17 ms·

How Google bought Android

262 points by samizdis 5y ago

samizdis 5y ago
> This time, there were more people in the room, and Google was ready to talk specifics. Andy and his team had assumed they were coming to give an update on the company’s progress since the last meeting. But in the middle of the presentation, Nick remembered, “They just said, ‘Let us interrupt you there. We just want to buy you.’” > Google turned what Andy’s team thought was a meeting of Android pitching to Google into a meeting in which Google was pitching to them instead.
zozbot234 5y ago
It's interesting that pre-acquisition Android seems like it was very much tailored to high-end feature phones. There was no touch screen support, and even "apps" themselves seemed to be a bit of an afterthought, although of course better planned than the 'J2ME profiles' mentioned in OP. The closest thing to it today would probably be KaiOS, even pure Linux on phones is aiming quite a bit higher. (Albeit with sxmo https://sxmo.org/ https://sxmo.org/ https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sxmo https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sxmo being a bit more minimalistic, even that is way above most feature phones.)
- jaywalk 5y ago
  iPhone changed everything.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    LG Prada changed everything. iPhone was a lame ripoff of that device.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      You think iPhone ripped off a device that was announced less than a month earlier? Really?
      - lostlogin 5y ago
        If you entertain the idea, what has that thing got that the iPhone could be accused of copying?
        jaywalk 5y ago
        I don't think either company copied the other.
  - pier25 5y ago
    Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone. I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.
    - macintux 5y ago
      > Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone. I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree that it would have changed the world. Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it interesting even in its fairly primitive form. Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no one knew how to use.
      - pier25 5y ago
        > Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in different world.
        macintux 5y ago
        You left out the rest of that... > or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and so I don't believe it would have had the technological impact the iPhone did.
        pier25 5y ago
        That's a good point. Maybe you're right, who knows.
        5y ago
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    Not really. It was going to happen with or without Apple. The first touchscreen smartphone was in 1992. Microsoft had touchscreen Windows devices from the late 90's through the 00's. Symbian and BlackBerry were things. And the LG Prada which was released before iPhone. iPhone just did what Apple's good at, taking existing technology and packaging it nicely, but it would have happened with or without them.
    - crmrc114 5y ago
      The reason I left my Treo for the OG iPhone was the data plan. No one could touch that unlimited data at the time. To me that is what sold the iPhone. I don't know that it ever would have taken off if it had been constrained per KB as was popular at the time. Also the data plan was a bit of a requirement considering the first iPhone was all webapps. I was so pissed when I found out it lacked copy and paste.
    - downWidOutaFite 5y ago
      iPhone's capacitive touchscreen was new and revolutionary. Microsoft had some success in the early 2000s with Windows Mobile but they inexplicably stopped investing into it after 2005. Without Apple it might have taken many more years before the mobile revolution kicked off in earnest.
      - Mikeb85 5y ago
        LG released a capacitive touchscreen phone before Apple by a month. The technology was out there and was always going to get used by someone.
        setpatchaddress 5y ago
        Here's a modern review of the original LG Prada, from the noted iPhone lovers at Android Authority. You be the judge. https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/ https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/ >The LG Prada was the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but there are reasons why you don't remember it.
  - realusername 5y ago
    I'd say the iPhone 2G changed everything, the first one did not really make a revolution on the mobile landscape.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      I could not disagree more. No handset manufacturer ever dared to make the demands that Apple did, including full control of the software with no ability to customize or even pre-install apps. It was completely unheard of, but that's what they got Cingular to agree to with the first iPhone. And they maintain that control to this day.
      - lostlogin 5y ago
        You disagree but then state that Apple did something no one else had ever done?
        jaywalk 5y ago
        What? I disagreed with the statement that there was no revolution until the iPhone 3G, because what I stated was done with the original iPhone.
        lostlogin 5y ago
        Apologies, I misunderstood your point.
      - kllrnohj 5y ago
        And nobody has done that since. Can it really be an industry revolution if it's still a solo act over a decade later?
        jaywalk 5y ago
        Google has, with Pixel. And even though the other Android OEMs allow for carrier apps to be preinstalled, it's nothing at all like it used to be. Verizon at one point was requiring feature phones to run a custom Verizon OS. Carriers would arbitrarily disable features on phones. The carriers had complete control over everything up until Apple came along. Even Android enjoys the fruits of Apple's initial demands.
  - swiley 5y ago
    The iPhone changed nothing and has, infact, been holding mobile computing captive in the 2007 era. Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes without all the crap that Apple and Google insist is necessary on a phone.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Mobile computing was way more limited prior to iPhone and Android. Mobile phones are embedded devices, and the embedded ecosystem has always been messy irrespective of raw computing power. Even today, this is clearly the main obstacle to running "desktop" Linux on phones. (Though one shouldn't underestimate the UX challenges involved in building a viable phone OS, these are largely solved by now thanks to Plasma Mobile and Phosh. What remains is 99% hardware bugs and lacking support.)
