The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479

by bluekitten • 13 years ago

85 82 13 years ago

salient• 13 years ago

Android already existed before Google bought it, and at the time it was built mainly as a competitor to Blackberry (before Google bought them). So Google continued on the same path, as they were less interested in "changing the paradigm of mobile UX" than in killing the Real Fragmentation that existed before, with each OEM having its own OS, and unifying them under the open source Android.

There's something to be said about how fast they reacted to iPhone once they saw it, though. I mean how many big companies react as fast the moment they see a disruptive technology and realize its potential for the future? In comparison it took Nokia 4 years after the iPhone, to even admit Symbian was a dead-end, and it also took Microsoft 3 years to come up with something that wasn't just an evolution of Windows Mobile. So kudos to Google for realizing early on the potential of the iPhone-like user interfaces and iPhone-like touchscreen smartphones.

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

A big +1 here. Microsoft and Palm were quoted in articles at the time saying stuff like "you can't just expect to enter the market and be successful immediately" and "we're not worried, we're the dominant player in the market". Google correctly went "well, shit, that's the new standard - let's catch up".

kenrikm• 13 years ago

Always knew Balmer was a goof - however this one will go down in history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

The best part is when he goes over the "checklist" of features their phones have.. it'll do email! - quality products are more about checklists of features, something Microsoft still does not get.

salgernon• 13 years ago

It really didn't take long for the Chinese phone modder contingent to clone the iPhone:

  http://gizmodo.com/377601/crazy-popular-asian-blogstar-prefers-fake-chinese-iphone-to-the-real-thing

objclxt• 13 years ago

* they were less interested in "changing the paradigm of mobile UX" than in killing the Real Fragmentation that existed before, with each OEM having its own OS, and unifying them under the open source Android.*

The article alludes to this, but I think at the time Google wasn't interested in killing "real fragmentation" so much as killing the carrier control that was stopping them from pushing search and ads to mobile.

When it came to negotiating with carriers, Apple had a huge advantage. They had a strong hardware brand, and the iPhone was exciting. Google didn't have that. When they went to talk to AT&T, Telefonica, Verizon, Vodafone, etc, to get Google services onto devices those companies were basically holding them to ransom. And quite rightly Google though: "hey, rather than spending all our money getting carriers to promote our services let's spend it making something carriers will want from us".

nakedrobot2• 13 years ago

This sort of cements the idea that Android really is a copy of iOS in most ways. Of course they've made some of their own innovations, and there are a few things that work better than on iOS.

I think Steve Jobs was probably justified in his furious reaction to Android.

disclosure: Android user, I dislike many aspects of iOS, namely the restrictive policies of the app store, and the totally broken app sharing UX.

ceejayoz4• 13 years ago

I think it's more a "no one can get away with the old shitty UIs anymore". Touch screens and iOS were a better way of doing smart phones, and not adapting was suicide for the companies that chose not to.

craigyk• 13 years ago

I think what made Jobs understandably furious was that the CEO of Google was on Apple's board. Not that he wouldn't have been litigious otherwise, but I think that moved it into vendetta territory.

jerf• 13 years ago

However, notice that if this article is true, then it also implies that Google was caught completely flat-footed by the iPhone, CEO on the board of Apple or no.

cma• 13 years ago

I think Steve Jobs was probably justified in his furious reaction to Android.

iOS was more of a copy of palm (which in turn was a copy of Newton..) than android was a copy of iOS.

The biggest innovation was realizing capactive screens made things much nicer, and made browsing possible. But it is hard to fault Google for copying their browser when Apple themselves based it on LGPLed KHTML; the license dictates that they share.

pessimizer6• 13 years ago

realizing capactive screens made things much nicer

In what way? Inaccuracy and the inability to use a stylus or wear gloves?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66RBfrBgL2E

edit: surprised at the downvotes. Is there a capacitive screen even remotely comparable to the accuracy and pressure response of a 4 year old resistant N900? I'm open to examples.

orbitur• 13 years ago

Jobs' anger wasn't at all related to WebKit.

ghshephard• 13 years ago

"Copy of Palm?"

I was an continuous palm user from 1998-2006, I owned four different treos, (and a handspring).

