If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/if-android-is-a-stolen-product-then-so-was-the-iphone.ars

by tambourine_man • 14 years ago

180 131 14 years ago

amartya9162• 14 years ago

By the way, a much better and more detailed commentary can be found here: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Bill Buxton is currently a Research Scientist at MSR and he more than knows what he's talking about.

binarybits4• 14 years ago

I link to that page in my story. I tried to interview Buxton but Microsoft's PR people turned me down.

amartya9162• 14 years ago

Sorry, I'd missed that link in your article. Although I don't claim to know him personally, I've interacted with him a few times and I know that he takes an interest in getting the mainstream tech. media to cover or correct popular myths (such as Apple pioneering multi-touch). Next time around, drop him an e-mail. Never hurts to ask, although I know why Microsoft's PR might have turned you down :).

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off.

Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android_mobile_phone_platf...

kenrikm• 14 years ago

Apple did not invent multitouch however they did invent how it was used to make a phone with a very specific interface that was then copied feature for feature by Google who had intimate knowledge of its design.

bunderbunder• 14 years ago

Pre-iPhone, they were also demoing devices that did not look quite so much like Blackberry clones:

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...

gnaffle5• 14 years ago

November 2007 isn't exactly pre-iPhone?

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

> We're talking November 12 2007

iPhone was announced January 2007 and released June 2007. That's hardly pre-iPhone.

eddieplan9• 14 years ago

Exactly. Picking individual feature to judge innovation is like saying Sydney Opera House is not interesting because the concrete, the flooring, the paint and window are pretty much the same as any one of the boring office buildings; and Golden Gate Bridge is just a bridge because it's still a bridge-looking bridge built with bridge-building materials.

Like design of any architecture, a consumer product is always a package of many components. Knowing what component to keep and what not to and tuning each to best please the user and work together are the art and the kind of innovation that is the most difficult to find.

And you know people are copying/stealing just by looking at it:

- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjetjep/4100430224/ - http://micgadget.com/8168/shanzhai-sydney-opera-house/

zmmmmm2• 14 years ago

> If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off.

The "entire package" of Android included a huge number of features that the iPhone did not, many of which later got incorporated into iOS.

> Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone

As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything. Of course, what actually emerged into production was iPhone-like because by then the market had moved in that direction.

beatle• 14 years ago

>As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything.

wrong.

jbrennan• 14 years ago

I'm not sure anyone is arguing the iPhone invented all these individual technologies, and if anyone is claiming that, they shouldn't be as the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary.

I think the real meat of the argument is "iPhone synthesized all those individual pieces into something coherent and incredible.". It's kind of like how the Macintosh and Lisa took the ideas from PARC, perfected them, and turned them into a real product. I think the stink is being made that Android is copying that aspect of the iPhone, instead of just a piece or two.

Maybe that's not what's actually being argued, but that's what I think should be argued at least.

horv• 14 years ago

"I'm not sure anyone is arguing the iPhone invented all these individual technologies, and if anyone is claiming that, they shouldn't be as the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary."

Isn't that what the current legal battle over slide to unlock is over? I'll be the first to agree that the iPhone put all the pieces together, but it seems like every other week there's a new lawsuit over some iPhone or Android feature that is more of a common sense thing and probably shouldn't have been granted a patent.

fpgeek14• 14 years ago

The battle over slide-to-unlock is particularly ludicrous because neither Apple nor Android invented it. To the best of my knowledge that honor (in the context of a smartphone) belongs to Neonode with their N1m (though I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out someone had anticipated them, as well).

angersock• 14 years ago

I mean, do we really want to support synthesis of other people's work as something that can be protected legally? Especially when most development nowadays is clicking cogs together anyways?

This doesn't seem like a meme we should seek to perpetuate.

0x444• 14 years ago

If the resulting synthesis is something new, why wouldn't we want to protect it legally? To make a literary analogy, any book written in an established genre necessarily synthesizes work that went before it… are these new works less worthy of legal protection because the ideas and tropes (and in the case of works synthesized from the Commons characters, setting, etc.) are things we've already seen? In the technology fields, it is common to base new innovation on that which came before. So long as the prior art is referenced in the claim for protection, aren't the useful arts strengthened by legal protection in exchange for continued disclosure of innovation, even in the case of innovations synthesized of prior development?

kprobst• 14 years ago

But then you can also say that everything is a remix and a synthesis of prior innovation, and if that's the case then Apple's position is still indefensible.