      - swiley 5y ago
        I run a desktop UI on my phone. The only place it really doesn't work is when I'm driving and that's illegal anyway. The main obstacle is SoC drivers that are kept closed.
        saagarjha 5y ago
        Which desktop UI do you run that is usable on a phone?
        swiley 5y ago
        FVWM2
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        While Symbian C++ might have been a pain to use, the phones could run J2ME, Apache (yep that web server), Python, Flash and Web Widgets (PWAs before it was even an idea!).
        5y ago
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    I'd be curious to read this book and learn more about the pivot once iPhone launched. I was at one of those TI partner companies during this time and we were contracted to assist with middleware for Android Sooner. I even got to test with one. Then everything got put on hold.
- wmf 5y ago
  high-end feature phones This kind of classification only makes sense in retrospect. Blackberries and Danger Hiptops were pretty much the best phones you could get in 2005. Sure, keyboardless phones existed but they weren't necessarily better.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    As ex-Symbian user/dev I beg to differ, specially the communicator models.
  - rootsudo 5y ago
    HTC 6700 and palm too. There were better phones.
- bane 5y ago
  It's really useful to look at the context of the market at the time. High-end phones ran a mobile variant of Windows, or were Blackberries. Screen sizes were getting larger and having data coming to your phone at all was still considered a bit exotic but was starting to happen. Touch, if there was any, was usually on a non-capacitive screen and was generally pretty terrible. The integration of sensors, data, GPS, etc. was starting to happen, but wasn't ubiquitous. The market was also incredibly fragmented both on the hardware and software side. The hard divide between feature phones and smart phones hadn't yet been delineated in a general sense (the Windows phones were just kind of clunky and weird, and Blackberry basically had it's own market segment and represented "smart phones" in the press). Phones just kept getting higher and higher end, and adding more and more features. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/ The most anticipated phone for 2007 was Nokia's N95, the press called it a "multimedia device". It came with GPS, quad-band, 5MP camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, an accelerometer, a Web Browser, a big screen, apps. It looks vaguely like an older iPod, but has a pop out numeric keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 At the time it was considered one of the best phones ever released and sold 10 million. At the time it was sometimes called smartphone, but I think today we'd call it an advanced feature phone. Android thus came out in this market, and the phones it originally targeted looked more like the N95 than the iPhone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they rethought the form-factor and simplified it, getting rid of most buttons and making touch not suck. But functionality-wise the iPhone was about on par with the N95, and so was Android. However, the first iPhone didn't support user apps, had limited connectivity and sold only 6.1 million devices. When Android started supporting phones with iPhone-like form factors, it wasn't a given that it would become the predominant form factor for phones. The first few generations of Android phones still features lots of vestigial keyboards and buttons and rollers and sliders and such carried over from the N95 and blackberry style phones that Android devices were also looking like. Once the iPhone style form factor started leaving everybody else in the dust, Android phones (and the OS) simply dropped that stuff also.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    > and the OS At least as of Android 8, the OS still supports hardware keyboards (and likely the rest); my current phone has one and can scroll by swiping on the keyboard.
kyaghmour 5y ago
Yet another example of how what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process. Also, not sure if it's covered elsewhere in the book, but it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.
- samizdis 5y ago
  > ... what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process Exactly. > ... it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google. That's sort of hinted at in the article: When Android met with Google, Larry Page observed that it would make sense for Google to acquire the small company, to help them build a platform that would enable Google to enter the mobile market. Perhaps we all need to buy the book to find out ...
- jcun4128 5y ago
  Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so far ahead... excerpt: > This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.
  - 5y ago
tdeck 5y ago
I got to play with that original Android demo; it's floating around Google and I even wrote an internal Google doc tour of what I found before I left. For those that work at Alphabet you may find it interesting to search that out. The demo itself is basically a bunch of JavaScript.
- throwawaycuriou 5y ago
  I'm seeing more of this in HN where folks hint at something that's available only if you're an employee at one of the tech giants. I feel like it used to be gauche and isn't now. (No jab at you specifically tdeck, just a trend I'm not fond of.)
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    It's overwhelmingly a Google thing in my experience, because they're used to everyone else being part of their own insular club (and ignoring the rest of the plebeians incapable of getting a job there). It's still gauche, you're not going crazy.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      The original commenter is not working at Google or part of that "club"; the comment states that they left that job.
      - EvilEy3 5y ago
        They're still part of it because they were there.
        rejectedandsad 5y ago
        Xoogler is a term. How many other companies have a term like that? They even have a website internally for people who leave and they call them “alums”. Nobody thinks I’m impressive or worthy of respect because of where I work, but people like OP continue to promote an elitist view of the world.
kumarm 5y ago
Slightly off topic. Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community and now in Android community. Thanks Romain Guy and Chet Haase for everything you guys do.
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  > Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community How so? Anywhere I can read about their contributions during Java time? Thanks.
