19 ms·

Was at Google in 2007 when the launch(es) were happening. The commenter at the bottom of the article is correct, the existential threat Google faced wasn't fro

by auiya 7y ago

Was at Google in 2007 when the launch(es) were happening. The commenter at the bottom of the article is correct, the existential threat Google faced wasn't from Apple, it was from US mobile carriers. Google wanted leverage over the carriers to bring Google products to feature phones more easily. They had no intention of actually releasing Android at the time, and it wasn't close to being ready for release anyway. Apple then released iPhone and beat Google to the punch, and I remember us all thinking "oh shit this is WAY better than the janky, blackberry-esque prototypes we have in development"[1]. So everyone at Google scrambled to get something out the door in response, and the compromise was the HTC G1/Dream on the cheapest carrier at the time (T-mobile). I was using a Nokia N95 at the time, and while the Dream was laughably bad, I did appreciate the bits of the Dream which compared favorably, like mobile web browsing and application development. I still feel Android is mostly a reactive product with many clumsy holdovers from v1, but I digress. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/HTC_HT722G700375_20080211.jpg/200px-HTC_HT722G700375_20080211.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/HT...

ajross 7y ago
> while the Dream was laughably bad, I did appreciate the bits of the Dream which compared favorably, like mobile web browsing and application development Aren't those The Thing though? I was in the peripheral Nokia/Symbian world at the time, had been working on smartphones for a few years, and... the G1 was amazing. Straightforward SDK vs. the insane embedded toolchains prevalent at the time (remember: there was no iOS SDK at all yet!), hardware specs similar to the iPhone... I mean, this thing was a breath of fresh air. Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends. But none of that seems to have been obvious at the time. Now, it's true that in terms of market share the G1 itself didn't do very much: it wasn't until Samsung launched all the Galaxy S variants ~2 years later running Eclair that Android took off as a platform. But I don't see much of that as an indictment of the G1.
- Shorel 7y ago
  > Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends. Not dead ends, just a bit too expensive for the cut-throat competitive market. I loved the keyboard and trackball and I still miss them in modern phones.
- thu2111 7y ago
  It was obvious at the time. G1 used a hw keyboard because Android was under incredible pressure to ship to meet the iPhone head on, but it had been originally designed for a Blackberry form factor. When the decision was made to switch to a full screen smartphone form factor there wasn't enough resourcing or time to develop a soft keyboard (which is a somewhat complex project), so they went with HW. It was just a scheduling and prioritisation issue.
wvenable 7y ago
I read that Google was far more worried about Microsoft at that time. Before the iPhone, it seemed likely that Windows Mobile was going to clean up in the mobile space eventually.
- joquarky 7y ago
  There was also the Sidekick, which at the time seemed to be in the early stages of creating an app ecosystem.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    It’s incredible how many companies in this space snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Microsoft, Sidekick, BlackBerry, Nokia...
    - cstross 7y ago
      You forgot Palm! Palm screwed up by failing to replace their ageing OS in time. IIRC they bought the remains of BeOS, built a next-gen PalmOS on top, then panicked in the face of short term cash-flow, sold the development group, tried something else -- failed -- tried to buy it back again, and had to pulled out from under them. At which point the only way out was to buy someone else's OS. They gambled on Windows Mobile (in whatever incarnation it was at the time) then hit the buffers when a frankly rubbish OS running on the Treo phones (which were nice, for thumb-keyboard devices) ran headfirst into the iPhone. (PalmOS 4+ was a moderately mac-like -- classic original MacOS, not OSX -- handheld operating system. Mac-like and crashed like a 68K Mac too, alas. But if they'd been able to build on their GUI/user interface chops with a modern OS they might have been able to get on board with the touchscreen trend.)
      - sliken 7y ago
        Similarly Psion has a pretty nice device. The psion 5 had a nice keyboard and limiting OS. It supports apps/app stores, but required windows and memberships to be a developer. I pushed them to open up a bit to get more apps, they thought it was a bad idea.
QUFB 7y ago
As a geek, the N95 was very amazing at the time: 1. Multitasking!! 2. Good maps app 3. 3G 4. SIP client 5. All the music you would ever need through Rhapsody These came years, sometimes many years, to other mobile platforms. The downside with the N95 was the lack or touchscreen and the crappy crappy Symbian UI. But in 2007, I could stream music from a subscription service while using mapping to navigate, then take a SIP call.
- auiya 7y ago
  The camera was pretty far ahead of everything else at the time also.
- johnflan 7y ago
  Gotta say my Nokia N82 was a slightly better phone.
netcan 7y ago
I think a lesson to learn from Google's experience with Android circa 2007 is... If you have the main strategy right, and execute well eventually, you can succeed despites a lot of despites. Those early androids were pretty poor value phones. But... the overall approach/concept was right. The strategy was very right. There would eventually be plenty of good OEMs. The market needed a msft. Apple was never going to supply the whole world with phones.
- coliveira 7y ago
  The true lesson is: if you have a lot of money to throw at a relevant problem, you can succeed even if your initial iteration is terrible.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Those "MSFT" were Blackberry, Nokia and Sony.
eloisant 7y ago
I remember the "reboot" bug on the HTC G1... Apparently everything you typed was executed in a terminal, so if you typed "reboot" anywhere, including in a chat window, it would reboot your device.
- monktastic1 7y ago
  Wait, how did this work? Surely not every typed word was issued as a command.