We all stand in the shoulders of someone else.

stonemetal• 14 years ago

Apple did when they got patents on them.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

I think it's a bit "pushing it" by saying the iPhone was a "big" technological revolution for having synthesized a few technologies together. Deep down, every invention is to some level, an evolution over existing inventions. As many great inventors said throughout history "I can only see this far because I'm standing in the shoulder of giants".

But sometimes, to better see the whole picture, we need to take a step back from the drawing board. We, as engineers, like to think that every great revolution in consumer behavior is due to a technological invention fundamental to the shift. But if you pay attention you'll notice that Apple's biggest innovation wasn't technological. The area they excel the most is marketing. They built a coherent experience from the device interface design, to the propaganda on TV ads that was powerful enough to convince consumers to buy their products.

Steve Jobs was a genius. But if you believe he was a genius engineer who you should try to mimic, then you'll end up making poor technical decisions. He was a genius marketer who excelled at convincing consumers his products are worth it. That's what we should take from all this. That's we should learn from Apple's growth. Marketing matters.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

Decent products matter.

gnaffle5• 14 years ago

While he was a genius at marketing, that's not the main lesson to take from Apple. The main lesson is that it's possible to focus on a few products and make them work really well. I don't think all the marketing genius in the world would have made the MacBooks and iPhones a success if they had been running Windows Vista or Windows Mobile 6 when they were released.

sbuk3• 14 years ago

Ars is getting worse.

sbuk3• 14 years ago

As is Hacker News apparently. It's a trollbait article that say nothing of merit or value. Frankly I'd've said the same were it a story about Android being a rip off of iOS. You 'haters' of whatever denomination are just ridiculous and it's about time you all grow the fuck up.

binarybits4• 14 years ago

Did you read the article or just the headline? You can disagree with my conclusions but I think patent policy is an important topic.

infiniteburp2• 14 years ago

Steve Jobs saying he's going to spend billions and billions on frivolous lawsuits should make still independent developers wary about getting boxed into his walled "ecosystem". Perhaps it's time to revise the laws on "thought property" to declaw the patent and copyright industries. We need more competition, not more "I have a lot of money therefore I get even more money" monopolies. Geez. Patent law is just turning into a subsidy for Silicon Valley.

fpgeek14• 14 years ago

Of course, all of those lawsuits might also make independent developers think that the only "safe" place is his walled "ecosystem". Yes, you pay taxes and you live at the pleasure of the king, but at least most of the time he's more interested fighting with the enemies outside than the subjects inside.

zefhous• 14 years ago

> Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation.

This article is heartily missing the point.

Android is basically a stolen product. It's a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it's current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing.

Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of "stolen" technologies and ideas, but Apple brought them together to make something great in a way that had never been done before. What Apple did took vision, discipline, and execution. That is what Apple brought to the table, and that is what innovation is.

Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.

We don't need to get all emotional about this. This doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the products, it's just the history about how this stuff came about. You are still free to like Android or WebOS or iOS or whatever you want. It's fine. Just recognize innovation for what it is.

nextparadigms2• 14 years ago

Look around in any industry you want. How would you define competition, if nothing but very similar products to the original product of that type in that particular market?

This video describes very well how inventions get created and then evolve for the benefit of everyone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg

wvenable6• 14 years ago

> Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple

That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM).

Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface. I'm not even sure that's a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.

nwjsmith• 14 years ago

> That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone.

Which phones?

jrockway2• 14 years ago

Indeed. Remember the Palm Pilot? Those things eventually ended up quite advanced; I remember buying one in Japan in 2002 with a camera, keyboard, swiveling screen, and so on. The only difference was that it didn't have a 3G radio.

Ah, here we are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg

The iPhone is a fine product. The ground it broke was making people want a PDA, not actually inventing the PDA.

yannickt• 14 years ago

"Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface."