  - kumarm 5y ago
    Their Rich UI clients with Java Swing was common presentation during Java One's. They wrote a book later: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applications/dp/0132413930 https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applic...
harshaw 5y ago
This was a very interesting time in the development of mobile technology and as was mentioned you clearly could see the writing on the wall but the challenge was how to get to a useful mobile platform from all the crap that predated Android / Iphone. When I was at Orange I hacked on all sort of devices: Symbian / UIQ, N60, Windows mobile, etc. They all sucked in one way or the other - mostly due to crappy tooling and crappy devices. Or completely broken understanding of software ecosystems which doomed Symbian and others. We all knew that there was going to be an explosion of cool things and a better platform was critical. There were some other companies doing interesting things - one was a startup called Savaje that had a complete java based phone environment up and running. However, they weren't a silicon valley company and didn't have Andy's connections (or reputation) from Danger.
- miohtama 5y ago
  I worked with Series 60 teams. For Nokia Series 60, an external developer was not a stakeholder, but a thread clamped down with NDAs and horrible permission system. Apple App Store changed this mentality and was what truly changed the mobile industry.
ineedasername 5y ago
The Danger Hiptop. Wow, I'd pretty much forgotten about that but it was probably the first phone I owned that I would consider a smartphone. Unfortunately I got it primarily for (very) basic web browsing and the area I was in at the time was fairly spotty on data coverage. Eventually I upgraded to a Treo 650 on Sprint which was a little better, but it really wasn't until the iPhone 3g that I was happy with a smartphone's mobile browsing capabilities. (But that was the last time I purchased an iPhone: I lost $hundreds when it got bricked and Apple said the moisture sensor was triggered so they wouldn't replace it. It never came close to getting wet, and I later got a minor settlement through a class action because the sensors were faulty, meaning anyone in the unfortunate coincidence of a broken phone still under warranty & a faulty triggered sensor got screwed.)
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I always wonder if Android was a success for google from a pure business perspective. Did it really help them make more money?
- sharkjacobs 5y ago
  That's pretty difficult to measure, but I think it's pretty difficult to argue that it hasn't made them money. That is to say, it's hard to even wrap my head around how Google has been able to leverage Android to influence the development of mobile as a platform, or the information they've been able to collect from 3 billion Android devices. So it's hard for me to guess how much money Android helped Google to earn. But it takes ten seconds of back of the envelope math to determine that Android makes money for Google. Google pays $8-12 billion per year to be the default iOS search engine in 2019[2]. I think it's safe to say that Android is worth at least that much to Google.
  - lern_too_spel 5y ago
    It's not quite that simple. How much do they pay to the carriers to be the default search engine on their Android phones? The risk remains that Apple creates its own search engine and cuts Google off from even being allowed to be the default, which was the risk that Google originally tried to fight with Android vs. Microsoft, but that hasn't materialized yet.
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  Without android they would have much less data on a lot of people; the location data gathered via android allows them to target localized adds, as they know where you are and where you are going to. A phone with android is like a vacuum cleaner of personal data - it gets your location, you photos, your messages, you name it;
  - purpmint008 5y ago
    I love this hyperbole. Please continue. I have never once seen an ad on my phone or on my desktop -- all thanks to ad blockers. They don't use photos for ad-targeting. Your messages are typically E2EE. I do actually have location history and sharing (with spouse) turned ON. But, yet again, I have not seen an ad for anything on my phone. I have turned off personalized ads too. I don't know how people are using As far as sharing my location with Google or Apple is concerned -- I don't mind because either way my cellular provider also knows where I am. More importantly, thanks to the rights and liberties in our country, I do not feel the need to hide my location from law enforcement. And now, the iOS devices I have are going to have the capability to scan my photos via neural hashing and cross-reference that with whatever TPTB see fit. Etc.
smallstepforman 5y ago
It's amazing how many ex BeOS developers (original BeInc employees) worked on Danger Hiptop, Android and iOS. It essence, the BeOS core team built the modern mobile ecosystem today. Yet BeInc went bankrupt and BeOS is no more (well, there is Haiku running with the torch).
- xuki 5y ago
  You should watch General Magic https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/
rob_c 5y ago
Impressive that it's one of the few purchases that didn't go to Google to die. I wonder if they ever compete the acquisition to other products that are no longer with us...
- lucb1e 5y ago
  It's also a purchase that, according to the article, hammered out a deal that included not being killed after acquisition but being allowed to execute the plans and bring the product to market.
softwaredoug 5y ago
> But handset manufacturers were not experts in software platform development and didn’t have the skill set or interest in providing the increasing capabilities required to differentiate their software from that of their competitors. This was my experience as a software dev starting out at trad. hardware companies in early 2000s. Software actually drove much of the potential upside, but traditional management was slow to realize this, having perhaps made their millions making hardware. They just didn’t get software, we’re fairly software illiterate. Software became an afterthought to a hardware centric dev process, but actually was what could make or break a product.
greatgib 5y ago
So sad that the open source spirit of the thing got lost on the way... Now, it is a tightly locked os with some limited bit open. Just enough to pretend to be open source but not enough to let anyone build a real functional phone from it or being able to rebuild the os of one own phone.