  - praptak 7y ago
    Every typed word between two CRs.
  - scintill76 7y ago
    I think it was more like every keystroke was sent to a virtual terminal as well as the GUI, so <enter>reboot<enter> would reboot.
  - donio 7y ago
    That was indeed the case. A better use for it was running "telnetd" which was how we got root access to the device initially.
- practical_lem 7y ago
  Source? I could understand (!) `reboot` (with backticks) evaluated by mistake inside a shell script; but still reboot needs high privileges.
  - ChrisClark 7y ago
    Yeah, it ran everything you typed as root. So open up a chat app, type return, reboot, return. Tada. I can't find some original sources, but there is a summary I found on Slashdot. https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/08/11/08/1720246/bug-in-android-passes-keystrokes-to-root-shell https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/08/11/08/1720246/bug-in-an...
- deleted 7y ago
dehrmann 7y ago
> laughably bad While not Dream-bad, the first iPhone was really bad, but with a better interface than every other phone. It didn't have an app store, so the interesting things were maps and a web browser, but with only 2.5G internet, they were mostly unusable.
- amluto 7y ago
  I remember showing off my Blackberry to friends with a shiny new iPhone. The Blackberry had GPS and 3G, but its web browser was admittedly much worse than the iPhone’s. Also, the Blackberry was actually useful as a phone. IIRC the iPhones could barely make phone calls until the iPhone 4.
  - blululu 7y ago
    It worked fine so long as you didn't hold it wrong...
  - acdha 7y ago
    > Also, the Blackberry was actually useful as a phone. IIRC the iPhones could barely make phone calls until the iPhone 4. I used mine from a couple months after release until the 4S came out and have no experience supporting that - it was equivalent quality to any other phone I used during that period (pre-VoLTE). The main source of problems was AT&T's network but that affected all phones since it was do to them having massively underprovisioned their network.
    - amluto 7y ago
      I found that, at least where I was, it would take 45-60 seconds to place a call or fail trying. Yes, this was AT&T, and yes they had problems, but it was also in large part Apple’s fault. I had a chance to sit down with actual network engineers from AT&T’s local network contractor, and the story I got was that the iPhone generated much more signaling traffic than it should have, so it worked much worse than it should have. Certainly my old Blackberry could place calls easily on the same network in the same location. (IIRC the iPhone issue was hypothesized to be related to an incorrect GSM power management implementation.)
donio 7y ago
As a physical keyboard fan the Dream was awesome. Sure, the trackball was wonky, the multitouch sensor was limited and the screen resolution and RAM was very low by today's standards but it was a great start. And given that it was hackable (in more than one way, remember the hilarious telnetd thing?) and had a keyboard it was 100x better than the iphone. Connectbot was the absolute killer app for me. I also fondly remember the nice tactile navigation buttons, it's been all downhill since then on that front. I always thought that the BB-like prototype looked pretty neat too, if the keyboard and button bar could have been made more compact to make more space for the screen. Now all the phones are exactly the same, there is very little experimentation or innovation except for small players like the fxtec pro (waiting for mine to ship)
- ansible 7y ago
  I really liked having the keyboard on the G1. Great keyboard on that little thing. It was only surpassed by the Samsung Sidekick 4G. That had nicely spaced keys for quick typing, and a decent sized screen for the time. I regret not getting to try out a Motorola Photon Q, which might have been a very nice experience. But it was released only for Sprint. And every expensive at the time. And now you can't get a decent physical keyboard on anything. I've gotten used to swiping and am decently fast at it after years of practice.
- sizzle 7y ago
  I recall the G1 had cut and paste functionality that iPhones lacked for many new releases to come.
  - gcb0 7y ago
    I get a feeling everyone in this thread did not buy the G1 because they liked the G1, but solely because they are google fans that buy anything google throw at them. If you people really liked the keyboard, you would be praising the two last phones from blackberry. physical keys, ctrl+a/c/v/z! it even have a gimmick that acts as a touchpad. and bloatware-less android (well, less than a pure-google anyway) only downside of those phones is nobody managed to get root yet. But that is more an android issue. And some people might actually prefer a phone with no root entry points anyway.
rhacker 7y ago
I am starting to agree with this sentiment, even for today. I feel like it takes an iphone release and a set of features for Google to even consider some taken path. I've been a long supporter of Android, by buying pretty much every released OnePlus phone and a few Nexus phones before that... (before the price exploded). For my next phone I will be going back to the more expensive iPhone. Everything built into Android feels like a compromise or an afterthought. The only really well built app is Google Maps. All of the other apps, like ones for messaging, calling, even the google assistant, everything feels buggy for some reason. Maybe it's One Plus? (I don't know?) Permissions seems to have gone through several crazy iterations, but I can't seem to mute my phone, but not my texts, or mute a specific app, but still get slack updates. I know there are some new break the glass features, but it's extremely confusing. I wish there were just simply profiles that I could just say - hey I want everything muted except slack and text messages. At other times, like the weekend, I want all apps muted except text messages. But I can't easily do this stuff, it's just really convoluted. I don't know if my mileage will vary on iphone, but I think that's just to get away from general bugginess, voice recognition issues, "map start issue", bad data drops even when my phone has a signal. Oh, one last thing on Google Maps - if anyone is listening, Can you please stop routing me to staff parking lots BEHIND the store I'm going to? Use some machine learning if you have to and find the best destination point.
