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> ... "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped ... Not necessarily

> ... "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/ .

kelnos 7y ago
Whenever I hear stuff about Jobs being pissed about stuff being "stolen" from Apple, it's just so disappointing. Jobs was a master at stealing ideas from others. Not saying he didn't have any original ideas (he certainly did!), but they weren't all his. And I think all this "it was my idea and you copied it!" is just kinda dumb anyway. I mean, imagine you're an Android UI/UX designer from before the iPhone came out. You're doing your thing, and it's looking a bit like WinCE and a bit like BB, and who knows what else. Then you get wind of the iPhone, and you see how completely different the UX is, and it hits you: "wow, this is amazing and so much better than what we're doing". So what are you going to do? Sit back? "Well, shucks, I didn't come up with this idea, it's all Apple's... I guess they win and Android will ship as-is." No, of course not, that's insane. You step back, throw out the ideas of yours that weren't good, and adopt the new ideas that are better. And frankly I still think there's a lot to the main launcher / home screen paradigm that Android has better. I love that I have an alphabetized app drawer listing all my apps, and then I get to make various home screens with just the subset of apps there that I want. I never understood why all apps on the iPhone live on one of the main screens and have to be organized, manually; it just felt like more work than I wanted to do. Android might be heavily heavily influenced by the iPhone, but it's not like they just copied it screen for screen, interaction for interaction, and called it a day.
- sliken 7y ago
  Android and IPhone both stole from various less popular phones/tablets that had better screens, icon based launchers, and app stores. Motorola had a few (not popular in the USA) and Nokia has the n770 (800 x 480). I went to OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) in summer and 2006 and begged the substantial number of Nokia folks to add a WAN chip to their Nokia 770. The n770 had a better screen than the first iphone (800x480), actually ran apps (the first iphone was web only), and had an app store. In particular Maemo mapper was crazy better than anything apple offered for many years.
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    The 770 and N800/N810 were amazing, and obviously the N900 was a real powerhouse at the time, but they just didn't have the marketing panache of Apple for widespread adoption. I remember following the development of the N950 and being thoroughly disappointed when Nokia killed it off and went all in on Windows Phone instead of sticking with Linux-based systems.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    We did the same on our internal employee demo shows, but that was seen as an attack to Symbian based devices, so...
- elangoc 7y ago
  Exactly. Wasn't Jobs proud to say, "Good artists copy, great artists steal"? Jobs made amazing things happen, but he also had a Reality Distortion Field with the best of them.
- vvanders 7y ago
  The number of people I've recomended Dealers of Lightning to and have come to this same conclusion is close to 100%. Damn Shane about Xerox, they really we're sitting on a gold mine.
- soup10 7y ago
  Android copied iOS design screen for screen, gesture for gesture, form factor, hardware and app design. It was not a 'well shucks' type move, it was 'copy everything and undercut them to get mobile market share at all costs'. They knew the lawsuits were inevitable. Samsung lost a 500M judgment and Google bought Motorola for 12.5 Billion to use their patent portfolio as leverage against Apple.

kelnos 7y ago

Whenever I hear stuff about Jobs being pissed about stuff being "stolen" from Apple, it's just so disappointing. Jobs was a master at stealing ideas from others. Not saying he didn't have any original ideas (he certainly did!), but they weren't all his. And I think all this "it was my idea and you copied it!" is just kinda dumb anyway. I mean, imagine you're an Android UI/UX designer from before the iPhone came out. You're doing your thing, and it's looking a bit like WinCE and a bit like BB, and who knows what else. Then you get wind of the iPhone, and you see how completely different the UX is, and it hits you: "wow, this is amazing and so much better than what we're doing". So what are you going to do? Sit back? "Well, shucks, I didn't come up with this idea, it's all Apple's... I guess they win and Android will ship as-is." No, of course not, that's insane. You step back, throw out the ideas of yours that weren't good, and adopt the new ideas that are better. And frankly I still think there's a lot to the main launcher / home screen paradigm that Android has better. I love that I have an alphabetized app drawer listing all my apps, and then I get to make various home screens with just the subset of apps there that I want. I never understood why all apps on the iPhone live on one of the main screens and have to be organized, manually; it just felt like more work than I wanted to do. Android might be heavily heavily influenced by the iPhone, but it's not like they just copied it screen for screen, interaction for interaction, and called it a day.

sliken 7y ago
Android and IPhone both stole from various less popular phones/tablets that had better screens, icon based launchers, and app stores. Motorola had a few (not popular in the USA) and Nokia has the n770 (800 x 480). I went to OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) in summer and 2006 and begged the substantial number of Nokia folks to add a WAN chip to their Nokia 770. The n770 had a better screen than the first iphone (800x480), actually ran apps (the first iphone was web only), and had an app store. In particular Maemo mapper was crazy better than anything apple offered for many years.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  The 770 and N800/N810 were amazing, and obviously the N900 was a real powerhouse at the time, but they just didn't have the marketing panache of Apple for widespread adoption. I remember following the development of the N950 and being thoroughly disappointed when Nokia killed it off and went all in on Windows Phone instead of sticking with Linux-based systems.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  We did the same on our internal employee demo shows, but that was seen as an attack to Symbian based devices, so...
elangoc 7y ago
Exactly. Wasn't Jobs proud to say, "Good artists copy, great artists steal"? Jobs made amazing things happen, but he also had a Reality Distortion Field with the best of them.
vvanders 7y ago
The number of people I've recomended Dealers of Lightning to and have come to this same conclusion is close to 100%. Damn Shane about Xerox, they really we're sitting on a gold mine.
soup10 7y ago
Android copied iOS design screen for screen, gesture for gesture, form factor, hardware and app design. It was not a 'well shucks' type move, it was 'copy everything and undercut them to get mobile market share at all costs'. They knew the lawsuits were inevitable. Samsung lost a 500M judgment and Google bought Motorola for 12.5 Billion to use their patent portfolio as leverage against Apple.