262 points by samizdis 5y ago

> This time, there were more people in the room, and Google was ready to talk specifics. Andy and his team had assumed they were coming to give an update on the company’s progress since the last meeting. But in the middle of the presentation, Nick remembered, “They just said, ‘Let us interrupt you there. We just want to buy you.’” > Google turned what Andy’s team thought was a meeting of Android pitching to Google into a meeting in which Google was pitching to them instead.

zozbot234 5y ago

It's interesting that pre-acquisition Android seems like it was very much tailored to high-end feature phones. There was no touch screen support, and even "apps" themselves seemed to be a bit of an afterthought, although of course better planned than the 'J2ME profiles' mentioned in OP. The closest thing to it today would probably be KaiOS, even pure Linux on phones is aiming quite a bit higher. (Albeit with sxmo https://sxmo.org/ https://sxmo.org/ https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sxmo https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sxmo being a bit more minimalistic, even that is way above most feature phones.)

jaywalk 5y ago
iPhone changed everything.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  LG Prada changed everything. iPhone was a lame ripoff of that device.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    You think iPhone ripped off a device that was announced less than a month earlier? Really?
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      If you entertain the idea, what has that thing got that the iPhone could be accused of copying?
      - jaywalk 5y ago
        I don't think either company copied the other.
- pier25 5y ago
  Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone. I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and UI/UX.
  - macintux 5y ago
    > Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much inevitable. The same components were available to everyone. I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree that it would have changed the world. Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it interesting even in its fairly primitive form. Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no one knew how to use.
    - pier25 5y ago
      > Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to be so influential Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in different world.
      - macintux 5y ago
        You left out the rest of that... > or would have hedged their bets with a dozen alternatives Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and so I don't believe it would have had the technological impact the iPhone did.
        pier25 5y ago
        That's a good point. Maybe you're right, who knows.
      - 5y ago
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Not really. It was going to happen with or without Apple. The first touchscreen smartphone was in 1992. Microsoft had touchscreen Windows devices from the late 90's through the 00's. Symbian and BlackBerry were things. And the LG Prada which was released before iPhone. iPhone just did what Apple's good at, taking existing technology and packaging it nicely, but it would have happened with or without them.
  - crmrc114 5y ago
    The reason I left my Treo for the OG iPhone was the data plan. No one could touch that unlimited data at the time. To me that is what sold the iPhone. I don't know that it ever would have taken off if it had been constrained per KB as was popular at the time. Also the data plan was a bit of a requirement considering the first iPhone was all webapps. I was so pissed when I found out it lacked copy and paste.
  - downWidOutaFite 5y ago
    iPhone's capacitive touchscreen was new and revolutionary. Microsoft had some success in the early 2000s with Windows Mobile but they inexplicably stopped investing into it after 2005. Without Apple it might have taken many more years before the mobile revolution kicked off in earnest.
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      LG released a capacitive touchscreen phone before Apple by a month. The technology was out there and was always going to get used by someone.
      - setpatchaddress 5y ago
        Here's a modern review of the original LG Prada, from the noted iPhone lovers at Android Authority. You be the judge. https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/ https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/ >The LG Prada was the first mobile phone with a capacitive touchscreen, but there are reasons why you don't remember it.
- realusername 5y ago
  I'd say the iPhone 2G changed everything, the first one did not really make a revolution on the mobile landscape.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    I could not disagree more. No handset manufacturer ever dared to make the demands that Apple did, including full control of the software with no ability to customize or even pre-install apps. It was completely unheard of, but that's what they got Cingular to agree to with the first iPhone. And they maintain that control to this day.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      You disagree but then state that Apple did something no one else had ever done?
      - jaywalk 5y ago
        What? I disagreed with the statement that there was no revolution until the iPhone 3G, because what I stated was done with the original iPhone.