- misterprime 7y ago
  >I feel like it takes an iphone release and a set of features for Google to even consider some taken path. I feel very grateful to Android for bring the slide down notification bar, easy multitasking, multi-microphone noise cancellation, customizable background image, and more to smartphones. All these features were Android first, and I don't know how many of those iOS would have if it wasn't for Android.
- hart_russell 7y ago
  I disagree with you on the profiles aspect. I miss two features from Android: 1. Extremely fine tuned profiles that are afforded by Tasker. 2. the much better digital assistant.
- Grazester 7y ago
rst 7y ago
Gundotra's comment to Bray was "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped -- by which point, by the commenter's account (and yours), Google's strategy had shifted, and they were using Android as a future product, not just a stalking horse. So, I'm not sure there's a contradiction here.
- auiya 7y ago
  Correct, after iPhone was released, it became apparently to Google that it wasn't just the carriers which were a roadblock to Google's unfettered monetization of the mobile space, but also Apple. Google leadership had these ridiculous fantasies of strong-arming US wireless carriers into ultra cheap unlimited data plans, and/or buying the 700Mhz spectrum for their own country-wide coverage with no dead zones. Hence the spectrum bid. When Apple released iPhone, it was not only a better product than the internal developing Android devices, but Apple also struck an exclusivity deal w/ AT&T which set the price point for these new devices. Google not only had their leverage yoinked out from under them, but they also started to realize becoming a wireless ISP is harder than they thought, and had no choice but to release what they could. I'm guessing at the time T-mobile needed the business inject the most of the big 4, and made Google the best partnering offer.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    I was at google at the time of the spectrum bidding (but not having anything to do with phones) and that was a different situation. Recall that there was some minimum amount of money in the spectrum bid to require that the wireless data use would follow net neutrality rules. I remember they discussed this at TGIF and google was bidding up until it went over that amount. It wasn't a secret, it was openly discussed at tgif.
- webmobdev 7y ago
  > ... "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped ... Not necessarily. Steve Jobs was really pissed with Google after they launched Android because Android copied a lot of features from ios. And they could do so because Apple had given them early access to it to develop apps like YouTube (remember, the first iPhone / ios 1 came with the YouTube app bundled by default). Steve Jobs was also mentoring the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at that time, and they had unprecedented access to both him and presumably his company. That's why he believed that Android was the "stolen" property of Apple: > According to Steven Levy's book, Jobs "concluded that he was a victim of deceit." He felt "he had been betrayed by the two young men he had been attempting to mentor. He felt the trust between the two companies had been violated […] Not only did he believe that Google had performed a bait and switch on him, replacing a non-competing phone with one that was very much in the iPhone mode, but he also felt that Google had stolen Apple's intellectual property." Source: https://gizmodo.com/what-really-made-steve-jobs-so-angry-at-google-5941817 https://gizmodo.com/what-really-made-steve-jobs-so-angry-at-... (Interestingly, it was after Android that Steve Jobs very rightly claimed that Google's "don't be evil" mantra was plain bullshit). Edit: Turns out I may have been wrong about the YouTube app part. While I do remember reading elsewhere that Apple did give Google access to early prototypes of ios and iPhone, this article claims that the YouTube app initially bundled with ios 1 to 6 was built by Apple themselves, and not Google - https://mashable.com/2017/06/30/iphone-youtube-app-story/ https://mashable.com/2017/06/30/iphone-youtube-app-story/ .
ninguem2 7y ago
I loved my G1. I didn't think it was that bad.
3xblah 7y ago
"Google wanted leverage over the carriers to bring Google products to feature phones more easily." "Google products" is not how another knowledgeable HN commenter recently put it in another thread. He said Google created Android to make Google the default search engine on phones. A commenter on the tbray.com page says the same thing. Given Google's line of business, online ad services, the cumulaitive search traffic sent to google.tld as a result of being the default search engine easily outweighs whatever value could be generated from other "products". The OS might be loaded with interesting things for users and industry commentators to "review", however nothing could be more important to the company's bottom line than search traffic to google.com. If that traffic were to die down, the company would be in crisis mode. An entire OS created just to be the default search engine. Was this the first time this was ever done.
- webkike 7y ago
  search is a google product.
musicale 7y ago
> Apple then released iPhone and beat Google to the punch, and I remember us all thinking "oh shit this is WAY better than the janky, blackberry-esque prototypes we have in development"[1]. So everyone at Google scrambled to get something out the door in response,... I still feel Android is mostly a reactive product This is amazing.
NikolaNovak 7y ago
I loved G1 for its over-engineered "let's throw everything and see what sticks" approach: touchscreen with soft keyboard; and a slider keyboard too; and hey, let's add a trackball as well! I switched to it from my Palm Treos and held on it for a long, long time ("root and replace the opening animation with a static image to free up 96k of RAM" kind of long time:-) It reminded me of my first 286 computer when I was 9 or 10, when you had to know what every file did and mess around with ridiculous extended vs expanded memory constructs, just to get new things working on it. My Samsung Note (and to lesser degree, iPhone XR), mostly "just work" and I enjoy them as such... but I can never love them as much as I did that G1:)

