mouse.
I'd be curious to read this book and learn more about the pivot once iPhone launched.
I was at one of those TI partner companies during this time and we were contracted to assist with middleware for Android Sooner. I even got to test with one. Then everything got put on hold.
I was at one of those TI partner companies during this time and we were contracted to assist with middleware for Android Sooner. I even got to test with one. Then everything got put on hold.
I'd say the iPhone 2G changed everything, the first one did not really make a revolution on the mobile landscape.
I could not disagree more. No handset manufacturer ever dared to make the demands that Apple did, including full control of the software with no ability to customize or even pre-install apps. It was completely unheard of, but that's what they got Cingular to agree to with the first iPhone. And they maintain that control to this day.
And nobody has done that since. Can it really be an industry revolution if it's still a solo act over a decade later?
Google has, with Pixel. And even though the other Android OEMs allow for carrier apps to be preinstalled, it's nothing at all like it used to be. Verizon at one point was requiring feature phones to run a custom Verizon OS. Carriers would arbitrarily disable features on phones.
The carriers had complete control over everything up until Apple came along. Even Android enjoys the fruits of Apple's initial demands.
The carriers had complete control over everything up until Apple came along. Even Android enjoys the fruits of Apple's initial demands.
They did to a certain degree even on iPhones too. Remember how Verizon used to cripple hotspots?
I'm not in the US so that's why my perspective is maybe different but the first generation iPhone did not have MMS support, which was a critical feature at the time and pretty much killed it as a mainstream phone.
LG Prada changed everything. iPhone was a lame ripoff of that device.
The iPhone changed nothing and has, infact, been holding mobile computing captive in the 2007 era. Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes without all the crap that Apple and Google insist is necessary on a phone.
Mobile computing was way more limited prior to iPhone and Android. Mobile phones are embedded devices, and the embedded ecosystem has always been messy irrespective of raw computing power. Even today, this is clearly the main obstacle to running "desktop" Linux on phones. (Though one shouldn't underestimate the UX challenges involved in building a viable phone OS, these are largely solved by now thanks to Plasma Mobile and Phosh. What remains is 99% hardware bugs and lacking support.)
> Mobile computing was way more limited prior to iPhone and Android
How exactly was it limited? My only issue with older Windows Mobile devices was non-capacitive touch, and HTC HD2 (still on Windows Mobile 6.5) did not even have that problem.
How exactly was it limited? My only issue with older Windows Mobile devices was non-capacitive touch, and HTC HD2 (still on Windows Mobile 6.5) did not even have that problem.
While Symbian C++ might have been a pain to use, the phones could run J2ME, Apache (yep that web server), Python, Flash and Web Widgets (PWAs before it was even an idea!).
> Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes
Good luck running a desktop OS optimized for keyboard, mouse and large screens on a mobile phone with a small screen and only touch as input.
Oh. WinMobile was like that. And the original Android was like that. People went over to iPhone in droves, and Google had to scramble to change Android to mimic iOS.
Good luck running a desktop OS optimized for keyboard, mouse and large screens on a mobile phone with a small screen and only touch as input.
Oh. WinMobile was like that. And the original Android was like that. People went over to iPhone in droves, and Google had to scramble to change Android to mimic iOS.
It's amazing how many ex BeOS developers (original BeInc employees) worked on Danger Hiptop, Android and iOS. It essence, the BeOS core team built the modern mobile ecosystem today. Yet BeInc went bankrupt and BeOS is no more (well, there is Haiku running with the torch).
You should watch General Magic https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/
So sad that the open source spirit of the thing got lost on the way...
Now, it is a tightly locked os with some limited bit open. Just enough to pretend to be open source but not enough to let anyone build a real functional phone from it or being able to rebuild the os of one own phone.
Now, it is a tightly locked os with some limited bit open. Just enough to pretend to be open source but not enough to let anyone build a real functional phone from it or being able to rebuild the os of one own phone.
Impressive that it's one of the few purchases that didn't go to Google to die. I wonder if they ever compete the acquisition to other products that are no longer with us...
It's also a purchase that, according to the article, hammered out a deal that included not being killed after acquisition but being allowed to execute the plans and bring the product to market.
Slightly off topic.
Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community and now in Android community.
Thanks Romain Guy and Chet Haase for everything you guys do.
Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community and now in Android community.
Thanks Romain Guy and Chet Haase for everything you guys do.
> Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community
How so? Anywhere I can read about their contributions during Java time? Thanks.
How so? Anywhere I can read about their contributions during Java time? Thanks.
Their Rich UI clients with Java Swing was common presentation during Java One's. They wrote a book later: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applic...
I always wonder if Android was a success for google from a pure business perspective. Did it really help them make more money?
That's pretty difficult to measure, but I think it's pretty difficult to argue that it hasn't made them money.
That is to say, it's hard to even wrap my head around how Google has been able to leverage Android to influence the development of mobile as a platform, or the information they've been able to collect from 3 billion Android devices. So it's hard for me to guess how much money Android helped Google to earn.
But it takes ten seconds of back of the envelope math to determine that Android makes money for Google. Google pays $8-12 billion per year to be the default iOS search engine in 2019[2]. I think it's safe to say that Android is worth at least that much to Google.
That is to say, it's hard to even wrap my head around how Google has been able to leverage Android to influence the development of mobile as a platform, or the information they've been able to collect from 3 billion Android devices. So it's hard for me to guess how much money Android helped Google to earn.
But it takes ten seconds of back of the envelope math to determine that Android makes money for Google. Google pays $8-12 billion per year to be the default iOS search engine in 2019[2]. I think it's safe to say that Android is worth at least that much to Google.
It's not quite that simple. How much do they pay to the carriers to be the default search engine on their Android phones?
The risk remains that Apple creates its own search engine and cuts Google off from even being allowed to be the default, which was the risk that Google originally tried to fight with Android vs. Microsoft, but that hasn't materialized yet.
The risk remains that Apple creates its own search engine and cuts Google off from even being allowed to be the default, which was the risk that Google originally tried to fight with Android vs. Microsoft, but that hasn't materialized yet.
Without android they would have much less data on a lot of people; the location data gathered via android allows them to target localized adds, as they know where you are and where you are going to. A phone with android is like a vacuum cleaner of personal data - it gets your location, you photos, your messages, you name it;
Also, not sure if it's covered elsewhere in the book, but it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.