Which is exactly why it resembled none of the smartphones that preceded it. That innovation was a monumental game changer.

tzs• 14 years ago

> Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone

Do you have specific smartphones in mind? The only ones of that era I'm more than passingly familiar with are the Palm phones, and they were nothing at all like the iPhone.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

"Smartphones" of 10 years ago (or PDAs) only resembled anything like an iPhone if you consider that a MacBook resembles an 80's terminal.

infiniteburp2• 14 years ago

Well Remember ...

Apple "advocates" always said: apple invented the gui, apple invented mp3 players, apple makes the fastest PC, apple's not the "big brother" company, etc. etc. Every claim usually turns out false. The Rep for "reality distortion field" has firm basis in trugth.

We can't always take Apple's claims at face value. This article just exposed, once again, another pro-Apple fallacy: that they own mini-tablet-phones and everyone stole the idea from them.

nonsense.

tejaswiy• 14 years ago

I don't agree with this. Lets flip it the other way round and compare it with technology today. Lots of research labs have made AR Goggles and they've been featured in lots of movies / sci-fi. But lets say the google goggles are a hit and Apple starts making goggles, I believe Google can rightfully claim that Apple "copied" them.

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

Apple "advocates" rarely, if ever, say those things.

Apple made the GUI, MP3 players, etc. usable for the general public.

eridius• 14 years ago

Apple "advocates" never said any of those things. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually did read this stuff, so let me just say, you need to learn how to recognize a straw man argument when you see it.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

>Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.

Palm was making touchscreen smartphones before iPhone.

huggyface3• 14 years ago

Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple

Years before the iPhone I was carrying around an iPaq. Now it isn't quite the same, most notably because the original device didn't even function as a phone. Yet I would argue that the phone part of smartphone is by far the least important part (and the only reason it is so prevalent is that carrier subsidization allows people to stomach $700 iPhones). Really these things are ultra-portable computers and the phone thing is ancillary.

The iPaq wasn't multitouch. But here's the thing -- Apple bought that multitouch sensor. They didn't invent it. They didn't specify it. They didn't even initiate its creation. Their software used it brilliantly, but by the common narrative you'd think they had invented it.

Capacitive touchscreens evolved. Embedded processors evolved. GPUs evolved. Wireless technologies evolved. Batteries evolved. Makers like RIM pushed much of that evolution.

Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. Better in every way -- largely owing to those hardware improvements, all of which came from outside Apple -- but did it really invent an industry?

It's actually a bit sad how little credit RIM gets, given that they were the ones who pushed a lot of the innovation in mobile that made the iPhone possible. A distributed messaging, application platform, camera, etc...everyone just focuses on the damn keyboard as if it defines the platform.

Already I'm seeing many ascribing the iPad as inventing the tablet, forgetting so many products that came before (both real, such as Archos, and conceptual like the Crunchpad). Apple executes amazingly well, but their creations are seldom as out of left field as people imagine. They say that the victors write history, but it is sad if we're blinded into confusing commercial success with innovation.

Anechoic• 14 years ago

Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0.

And isn't the iPaq v1.0 just the Newton v2.0?

gnaffle5• 14 years ago

I think Apple can rightly be credited with making smartphones and tablets mainstream. Smartphones and tablets were niches before the iPhone. Microsoft had tried for years pushing Windows Tablet Edition, but it only became a niche.

Do you think that was only because those devices lacked a capacitive touchscreen? If so, then why did every other company have to scratch their mobile platform after the iPhone came along? Why didn't Microsoft make Metro in 2006, after all, the techology was available (I tried a Panasonic Toughbook with a capacitive display way before that).

I agree that others should be credited for their inventions. Both RIM and others like Nokia helped pushed the technology forward, but they did so very gradually. It took an outsider to disrupt the industry (luckily, Apple had killed off the Newton, or they probably woudn't have had the incentive to do so).

huggyface3• 14 years ago

It's too late for me to edit it into my post, but I should have added that the incredible improvements in embedded processors, in particular GPUs, was also heavily spurred on by the GPS industry. Those little 3D perspectives on the in-vehicle GPS are what financed the technology that made the iPhone possible.

orbitingpluto2• 14 years ago

Just to add to the list of previous art:

The Nokia 770 from 2005/11 and the N800 which was released (2007/01) around the same time that Jobs was announcing the development of the iPhone. (These were Internet tablets with the hints of the telephony stack already included. Eventually the N900 phone did come out, too little too late unfortunately.)