by auiya 7y ago

ajross 7y ago

> while the Dream was laughably bad, I did appreciate the bits of the Dream which compared favorably, like mobile web browsing and application development Aren't those The Thing though? I was in the peripheral Nokia/Symbian world at the time, had been working on smartphones for a few years, and... the G1 was amazing. Straightforward SDK vs. the insane embedded toolchains prevalent at the time (remember: there was no iOS SDK at all yet!), hardware specs similar to the iPhone... I mean, this thing was a breath of fresh air. Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends. But none of that seems to have been obvious at the time. Now, it's true that in terms of market share the G1 itself didn't do very much: it wasn't until Samsung launched all the Galaxy S variants ~2 years later running Eclair that Android took off as a platform. But I don't see much of that as an indictment of the G1.

Shorel 7y ago
> Obviously things got better, and in hindsight the hardware keyboard and trackball were silly dead ends. Not dead ends, just a bit too expensive for the cut-throat competitive market. I loved the keyboard and trackball and I still miss them in modern phones.
thu2111 7y ago
It was obvious at the time. G1 used a hw keyboard because Android was under incredible pressure to ship to meet the iPhone head on, but it had been originally designed for a Blackberry form factor. When the decision was made to switch to a full screen smartphone form factor there wasn't enough resourcing or time to develop a soft keyboard (which is a somewhat complex project), so they went with HW. It was just a scheduling and prioritisation issue.

wvenable 7y ago

I read that Google was far more worried about Microsoft at that time. Before the iPhone, it seemed likely that Windows Mobile was going to clean up in the mobile space eventually.