Trust me when I say there was almost no relationship (let alone "copy") between the Palm and iPhone. Except, maybe, they could both make phone calls.

I watched the Apple keynote, swearing that under no circumstance would I ever purchase an apple toy - 2 minutes after I touched the iPhone/Google Maps (even with it's crappy GPRS/EDGE network) I was heading to go line up at the Apple Store.

ebbv• 13 years ago

iOS was more of a copy of palm

Bullshit. I used tons of Palm devices and iOS has basically nothing in common with PalmOS.

The only thing in common between the initial iPhone and a Palm device is that they have a large touch screen.

bradleyland• 13 years ago

I think there's a difference between acknowledging that Steve Jobs was justified in being angry and holding that Google shouldn't have been allowed to do what they did. I think the most certain thing is that both iOS and Android are better off because the other exists. The competition has allowed for a lot of mutual copying, just as we'd seen in the PC market before it, and in just about every other technological development since the stone age.

Steve Jobs is justified in being angry because he feels ownership of his ideas. Is anger is held impotent because we recognize that a healthy degree of copying is good for innovation. Both of those are OK.

shootaray• 13 years ago

Could this be done if this was a startup going after a phone?

AnotherDesigner2• 13 years ago

As someone that has a lot of Apple products I'm glad they have competition. I don't think any one company should have a monopoly on the modern touchscreen smartphone concept. That being said I wish more Android fans would accept that Google directly copied a lot of ideas from their competition. And that's okay. It would be one thing if Android looked like a direct copy of iOS but it doesn't. It just uses the same technologies. On the other hand, when unscrupulous companies like Samsung try to capitalize on Apples success by directly copying the product they should be slapped down and reminded to do their own thing. It's all about balancing the rights of innovators and the protections for consumers.

micampe2• 13 years ago

I think the problem is the word "copied", it always comes with a whiff of "and hence worthless".

DannyBee• 13 years ago

"That being said I wish more Android fans would accept that Google directly copied a lot of ideas from their competition"

1. I wish Apple fans would accept that Apple does the same instead of seemingly believing that every feature Apple has ever added was brought down on chiseled stone tablets received on Mount Sinai :)

2. FWIW: Roughly this exact same story could be written about any good competitor reacting to any good launch by any company ever. It sounds sensational because it's "Google" vs. "Apple" or whatever, but realistically, companies react to each other.

gfodor• 13 years ago

re: 1, obviously this is true in any element of creative work. there is, of course, a line, where a creative work becomes distinctly new and reasonably un-plagiaristic even though it clearly draws upon the work of others.

in other words, pointing out copying by a copier does not make them a hypocrite, since there isn't just one definition of copying, and anyone doing creative work is by definition a copier. Apple defenders would argue that all of the other products they've built have been sufficiently innovative and improvements over their predecessors so as to make them genuinely new things. It's a hard case to make for Android if you consider iOS a predecessor to its design process, which it sounds like was rebooted upon iOS's reveal.

iribe• 13 years ago

Any decent company reacts to competitors to survive: witness iOS notifications in response to android notifications. Consumers benefit when companies are busy one-upping each other.

AnotherDesigner2• 13 years ago

instead of seemingly believing that every feature Apple has ever added was brought down on chiseled stone tablets received on Mount Sinai :)

My impression of Apple has changed dramatically in the past few years. I think a lot of it started with the iPad. I waited years for Apple to release a modern touchscreen computer. As a designer, I basically wanted a portable Wacom Cintiq so I could bring the Adobe Creative Suite with me and work anywhere. When Apple finally announced the iPad, based on iOS instead of OS X, it changed my opinion of them. Don't get me wrong, I like the iPad. I use it to browse the web, check e-mail and other basic tasks. But the iPad wasn't what Apple users had been asking for. We had been asking for what turned out to be the Microsoft Surface. And I'd own the Surface (Pro) today if it weren't for my annoyances with Windows 8.

publicfig• 13 years ago

If you have the chance, it really is worth going back and watching the original iPhone release video. It's pretty amazing to see some of the things that were so new and exciting a few years ago now so much a part of the phone landscape that we can't even imagine a phone without them. It's almost more amazing to see how basic it seems compared to what we have now, just 6 years later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ

AlexanderDhoore• 13 years ago

I was surprised by the fact that it was an "internet phone". They didn't even talk about apps really. Just a few "widgets", like Google Maps.

