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But could Samsung have made Android this big?

• higherpurpose 13y ago
  Going by what they achieved with Bada, I'd say no. To me it became obvious rather quickly after the iPhone started taking off that the only way to beat it as a platform was to create another platform that's supported by multiple OEMs, and not just one, because no single OEM could've become more popular than Apple using their own OS.
  • fidotron 13y ago
    Nokia or Sony could have done it, if they weren't being run by idiots. The hardware was very close, but Symbian had been off in a land developing stuff for their own amusement with no connection to end users for too long. Some of the software written behind closed doors on Sony hardware in around 2006 looked a lot like a modern games console UI. The problem was the US was largely an incompatible market (brew) so you had to pay for this stuff just with Europe, so it remained a niche. The modern mobile industry view of history is hilariously US centric, when until 2007 it was one of the moat backwards markets around.
  • ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    Symbian was a shared platform. Maemo was too. As was Windows Mobile. It's not clear if Android was offered to Samsung as a base for a shared platform (it's often mentioned that this is the fundamental reason for Android existing, but people seem to assume Samsung wanted their own OS, and the Android folk may have been desperate enough for cash to go that way) but if so it wouldn't have been a particularly crazy idea. And even Samsung's Bada shared elements of Linux and HTML5 platforms, so it's not a total silo.