joquarky 7y ago
There was also the Sidekick, which at the time seemed to be in the early stages of creating an app ecosystem.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  It’s incredible how many companies in this space snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Microsoft, Sidekick, BlackBerry, Nokia...
  - cstross 7y ago
    You forgot Palm! Palm screwed up by failing to replace their ageing OS in time. IIRC they bought the remains of BeOS, built a next-gen PalmOS on top, then panicked in the face of short term cash-flow, sold the development group, tried something else -- failed -- tried to buy it back again, and had to pulled out from under them. At which point the only way out was to buy someone else's OS. They gambled on Windows Mobile (in whatever incarnation it was at the time) then hit the buffers when a frankly rubbish OS running on the Treo phones (which were nice, for thumb-keyboard devices) ran headfirst into the iPhone. (PalmOS 4+ was a moderately mac-like -- classic original MacOS, not OSX -- handheld operating system. Mac-like and crashed like a 68K Mac too, alas. But if they'd been able to build on their GUI/user interface chops with a modern OS they might have been able to get on board with the touchscreen trend.)
    - sliken 7y ago
      Similarly Psion has a pretty nice device. The psion 5 had a nice keyboard and limiting OS. It supports apps/app stores, but required windows and memberships to be a developer. I pushed them to open up a bit to get more apps, they thought it was a bad idea.

QUFB 7y ago

As a geek, the N95 was very amazing at the time: 1. Multitasking!! 2. Good maps app 3. 3G 4. SIP client 5. All the music you would ever need through Rhapsody These came years, sometimes many years, to other mobile platforms. The downside with the N95 was the lack or touchscreen and the crappy crappy Symbian UI. But in 2007, I could stream music from a subscription service while using mapping to navigate, then take a SIP call.

auiya 7y ago
The camera was pretty far ahead of everything else at the time also.
johnflan 7y ago
Gotta say my Nokia N82 was a slightly better phone.

netcan 7y ago

I think a lesson to learn from Google's experience with Android circa 2007 is... If you have the main strategy right, and execute well eventually, you can succeed despites a lot of despites. Those early androids were pretty poor value phones. But... the overall approach/concept was right. The strategy was very right. There would eventually be plenty of good OEMs. The market needed a msft. Apple was never going to supply the whole world with phones.

coliveira 7y ago
The true lesson is: if you have a lot of money to throw at a relevant problem, you can succeed even if your initial iteration is terrible.
pjmlp 7y ago
Those "MSFT" were Blackberry, Nokia and Sony.

eloisant 7y ago

I remember the "reboot" bug on the HTC G1... Apparently everything you typed was executed in a terminal, so if you typed "reboot" anywhere, including in a chat window, it would reboot your device.

monktastic1 7y ago
Wait, how did this work? Surely not every typed word was issued as a command.
- praptak 7y ago
  Every typed word between two CRs.
- scintill76 7y ago
  I think it was more like every keystroke was sent to a virtual terminal as well as the GUI, so <enter>reboot<enter> would reboot.
- donio 7y ago
  That was indeed the case. A better use for it was running "telnetd" which was how we got root access to the device initially.
practical_lem 7y ago
Source? I could understand (!) `reboot` (with backticks) evaluated by mistake inside a shell script; but still reboot needs high privileges.
- ChrisClark 7y ago
  Yeah, it ran everything you typed as root. So open up a chat app, type return, reboot, return. Tada. I can't find some original sources, but there is a summary I found on Slashdot. https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/08/11/08/1720246/bug-in-android-passes-keystrokes-to-root-shell https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/08/11/08/1720246/bug-in-an...
deleted 7y ago

dehrmann 7y ago

> laughably bad While not Dream-bad, the first iPhone was really bad, but with a better interface than every other phone. It didn't have an app store, so the interesting things were maps and a web browser, but with only 2.5G internet, they were mostly unusable.