Android has much more in common with Maemo than Apple iOS.

orbitingpluto2• 14 years ago

Odd to see this comment get downvoted. Apple fanboism attempting to reassert the reality distortion field?

gnaffle5• 14 years ago

..and sadly, the 770 and its user interface just shows too well why the iPhone won, and why the other companies had to go back to the drawing board with their operating systems. I used the 770 and actually got wrist pain from using it too much with the crappy plastic stylus that was included.

(And at the time, the 770 had a pretty amazing screen and user interface compared to most other mobile devices. If only Nokia had known that capacitive touchscreens existed and started porting the Hildon UI to multi touch in 2005..)

zmmmmm2• 14 years ago

You say "Android is basically a stolen product" and then "We don't need to get all emotional about this". If you don't want people to get emotional then stop using highly pejorative, emotionally charged words like "stolen".

Aspects of Android were inspired by the iPhone. The iPhone itself was inspired by the Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile series of devices before it.

There really is no such thing as "stolen" when it comes to knowledge. Everything is built upon other things, emerging from the context where they are conceived. It is utterly impossible to not "steal" when you create because your creations are a direct response to the environment in which you create them, which by necessity is a result of creations that came before.

freyrs3• 14 years ago

Industries converge around good ideas. This isn't "stealing", its progress.

nextparadigms2• 14 years ago

I agree. Apple had a lot of great ideas for their phone, and sooner or later someone would've copied them to be able to compete in the same type of market, and then build on that platform. In turn Apple ended up copying some of the later ideas from their competitors, too.

It's how progress happens. Too bad people are so quick to blame others with "stealing" when this happens.

fudged• 14 years ago

I thought 'we' as a tech community had moved passed this. It's been dragged through the mud time and time again.

YooLi5• 14 years ago

Ars must he hurting for some ad impressions.

discreteevent• 14 years ago

Bell Labs and Xerox Parc. I wonder what percentage of the contemporary computing experience wasn't invented in either of those places.

Apple-Guy2• 14 years ago

The problem is, Apple made the unfinished parc products usable, and invented drag and drop. Here from page 4 of an article:

jff• 14 years ago

What's that, Apple-Guy? A website billing itself as "Apple iPhone, iPad 2, iPod News, Celebrity Mac Users, and More" claims that Apple did all the real, important work? Wow!

YooLi5• 14 years ago

Poor article. Show multitouch before the iPhone, show "touchable" screens before the iPhone, conclude the iPhone was just a copy.

Meanwhile all phones since the iPhone look a heck of a lot like it.

binarybits4• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure I didn't say "the iPhone was just a copy."

sirclueless• 14 years ago

Let me put this in hacker terminology: Have you ever looked at someone else's product and said, "Well that's stupid, I could remake it in a week and it would be even better"? But even if that were true, you weren't the one who took the risk and built the damn thing.

Other people here are talking about "vision" and "innovation" and while these are certainly things Apple had in abundance, the bottom line is that Samsung's lack of vision is not what Apple is complaining about. It's all about risk: Apple took a risk, they pioneered a whole metaphor of a smartphone made of a giant touchscreen and little packaged apps. They had to convince a whole legion of consumers that their highly simplified interface was the elegant solution they needed, and that takes a lot of money and a lot of risk. Now Apple wants their day in the sun to last as long as possible, they want as much of the payoff from the risks they took as possible, and they feel entitled to a degree of exclusivity.

vacri4• 14 years ago

The sword cuts both ways - here on HN we've had a number of stories about the 'little guy' who makes a software package (eg cloud music manager), taking the risk, then apple comes along and implements the same thing, destroying the little guy. The little guy takes risk that's big from his point of view - does this mean he's entitled not to be copied by Apple?

fpgeek14• 14 years ago

And Motorola took a risk on the cell phone in the first place and Rio took a risk (including a make-or-break lawsuit) on the first mp3 player and on and on...

