As I understand it the android team had to complete redesign the user facing aspect of the platform after the iPhone was announced
Android source code is publicly available, with time stamps. You can read it and see how little had to change to make it a touch first ux.
Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards.
> Android had to add multi-touch events, make the default controls bigger, and add inertial scrolling to the list views. They didn’t even have to add a soft keyboard, because the first few gens of phones had physical keyboards.
Whether or not it was a lot of code, multi-touch was a revolutionary new UI paradigm and a beautiful symbiosis between well tuned hardware and software. I don’t think its importance should be trivialized and the iPhone was undoubtedly the catalyst that brought Fingerworks’s invention to the masses.
LG prada phone demo from 15 years ago: https://youtu.be/5mo7Ab6ZcJ4
There were lots and lots of other small details that Apple got it right. And I said it the first time I saw the iPhone, what sets them apart was Apple was trying to make an iPhone like an Appliance. While all other Smartphones was trying to cramp a computer inside a Phone factor. The day I saw iPhone I knew that was it. The Smartphone I have been looking for. Strange it is 15 years already.
I still dont know why the Visual Voicemail patents had not expired. It really should be the standard on all network.
Yes, really.
>[Google] had been working with prototypes for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year . . . until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.
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.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
Chris is talking about the Sooner: https://www.androidcentral.com/look-back-google-sooner-first.... It was called Sooner because it was going to come to market "sooner" than the other, more advanced, Dream prototype. After the iPhone announcement Sooner was canceled, in favor of the "Dream" prototype, which eventually shipped in a modified form as the G1.
The _software_ difference between non-touch Sooner and the touch-capable G1 were relatively minor. Same OS, same view system, same application framework.
As I recall, Chris's role at the time was as a UX focused engineer, so perhaps from his POV it was a massive redesign. But if you consider Android as a whole, relatively little changed. I recall the apps being pretty easy to port over to support touch. (Moving to a bigger screen helped offset the problem of having to make the buttons way larger.)