amluto 7y ago
I remember showing off my Blackberry to friends with a shiny new iPhone. The Blackberry had GPS and 3G, but its web browser was admittedly much worse than the iPhone’s. Also, the Blackberry was actually useful as a phone. IIRC the iPhones could barely make phone calls until the iPhone 4.
- blululu 7y ago
  It worked fine so long as you didn't hold it wrong...
- acdha 7y ago
  > Also, the Blackberry was actually useful as a phone. IIRC the iPhones could barely make phone calls until the iPhone 4. I used mine from a couple months after release until the 4S came out and have no experience supporting that - it was equivalent quality to any other phone I used during that period (pre-VoLTE). The main source of problems was AT&T's network but that affected all phones since it was do to them having massively underprovisioned their network.
  - amluto 7y ago
    I found that, at least where I was, it would take 45-60 seconds to place a call or fail trying. Yes, this was AT&T, and yes they had problems, but it was also in large part Apple’s fault. I had a chance to sit down with actual network engineers from AT&T’s local network contractor, and the story I got was that the iPhone generated much more signaling traffic than it should have, so it worked much worse than it should have. Certainly my old Blackberry could place calls easily on the same network in the same location. (IIRC the iPhone issue was hypothesized to be related to an incorrect GSM power management implementation.)

donio 7y ago

As a physical keyboard fan the Dream was awesome. Sure, the trackball was wonky, the multitouch sensor was limited and the screen resolution and RAM was very low by today's standards but it was a great start. And given that it was hackable (in more than one way, remember the hilarious telnetd thing?) and had a keyboard it was 100x better than the iphone. Connectbot was the absolute killer app for me. I also fondly remember the nice tactile navigation buttons, it's been all downhill since then on that front. I always thought that the BB-like prototype looked pretty neat too, if the keyboard and button bar could have been made more compact to make more space for the screen. Now all the phones are exactly the same, there is very little experimentation or innovation except for small players like the fxtec pro (waiting for mine to ship)

ansible 7y ago
I really liked having the keyboard on the G1. Great keyboard on that little thing. It was only surpassed by the Samsung Sidekick 4G. That had nicely spaced keys for quick typing, and a decent sized screen for the time. I regret not getting to try out a Motorola Photon Q, which might have been a very nice experience. But it was released only for Sprint. And every expensive at the time. And now you can't get a decent physical keyboard on anything. I've gotten used to swiping and am decently fast at it after years of practice.
sizzle 7y ago
I recall the G1 had cut and paste functionality that iPhones lacked for many new releases to come.
- gcb0 7y ago
  I get a feeling everyone in this thread did not buy the G1 because they liked the G1, but solely because they are google fans that buy anything google throw at them. If you people really liked the keyboard, you would be praising the two last phones from blackberry. physical keys, ctrl+a/c/v/z! it even have a gimmick that acts as a touchpad. and bloatware-less android (well, less than a pure-google anyway) only downside of those phones is nobody managed to get root yet. But that is more an android issue. And some people might actually prefer a phone with no root entry points anyway.

rhacker 7y ago

I am starting to agree with this sentiment, even for today. I feel like it takes an iphone release and a set of features for Google to even consider some taken path. I've been a long supporter of Android, by buying pretty much every released OnePlus phone and a few Nexus phones before that... (before the price exploded). For my next phone I will be going back to the more expensive iPhone. Everything built into Android feels like a compromise or an afterthought. The only really well built app is Google Maps. All of the other apps, like ones for messaging, calling, even the google assistant, everything feels buggy for some reason. Maybe it's One Plus? (I don't know?) Permissions seems to have gone through several crazy iterations, but I can't seem to mute my phone, but not my texts, or mute a specific app, but still get slack updates. I know there are some new break the glass features, but it's extremely confusing. I wish there were just simply profiles that I could just say - hey I want everything muted except slack and text messages. At other times, like the weekend, I want all apps muted except text messages. But I can't easily do this stuff, it's just really convoluted. I don't know if my mileage will vary on iphone, but I think that's just to get away from general bugginess, voice recognition issues, "map start issue", bad data drops even when my phone has a signal. Oh, one last thing on Google Maps - if anyone is listening, Can you please stop routing me to staff parking lots BEHIND the store I'm going to? Use some machine learning if you have to and find the best destination point.

misterprime 7y ago
>I feel like it takes an iphone release and a set of features for Google to even consider some taken path. I feel very grateful to Android for bring the slide down notification bar, easy multitasking, multi-microphone noise cancellation, customizable background image, and more to smartphones. All these features were Android first, and I don't know how many of those iOS would have if it wasn't for Android.
hart_russell 7y ago
I disagree with you on the profiles aspect. I miss two features from Android: 1. Extremely fine tuned profiles that are afforded by Tasker. 2. the much better digital assistant.
Grazester 7y ago

rst 7y ago

Gundotra's comment to Bray was "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped -- by which point, by the commenter's account (and yours), Google's strategy had shifted, and they were using Android as a future product, not just a stalking horse. So, I'm not sure there's a contradiction here.

