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I was wrong. The 3GS was the first model with GPS, which came about five months after the G1. The G1's touchscreen was very comparable to the Apple devices I wa

I was wrong. The 3GS was the first model with GPS, which came about five months after the G1. The G1's touchscreen was very comparable to the Apple devices I was building software for at the time - I think the multitouch capability was there, and really the only use was pinch to zoom... which I seem to recall working on the G1 after an OS update. Regardless, the web browser part was rather the opposite - the G1 with it's weird trackball could be used to browse desktop sites and at the time, most websites were not responsive. Also, there were places where android used long-press... which Apple added later. Regardless, I was fascinated at the time how Apple was able to outmarket everyone with iPhone... and equally fascinated with how quickly the army of Android vendors materialized. Fun times.

acdha 4y ago
A lot of us were also there at the time. It was considerably more than marketing, and a lot of companies said they had iPhone killers which promptly failed in the market. It took a solid half decade for the competition to really firm up because there were a lot of little details which required time to get right. It was definitely eye-opening to see people’s usage habits shift so quickly. I know multiple large organizations who completely reapproached how they developed internal applications because the executives no longer accepted IT’s unwillingness to support mobile access. I’d previously thought that would never happen. Amusingly, the one which had a damaging public breach did not have it due to allowing phones access as some had predicted but when one of IT’s managed laptops was stolen out of someone’s car and, unlike an iPhone, it didn’t have storage encryption enabled.