Has Apple been fair to those companies by their own standard?

rbarooah• 14 years ago

Wasn't Steve Job's comment driven by his belief that Eric Schmidt used his insider knowledge of the iPhone project to inform the direction of the Android team?

It seems to me that he wasn't calling it stolen because it was a similar product - other comments of his indicate that he was was well aware that the technology would be cloned.

He was calling it stolen because he felt the time-to-market advantage had been stolen by an insider who breached his trust. I think this is what drove his animosity.

Android is obviously deeply influenced by the iPhone. The iPhone is obviously influenced by a whole load of other products (though not to quite the same extent).

What makes it 'stealing' is whether the influence was underhand or not.

We don't know whether Eric Schmidt did use inside information in breach of trust, but if he did then Jobs' position seems a lot more supportable.

arjn2• 14 years ago

Funny how the article mentions the LG Prada pre-dating the iPhone and then dismisses it. The software would of course be different but the LG Prada's physical design - full capacitive touchscree etc. - was public knowledge before the iPhone came out (and they also won a couple of awards for the design) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

j453• 14 years ago

My Palm Treo was the original smartphone. Blackberry, iPhone, and everyone else stole from that.

No wonder Apple has never sued Palm, or now HP who owns all the IP. Palm had half the iPhone probably patented lol.

joenathan• 14 years ago

It appears that the majority of people commenting haven't even read the article...

DanBC• 14 years ago

The iPhone isn't even the first thing called an iPhone with a touchscreen that makes telephone calls and connects to the internet.

From 1997:

(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.telecom/msg/f62a1ff...)

vacri4• 14 years ago

Well... that's a desktop phone, not a mobile, but true, it's branded an 'iphone', connects to the internet, makes calls, and has apps

http://aaworldtrade.com/phones-accessories.html

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

The article goes a great length to mention other companies' and persons' accomplishments in the field, all the while completely ignoring Apple's research on it since the 80s.

They get to the point themselves:

Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch user interfaces—and combined them in a product greater than the sum of its parts.

And then Android just imitated that precise sum of parts (full touchscreen, swipe gestures, on-screen keyboard, apps, desktop-class browser, accelerometer, great graphics...). Android looked nothing like it is today before the iPhone OS.

shpoonj• 14 years ago

This conversation should have ended years ago... Are people really still bickering?

wavephorm• 14 years ago

We all know software patents are bullshit. The problem is the law doesn't care, and politicians are paid not to care.

falling• 14 years ago

People are still bickering about the GUI, and that started at least forty years ago.

caycep• 14 years ago

I suspect it isn't so much the design (although as has been pointed out the jump from treo-like to iphone-like is telling), but that a member of a board of directors used his access to proprietary company secrets/internal information to directly benefit a competitor company - its a conflict of interest issue at best, and corporate data theft at worst. And I think Jobs took it personally because the Larry, Sergei, and maybe even Schmidt had soliticed his mentorship and advice and for them to turn around and do this to him would seem to me like it would be felt as a personal betrayal.

51Cards• 14 years ago

Re: IBM's 1993 Simon: "The e-mail app even included the ability to click on a phone number to dial it."

Would that not constitute prior art in one of the patents Apple asserted against Android recently? I am only vaguely aware of the finer details so I'm probably mistaken on some point.

fpgeek14• 14 years ago

Actually, it would. Apple is asserting a patent (from 1996) against Android's "Linkify" functionality which does exactly that.

Other prior art would be Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb (1994/1995) for turning CamelCase into links and, my personal favorite, Netscape Navigator 2.0b1, for "Live URLs" (that recognized URLs and email addresses in mail and news text and made them clickable).

I've been following this off and on, and AFAICT, HTC didn't bring up any of these piece of prior art, which makes me seriously question the quality of their prior art searches.

bane2• 14 years ago

I swear to god, this would be such a non-issue if people would just stop acting like human history started with the release date of their favorite Apple product.

noble• 14 years ago

How Similar is a Galaxy Nexus to iPhone 4S ? My question is , who is leading and who is following?

fpgeek14• 14 years ago

At this point that depends on what you consider important.

If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone

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