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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Android's success was that its foundations was something the community knew. Java was either #1 or #2 of most popular language and their was a vast mind share that could be utilized.

A new language for a new mobile platform would have been disastrous. Could you imagine someone saying her is our phone everyone learn it and make great apps for launch in 6 months?

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You mean, like Objective-C was disastrous for the iPhone?

Apple had the luxury of being the first to sell smartphones, they could do it in whatever language they wanted. Android could never have tried to do the same thing.

Apple were not the first smartphones. Without even nitpicking on Palm, etc, you're forgetting Blackberry.

I wouldn't call the blackberries smartphones. They were feature phones where one of the features was a proprietary email system.

There were touch-screen smartphones with no keyboards before the iPhone...

http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/O2-Unveils-Xda-Orbit-Smar...

Blackberry had a real OS, push email and third party apps. Everything the first iPhone had when it comes to "smart"

Nokia's smartphone line was already several generations old when Apple introduced the first iPhone... The Symbian OS had a 67% market share in smartphones in 2006. The first version of the Communicator with 3rd party software ecosystem, the 9210, was released in 2001!

Erm, Nokia?

Objective-C 1983 creation date :)

Came with Steve Jobs from NeXT and was used in OS X way before 2007 iPhone debut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

Umm, Objective-C wasn't a new language for the iPhone.

Yes I can absolutely imagine that. I believe such a decision would have been welcomed enthusiastically. Early adopters of a new hardware/OS platform are extremely easy to win over with an exciting new language. Others would have followed in good time.

Don't you see all those "why we switched from language A to language B" stories that seem to come up every other day? No need to read them. The content is not important. All they ever mean to say is "we were so bored with that old language and now we're thrilled to try something new!"

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