Look at it this way. If Android wouldn't have existed, Samsung would've gone with Bada, LG with their own Bada-inspired clone with no binary compatibility with

Look at it this way. If Android wouldn't have existed, Samsung would've gone with Bada, LG with their own Bada-inspired clone with no binary compatibility with Samsung's OS, Sony would've made their own, too, HTC, and Motorola the same. Would that be a better situation? Even if Microsoft got ahead and released Windows Phone early (which they didn't), you would've still had "hardware fragmentation" for developers. You would need to work with different resolutions, just like today, and with hardware from 600 Mhz ARM11 to quad-core 2.3 Ghz CPU's (same for GPU's). And of course WP would need to be on the same amount of hardware Android is today, not just on the 5 models it is today due to the poor adoption. And it would need to support more than just Qualcomm's chips, and same goes for other components. The point is, the situation wouldn't be much better. So Android did solve what could've been a big problem, and it's almost as good as it gets for this kind of situation (it can be better, but that requires not just technical solutions, but commitment from other OEM's too, to actually do what Google is asking them in order to further standardize the platform, but unfortunately many still want to go in their own directions). The truth is this things are "no worse" than they were with other platforms before, it's just that Apple made it "better" for developers, but only because they got lucky (sort of speak) to get hundreds of millions of people to buy just one device that developers need to target - and get away with releasing it only once a year. That's pretty unheard of, and it's the exception that proves the rule, I'd say. If you want everything to be "just like iOS", you'd probably have to get all of the world's inhabitants to use the same device - the iPhone. But that's kind of ridiculous, isn't it?