        lostlogin 5y ago
        Apologies, I misunderstood your point.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      And nobody has done that since. Can it really be an industry revolution if it's still a solo act over a decade later?
      - jaywalk 5y ago
        Google has, with Pixel. And even though the other Android OEMs allow for carrier apps to be preinstalled, it's nothing at all like it used to be. Verizon at one point was requiring feature phones to run a custom Verizon OS. Carriers would arbitrarily disable features on phones. The carriers had complete control over everything up until Apple came along. Even Android enjoys the fruits of Apple's initial demands.
- swiley 5y ago
  The iPhone changed nothing and has, infact, been holding mobile computing captive in the 2007 era. Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes without all the crap that Apple and Google insist is necessary on a phone.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Mobile computing was way more limited prior to iPhone and Android. Mobile phones are embedded devices, and the embedded ecosystem has always been messy irrespective of raw computing power. Even today, this is clearly the main obstacle to running "desktop" Linux on phones. (Though one shouldn't underestimate the UX challenges involved in building a viable phone OS, these are largely solved by now thanks to Plasma Mobile and Phosh. What remains is 99% hardware bugs and lacking support.)
    - swiley 5y ago
      I run a desktop UI on my phone. The only place it really doesn't work is when I'm driving and that's illegal anyway. The main obstacle is SoC drivers that are kept closed.
      - saagarjha 5y ago
        Which desktop UI do you run that is usable on a phone?
        swiley 5y ago
        FVWM2
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      While Symbian C++ might have been a pain to use, the phones could run J2ME, Apache (yep that web server), Python, Flash and Web Widgets (PWAs before it was even an idea!).
      - 5y ago
- joezydeco 5y ago
  I'd be curious to read this book and learn more about the pivot once iPhone launched. I was at one of those TI partner companies during this time and we were contracted to assist with middleware for Android Sooner. I even got to test with one. Then everything got put on hold.
wmf 5y ago
high-end feature phones This kind of classification only makes sense in retrospect. Blackberries and Danger Hiptops were pretty much the best phones you could get in 2005. Sure, keyboardless phones existed but they weren't necessarily better.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  As ex-Symbian user/dev I beg to differ, specially the communicator models.
- rootsudo 5y ago
  HTC 6700 and palm too. There were better phones.
bane 5y ago
It's really useful to look at the context of the market at the time. High-end phones ran a mobile variant of Windows, or were Blackberries. Screen sizes were getting larger and having data coming to your phone at all was still considered a bit exotic but was starting to happen. Touch, if there was any, was usually on a non-capacitive screen and was generally pretty terrible. The integration of sensors, data, GPS, etc. was starting to happen, but wasn't ubiquitous. The market was also incredibly fragmented both on the hardware and software side. The hard divide between feature phones and smart phones hadn't yet been delineated in a general sense (the Windows phones were just kind of clunky and weird, and Blackberry basically had it's own market segment and represented "smart phones" in the press). Phones just kept getting higher and higher end, and adding more and more features. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/ The most anticipated phone for 2007 was Nokia's N95, the press called it a "multimedia device". It came with GPS, quad-band, 5MP camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, an accelerometer, a Web Browser, a big screen, apps. It looks vaguely like an older iPod, but has a pop out numeric keyboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 At the time it was considered one of the best phones ever released and sold 10 million. At the time it was sometimes called smartphone, but I think today we'd call it an advanced feature phone. Android thus came out in this market, and the phones it originally targeted looked more like the N95 than the iPhone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they rethought the form-factor and simplified it, getting rid of most buttons and making touch not suck. But functionality-wise the iPhone was about on par with the N95, and so was Android. However, the first iPhone didn't support user apps, had limited connectivity and sold only 6.1 million devices. When Android started supporting phones with iPhone-like form factors, it wasn't a given that it would become the predominant form factor for phones. The first few generations of Android phones still features lots of vestigial keyboards and buttons and rollers and sliders and such carried over from the N95 and blackberry style phones that Android devices were also looking like. Once the iPhone style form factor started leaving everybody else in the dust, Android phones (and the OS) simply dropped that stuff also.
- Izkata 5y ago
  > and the OS At least as of Android 8, the OS still supports hardware keyboards (and likely the rest); my current phone has one and can scroll by swiping on the keyboard.