The native, installed apps were just a by-product.

ash• 13 years ago

It didn't make sense to talk about apps, because there were no third-party apps at the time.

mattmanser• 13 years ago

There's a great story by one of the engineers about this presentation, whole thing was still pretty prototype and crashed a fair bit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-sa...

Also to put this in context, go watch the original Android sneak peek. Anyone who claims Google didn't completely rip off Apple is delusional. Android sucked pre-iPhone. Can't find the video now with a quick google.

bryanlarsen2• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that most of those things that were "new and exciting" weren't new; it was just that most people hadn't seen them before, or not done well before.

For example, nobody used capacitive touch screens because they were horribly imprecise. The iPhone included some tricks to make them less precise, but mostly they just embraced the imprecision: all tap targets on the iPhone are thumb size.

Another thing that bothered me was Steve's description of the screen as the highest resolution screen available on a phone, when there were several gadgets available with much higher resolution screens, such as the Nokia N770.

My experience with the N770 definitely made me dismissive of the iPhone. The n770 made me well aware of the value of having a web browser in your pocket. But it had an 800 pixel screen at a time when that was the minimum width that many web sites designed for, along with a highly accurate stylus that you could use to accurately click on tiny links. There was no way the web was going to be usable on a 480 pixel screen without an accurate stylus. Which meant that every web site had to be rewritten to be iPhone friendly.

Who was going to buy an iPhone when virtually all websites were unusable? (remember at that time there were no apps). And who would rewrite their website to support an iPhone that nobody was buying? Classic chicken and egg problem.

Steve told us the answer: an incredibly polished product and incredible salesmanship.

Synaesthesia• 13 years ago

The iphone may have had a lower resolution screen, but the performance and responsiveness of the OS and browser were the real innovations. The power of Safari as well as the way you could zoom made it a game changer for surfing the web on your phone.

antimagic• 13 years ago

"Who was going to buy an iPhone when virtually all websites were unusable? (remember at that time there were no apps). And who would rewrite their website to support an iPhone that nobody was buying? "

Which of course was why MobileSafari and it's "pinch-to-zoom" functionality was revolutionary - it solved the chicken-and-egg problem by not requiring a site to be rewritten (although as experience has since demonstrated, you can certainly improve the user experience by optimising for mobile devices).

thoughtsimple2• 13 years ago

"nobody used capacitive touch screens because they were horribly imprecise. The iPhone included some tricks to make them less precise, but mostly they just embraced the imprecision: all tap targets on the iPhone are thumb size."

This is definitely not true today and I don't believe it was true when the iPhone was introduced either. I remember how remarkable it was that I could hit targets on unzoomed web pages accurately.

mongol• 13 years ago

Yes, I saw it a while ago. It is something very rare, how many videos of this kind introduces something that completely revolutionizes the way everyone uses a piece of technology?

marbletiles• 13 years ago

Larry Page: “We had a closet full of over 100 phones [that we were developing software for], and we were building our software pretty much one device at a time,” he said in his 2012 report to shareholders. In various remarks over the years he has described the experience as both “awful” and “incredibly painful.”

... and now nearly every Android dev shop I know has closets full of way more than 100 phones, with feature white and blacklists all around.

alttab• 13 years ago

Very true. The difference is in the profit. Google arguably will put up with it considering they are selling more phones.

Once goolge starts shipping good hardware, other carriers will follow them for compatibility.

kumarm2• 13 years ago

We are an Android Dev Shop with decent success (US Based). We don't carry more than 4 models of android Devices.

Would you care to mention names of couple of dev shops that has 100 Android models?

girvo2• 13 years ago

Some big game shops do, IIRC. That was a while back too, when there was 1.6 devices still being used. In my experience, 4 phone devices is about right for Android (and 2-3 iPhones for full testing).

rsfinn• 13 years ago

What do you do when someone reports a bug on a device you don't have, and you can't reproduce it on one of the devices you do have? Genuinely curious (I'm a software developer but not on Android).

Sephiroth873• 13 years ago

Yeah, that part definitely made me chuckle :D

fidotron• 13 years ago

And if you're doing that you're doing it wrong.

