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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

The timeline doesn't seem correct. According to https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim, the author joined Google in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His... says "Android Inc. was founded ... 2003" and "In July 2005 ... Google acquired Android Inc". The iPhone launched in 2007.

Google knew about it earlier since they were partnering for Maps & YouTube, but it's incorrect to state that Google was doing Android in response to the iPhone.

The Android acquisition was initially a response to the horribly fragmented and underpowered mobile phone ecosystem that Google was trying to get its software onto. Android & the Open Handset Alliance unified it and gave Google an easier way to develop for billions of devices. Android had to be redesigned after the iPhone launched to switch to the new stylus-free & button-free paradigm, but it initially wasn't a response to the iPhone.

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> it's incorrect to state that Google was doing Android in response to the iPhone.

Yeah sure, but pre-iPhone Android phones looked and worked very differently from modern Android phones. Google knew it needed to get into mobile phones; it's just that at that time it thought its competitor was Microsoft with its Windows CE phones, or BlackBerry. Google had a major pivot in Android development in 2007. Take a look at what Android phones looked like before the iPhone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HTC_HT722G700375_20080211... This was the "Sooner" phone built in 2006–7.

Vic was not at Google in 2005, when the Android acquisition happened, and he might have thrown in some hindsight to retrofit the reality of 2007-2010 onto the original decision. Fifteen years ago, Google knew too well about the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop, even after the antitrust lawsuit, and didn't want to be at their mercy. Back then, that was a much more tangible and plausible threat than Apple, to the point that they referred to MS using codenames. It's funny how, despite Ballmer promising to kill Google, a few years later Jobs ended up escalating a thermonuclear patent and PR war that was just as incendiary.

And MS, in its turn, was almost certainly not in both smartphones and consoles simply because it had too much money and was looking for something to do. MS' top management was famously familiar with The Innovator's Dilemma, and smartphones and the console were (along with the Web browser) very clearly Windows' vulnerable flanks. It was only devastating incompetence on Sony's part which prevented the PlayStation series from ever becoming a significant (non-gaming) app and Web-browser platform (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221 ).

>it's incorrect to state that Google was doing Android in response to the iPhone.

If you read the Wikipedia article you posted, it mentions that Android was originally supposed to run on digital cameras. Then it was intended as a competitor to Windows Mobile and Symbian.

Later, the history reads:

"An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007's Apple iPhone meant that Android 'had to go back to the drawing board'."

In 2007 they focus of Android changed drastically.

This was before iPhone: "2007’s pre-M3 version of Android; the Google Sooner" [1]

After they saw the iPhone keynote though:

--- start quote ---

Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

“What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

...

On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas...

Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.

“Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”

...

Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives.

--- end quote ---

[1] https://9to5google.com/2012/05/05/2007s-pre-m3-version-of-an...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...

Its entirely possible the reasons for working on Android changed throughout its timeline.

Sure, but the question is "why did Google do Android?", and so this doesn't at all answer that question. In 2007 when Google started to see Apple as an existential threat, Google was already doing Android, so changing its motivation isn't a big step. But in 2003-2005, why did Google start doing Android in the first place? And why is the provided reason always Apple, when that doesn't make any chronological sense?

Furthermore the first Google Android phone was NOT designed at all to compete with an iPhone. It was more of a Blackberry competitor. Large keyboard. No touchscreen. For Android 2.0 they had to rejigger a lot of the OS and tooling to focus on all-screen touch devices.

It’s well documented that what Android “Was” was very different prior to the iPhone and that they had seen the iPhone and then threw most of Android as it was away to start over.

It was actually pretty easy for Android software to change to support full-screen touch UI. Just add a software keyboard and inertial scrolling and enlarge the button sizes. You can verify this by reading the AOSP sources to see how little code was added/changed.

Android was lucky to have an internal software architecture that was easy to reskin to support iPhone style UI. All the alternatives had more work to do.

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