kyaghmour 5y ago

Yet another example of how what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process. Also, not sure if it's covered elsewhere in the book, but it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.

samizdis 5y ago
> ... what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process Exactly. > ... it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google. That's sort of hinted at in the article: When Android met with Google, Larry Page observed that it would make sense for Google to acquire the small company, to help them build a platform that would enable Google to enter the mobile market. Perhaps we all need to buy the book to find out ...
jcun4128 5y ago
Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so far ahead... excerpt: > This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.
- 5y ago

tdeck 5y ago

I got to play with that original Android demo; it's floating around Google and I even wrote an internal Google doc tour of what I found before I left. For those that work at Alphabet you may find it interesting to search that out. The demo itself is basically a bunch of JavaScript.

throwawaycuriou 5y ago
I'm seeing more of this in HN where folks hint at something that's available only if you're an employee at one of the tech giants. I feel like it used to be gauche and isn't now. (No jab at you specifically tdeck, just a trend I'm not fond of.)
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  It's overwhelmingly a Google thing in my experience, because they're used to everyone else being part of their own insular club (and ignoring the rest of the plebeians incapable of getting a job there). It's still gauche, you're not going crazy.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The original commenter is not working at Google or part of that "club"; the comment states that they left that job.
    - EvilEy3 5y ago
      They're still part of it because they were there.
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        Xoogler is a term. How many other companies have a term like that? They even have a website internally for people who leave and they call them “alums”. Nobody thinks I’m impressive or worthy of respect because of where I work, but people like OP continue to promote an elitist view of the world.

kumarm 5y ago

Slightly off topic. Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community and now in Android community. Thanks Romain Guy and Chet Haase for everything you guys do.

EvilEy3 5y ago
> Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community How so? Anywhere I can read about their contributions during Java time? Thanks.
- kumarm 5y ago
  Their Rich UI clients with Java Swing was common presentation during Java One's. They wrote a book later: https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applications/dp/0132413930 https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applic...

harshaw 5y ago

This was a very interesting time in the development of mobile technology and as was mentioned you clearly could see the writing on the wall but the challenge was how to get to a useful mobile platform from all the crap that predated Android / Iphone. When I was at Orange I hacked on all sort of devices: Symbian / UIQ, N60, Windows mobile, etc. They all sucked in one way or the other - mostly due to crappy tooling and crappy devices. Or completely broken understanding of software ecosystems which doomed Symbian and others. We all knew that there was going to be an explosion of cool things and a better platform was critical. There were some other companies doing interesting things - one was a startup called Savaje that had a complete java based phone environment up and running. However, they weren't a silicon valley company and didn't have Andy's connections (or reputation) from Danger.