This whole myth of you needing vast amounts of devices to do Android testing is mysteriously propagated by those that stand to benefit from it, such as game QA companies or departments.

In reality you can do massive scale deployment with a relative handful of devices, assuming you understand what you're actually doing and not just writing stuff that's specific to whatever device you're testing on.

bane• 13 years ago

It's a lesson that head starts, no matter how revolutionary, can always be overcome.

ori_b4• 13 years ago

This is not actually true, although it makes a good myth.

Android seems to have been targeting a variety of form factors from pre-iPhone times, and had a touchscreen interface implemented before Apple released the iPhone:

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

jolan• 13 years ago

From the article:

Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives. A phone with a touchscreen, code-named Dream, that had been in the early stages of development, became the focus.

ori_b4• 13 years ago

So, "They prioritized a form factor they'd already been working on"?

I'm not sure that I'd describe that as "The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android".

thoughtsimple2• 13 years ago

How do you reconcile your view that this is a myth with this:

"But for the Google Android team, the iPhone was a kick in the stomach.

'What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,' DeSalvo said. 'It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.'"

Either the Android team already had something like the iPhone but it was so far out that it may as well not have existed or even their work on the touchscreen version was not nearly good enough to ship after the iPhone. I don't think you can read that passage and think that Google was ready with an iPhone like touchscreen design. Even their early touchscreen designs that I saw were still smallish screens with physical keyboards attached.

ori_b4• 13 years ago

I was interning at RIM (now BlackBerry) during the era around the release of the iPhone. RIM also had prototyped iPhone form factors at the time. They were backwards, poorly implemented, and generally turds. You may remember the BlackBerry Storm. You may wish you didn't remember it.

Android was clearly in a similar situation. (In fact, they were clearly playing catchup until at least Android 4.0). However, there was something working. The concept was there. A prototype implementation was there. The execution was not.

rgbrenner• 13 years ago

"had a touchscreen interface implemented before Apple released the iPhone:"

Your link says November 12 2007 was when Google demoed a touchscreen phone.

The iphone was announced Jan 9, 2007, and went on sale Jun 29, 2007.

What calendar are you using where November is before June?

ori_b4• 13 years ago

Oops. My mistake -- I admit, I only skimmed it, since I knew what I expected it to contain. Take a look at the Samsung Switch, which was leaked in Jan 2007: http://gizmodo.com/229579/google-switch-phone-by-google-and-...

tomasien• 13 years ago

Apple annoys me with how closed off they are in many ways, but this is the example I always bring up when people are trying to HATE Apple for being so closed off - they destroyed the most destructive force in mobile UX ever - the phone company oligopoly. Besides also presenting the only ever true competitor to the Microsoft PC, that's their biggest contribution to openness (whether done intentionally or not).

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

Seems like an admission of guilt over patent infringement. /s

mzs• 13 years ago

I wondered what Sooner was like, closest I could find:

http://blog.steventroughtonsmith.com/2012/05/2007s-pre-m3-ve...

There is also a video, pretty similar device.

joezydeco• 13 years ago

That is definitely the Sooner. I used one while working at an OHA partner company in 2007. It was just an HTC reflashed with Android.

melling• 13 years ago

Steve doesn't get enough credit with many HN types. He was also the spark that launched the multi-billion dollar mobile industry. Samsung, Google, etc now all aggressively compete with huge resources. Hopefully, Elon will do the same with the electric car and rockets. If Elon, is successful enough with electric cars, for example, then others will follow, and more resources will be thrown at the problem.

credo• 13 years ago

Interesting to see how this report has been buried on HN

This post is on page 3 and ranked 75. it says "59 points by bluekitten 2 hours ago"

Meanwhile on page 1, the number 21 item says "35 points by cromulent 4 hours ago" and the number-29 item says "64 points by AndrewDucker 8 hours ago"

quarterto• 13 years ago

Having more comments than points it will have triggered the controversial filter.

ahomescu1• 13 years ago

When I first saw the headline, I thought the article would be about throwing Dalvik away and going with AOT compilation (as in the new ART). I've heard a lot of people complain that Android is more laggy/less smooth than iOS, and I always suspected Dalvik is a big part of that.

The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android

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