auiya 7y ago
Correct, after iPhone was released, it became apparently to Google that it wasn't just the carriers which were a roadblock to Google's unfettered monetization of the mobile space, but also Apple. Google leadership had these ridiculous fantasies of strong-arming US wireless carriers into ultra cheap unlimited data plans, and/or buying the 700Mhz spectrum for their own country-wide coverage with no dead zones. Hence the spectrum bid. When Apple released iPhone, it was not only a better product than the internal developing Android devices, but Apple also struck an exclusivity deal w/ AT&T which set the price point for these new devices. Google not only had their leverage yoinked out from under them, but they also started to realize becoming a wireless ISP is harder than they thought, and had no choice but to release what they could. I'm guessing at the time T-mobile needed the business inject the most of the big 4, and made Google the best partnering offer.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  I was at google at the time of the spectrum bidding (but not having anything to do with phones) and that was a different situation. Recall that there was some minimum amount of money in the spectrum bid to require that the wireless data use would follow net neutrality rules. I remember they discussed this at TGIF and google was bidding up until it went over that amount. It wasn't a secret, it was openly discussed at tgif.
webmobdev 7y ago
> ... "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped ... Not necessarily. Steve Jobs was really pissed with Google after they launched Android because Android copied a lot of features from ios. And they could do so because Apple had given them early access to it to develop apps like YouTube (remember, the first iPhone / ios 1 came with the YouTube app bundled by default). Steve Jobs was also mentoring the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at that time, and they had unprecedented access to both him and presumably his company. That's why he believed that Android was the "stolen" property of Apple: > According to Steven Levy's book, Jobs "concluded that he was a victim of deceit." He felt "he had been betrayed by the two young men he had been attempting to mentor. He felt the trust between the two companies had been violated […] Not only did he believe that Google had performed a bait and switch on him, replacing a non-competing phone with one that was very much in the iPhone mode, but he also felt that Google had stolen Apple's intellectual property." Source: https://gizmodo.com/what-really-made-steve-jobs-so-angry-at-google-5941817 https://gizmodo.com/what-really-made-steve-jobs-so-angry-at-... (Interestingly, it was after Android that Steve Jobs very rightly claimed that Google's "don't be evil" mantra was plain bullshit). Edit: Turns out I may have been wrong about the YouTube app part. While I do remember reading elsewhere that Apple did give Google access to early prototypes of ios and iPhone, this article claims that the YouTube app initially bundled with ios 1 to 6 was built by Apple themselves, and not Google - https://mashable.com/2017/06/30/iphone-youtube-app-story/ https://mashable.com/2017/06/30/iphone-youtube-app-story/ .

ninguem2 7y ago

I loved my G1. I didn't think it was that bad.

3xblah 7y ago

"Google wanted leverage over the carriers to bring Google products to feature phones more easily." "Google products" is not how another knowledgeable HN commenter recently put it in another thread. He said Google created Android to make Google the default search engine on phones. A commenter on the tbray.com page says the same thing. Given Google's line of business, online ad services, the cumulaitive search traffic sent to google.tld as a result of being the default search engine easily outweighs whatever value could be generated from other "products". The OS might be loaded with interesting things for users and industry commentators to "review", however nothing could be more important to the company's bottom line than search traffic to google.com. If that traffic were to die down, the company would be in crisis mode. An entire OS created just to be the default search engine. Was this the first time this was ever done.

webkike 7y ago
search is a google product.

musicale 7y ago

> Apple then released iPhone and beat Google to the punch, and I remember us all thinking "oh shit this is WAY better than the janky, blackberry-esque prototypes we have in development"[1]. So everyone at Google scrambled to get something out the door in response,... I still feel Android is mostly a reactive product This is amazing.

NikolaNovak 7y ago

I loved G1 for its over-engineered "let's throw everything and see what sticks" approach: touchscreen with soft keyboard; and a slider keyboard too; and hey, let's add a trackball as well! I switched to it from my Palm Treos and held on it for a long, long time ("root and replace the opening animation with a static image to free up 96k of RAM" kind of long time:-) It reminded me of my first 286 computer when I was 9 or 10, when you had to know what every file did and mess around with ridiculous extended vs expanded memory constructs, just to get new things working on it. My Samsung Note (and to lesser degree, iPhone XR), mostly "just work" and I enjoy them as such... but I can never love them as much as I did that G1:)