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Comment by soup10 | Hacker News Reader

Android copied iOS design screen for screen, gesture for gesture, form factor, hardware and app design. It was not a 'well shucks' type move, it was 'copy everything and undercut them to get mobile market share at all costs'. They knew the lawsuits were inevitable. Samsung lost a 500M judgment and Google bought Motorola for 12.5 Billion to use their patent portfolio as leverage against Apple.

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No it didn't. If it was copying iOS screen for screen then surely it'd have started with the home screen, which was entirely different. The Android home screen was much more desktop-like with draggable icons, home folders, wallpapers etc, long before iOS did these things.

The Android top bar was also totally different. The Android bar was a full UI widget you could drag down to reveal a sophisticated notifications system. iOS barely had a notifications system at all when it launched.

There were really quite a lot of differences. That's why Apple was reduced to arguing nonsense like "we own rounded rectangles" and "grids of icons are iOS IP".

This wasn't 'nonsense'... Google spent 12 billion on Motorola's mobile patent portfolio and Samsung lost half a billion in legal judgements. If they spent half that money innovating and improving mobile design instead of copying everything to the point of confusion from the popular market leader.. we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Apple sure had a lot of innovations, like rectangles with rounded corners. Skipping that ridiculous argument, of course apple had real innovation too, more than form factor. Reality is that other vendors and device makers were innovative. Apple could have had even more of the market if they had been just a little bit less controlling, in my opinion.

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