miohtama 5y ago
I worked with Series 60 teams. For Nokia Series 60, an external developer was not a stakeholder, but a thread clamped down with NDAs and horrible permission system. Apple App Store changed this mentality and was what truly changed the mobile industry.

ineedasername 5y ago

The Danger Hiptop. Wow, I'd pretty much forgotten about that but it was probably the first phone I owned that I would consider a smartphone. Unfortunately I got it primarily for (very) basic web browsing and the area I was in at the time was fairly spotty on data coverage. Eventually I upgraded to a Treo 650 on Sprint which was a little better, but it really wasn't until the iPhone 3g that I was happy with a smartphone's mobile browsing capabilities. (But that was the last time I purchased an iPhone: I lost $hundreds when it got bricked and Apple said the moisture sensor was triggered so they wouldn't replace it. It never came close to getting wet, and I later got a minor settlement through a class action because the sensors were faulty, meaning anyone in the unfortunate coincidence of a broken phone still under warranty & a faulty triggered sensor got screwed.)

spaetzleesser 5y ago

I always wonder if Android was a success for google from a pure business perspective. Did it really help them make more money?

sharkjacobs 5y ago
That's pretty difficult to measure, but I think it's pretty difficult to argue that it hasn't made them money. That is to say, it's hard to even wrap my head around how Google has been able to leverage Android to influence the development of mobile as a platform, or the information they've been able to collect from 3 billion Android devices. So it's hard for me to guess how much money Android helped Google to earn. But it takes ten seconds of back of the envelope math to determine that Android makes money for Google. Google pays $8-12 billion per year to be the default iOS search engine in 2019[2]. I think it's safe to say that Android is worth at least that much to Google.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  It's not quite that simple. How much do they pay to the carriers to be the default search engine on their Android phones? The risk remains that Apple creates its own search engine and cuts Google off from even being allowed to be the default, which was the risk that Google originally tried to fight with Android vs. Microsoft, but that hasn't materialized yet.
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
Without android they would have much less data on a lot of people; the location data gathered via android allows them to target localized adds, as they know where you are and where you are going to. A phone with android is like a vacuum cleaner of personal data - it gets your location, you photos, your messages, you name it;
- purpmint008 5y ago
  I love this hyperbole. Please continue. I have never once seen an ad on my phone or on my desktop -- all thanks to ad blockers. They don't use photos for ad-targeting. Your messages are typically E2EE. I do actually have location history and sharing (with spouse) turned ON. But, yet again, I have not seen an ad for anything on my phone. I have turned off personalized ads too. I don't know how people are using As far as sharing my location with Google or Apple is concerned -- I don't mind because either way my cellular provider also knows where I am. More importantly, thanks to the rights and liberties in our country, I do not feel the need to hide my location from law enforcement. And now, the iOS devices I have are going to have the capability to scan my photos via neural hashing and cross-reference that with whatever TPTB see fit. Etc.

smallstepforman 5y ago

It's amazing how many ex BeOS developers (original BeInc employees) worked on Danger Hiptop, Android and iOS. It essence, the BeOS core team built the modern mobile ecosystem today. Yet BeInc went bankrupt and BeOS is no more (well, there is Haiku running with the torch).

xuki 5y ago
You should watch General Magic https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/

rob_c 5y ago

Impressive that it's one of the few purchases that didn't go to Google to die. I wonder if they ever compete the acquisition to other products that are no longer with us...

lucb1e 5y ago
It's also a purchase that, according to the article, hammered out a deal that included not being killed after acquisition but being allowed to execute the plans and bring the product to market.

softwaredoug 5y ago

> But handset manufacturers were not experts in software platform development and didn’t have the skill set or interest in providing the increasing capabilities required to differentiate their software from that of their competitors. This was my experience as a software dev starting out at trad. hardware companies in early 2000s. Software actually drove much of the potential upside, but traditional management was slow to realize this, having perhaps made their millions making hardware. They just didn’t get software, we’re fairly software illiterate. Software became an afterthought to a hardware centric dev process, but actually was what could make or break a product.

greatgib 5y ago

So sad that the open source spirit of the thing got lost on the way... Now, it is a tightly locked os with some limited bit open. Just enough to pretend to be open source but not enough to let anyone build a real functional phone from it or being able to rebuild the os of one own phone.