Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get this article's logic. The original iPhone was unveiled in January 2007, 11 months before the timeframe of November 2007.

The grid of icons thing had been in mobile phones for years and years before Android or the iPhone. What Android borrowed was the capacitive multitouch-style interface of the iPhone.

I played extensively with the Android SDK public releases before it incorporated touch. So did perhaps hundreds or thousands of others. It clearly wasn't going the direction the iPhone was, at the time.

He talks about facts this and facts that. But the fact is, he's wrong. Android borrowed from the iPhone's new paradigms. Has it been that long ago that we've already forgotten history?

Note that none of his facts come from personal experience. They come from dug up videos.

And again, what's the big deal? Everyone's all of a sudden screaming theft. Iterative improvements are good. They promote evolution and competition (eg. one upping each other's designs).

I agree with everything you said but the one thing you didn't mention is he makes the mistake of dating the prototype to the Techcrunch post. When in fact the prototype was obviously from an earlier version (hence the SDK looking like an iPhone).

As he said in the article Android had been in development for years before Google bought the company.

What is noteworthy about the "Blackberry" phone is the entire paradigm is different. The navigation is different. The desktop-esque icons on the home screen are different (the blackberry prototype had a dock type system where as Android has the icons on the desktop). The resolution is different (notice Android phones with keyboards have smaller screens but a similar resolution ratio where as the blackberry protype had a wide, short screen)

Notice how the touchscreen in the video works like the keyboard prototype and nothing like modern day android. Look at the 3 minute mark. See he's navigating through a dock. See how the commands are through menus and not icons like modern day android. Notice no pinch and zoom (he uses a button on the side). Notice no swipe (he's using a button on the right hand side). It's as if they took a keyboard prototype and rushed out a touch version (and then added all Apple's look, feel and gestures later)

Compare the phone shown in the video to the G1 (http://www.letsgodigital.org/images/artikelen/681/tmobile-g-...) which had gestures, 4 icons per screen, swipe to get between screens and so on.

While the launcher changed quite a between the initial SDK release when that video was taken and what shipped on the G1, the version of Android shown did support a drag-scroll gesture for scrolling through the dock and app drawer. It did not support kinetic scrolling at the time though. You can still download the version of the SDK that was released back in November 2007 (when the video in question was released) and play with that early version in the emulator.

The G1 has never supported pinch-to-zoom or multi-touch in general except for in 3rd party ROMs and at least as of Gingerbread menus are still quite prevalent in Android (though D-pads and trackballs have fallen out of favor). The G1 also lacked an on-screen keyboard at its initial release (though this was added in an official update, Android 1.5 IIRC).

I don't think anyone would argue that Android hasn't been influenced by iOS, but it doesn't seem clear that they were solely focused on a non-touchscreen Blackberry clone and then did a complete 180 upon the release of the iPhone. It's certainly possible that they did so before they publicly announced Android, but we don't have any direct evidence of that.

The article seems to have a bias against iOS in general, which I believe might have led to the author's fact checking problems.

Some notable examples are referring to the OS behind appletv, ipod touch/iphone & ipad as inflexible.

A short memory with regard to iOS borrowing from PalmOS, while ignoring Newton.

Then being critical of unsubstantiated news, while himself representing unsubstantiated rumours as fact, but only when it favours Android.

If you read Thom long enough you'll find he has no love for either Microsoft or Apple. I do find his articles on Amiga and GNU/Linux to be well thought out and researched. But if he has an agenda he pushes it.

It's like getting an Apple review from Paul Thurrot, he starts off hating it so you base everything from that.

I've been reading Thom's posts for long enough to infer that Apple is his least favorite company bar none, and that he would much rather side with Microsoft than with Apple.

This anti-Apple bias is common in people who write tech reviews because (a) their audience is often international and Apple has been historically been popular internationally than in the U.S. (today, with China and Japan, things are a bit different), and (b) the reviewers are interested in creating as much confusion as possible about a large variety of tech products in order to ensure page hits, and Apple is actively working towards eliminating consumer confusion. Who wants to read boring, often poor-quality tech reviews when things just work?

I don't think you've been reading my posts long enough, then. Every review I've ever written on an Apple product has been positive. Each and every one of them.

On top of that, OSNews barely does any reviews - only a few every year. In other words, your post seems to be of a trollish nature :).

> What Android borrowed was the capacitive multitouch-style interface of the iPhone

How could Android have "borrowed" multitouch for its basic design when Android OS didn't even support multitouch until nearly 3 years after the launch of the iPhone, not until Android 2.1? If anything, Google showed remarkable forbearance in holding off on such a desirable feature for so long, as it turns out, merely at Apple's say so.

Ultimately I believe apple is responsible for this feature not being included, but the rumour of it being Apple's request is probably not the full picture (or even accurate). Apple is known to approach companies that are likely to infringe on what Apple believes to be their IP, a recent example that came to light was a meeting between Steve Jobs and Samsung executives.

It's clear Google will not (and never were) going to heed any directions given by Apple. Apple probably did approach google about it, but I suspect it's likely that Google held back on the feature due to potential legal ramifications of including the feature. (Remembering here that Google originally entered the market as a phone provider.)

> It's clear Google will not (and never were) going to heed any directions given by Apple

Actually the history is more complicated. Google held off on including multitouch but when Apple banned Google Voice from the App Store things soured. I think it was at that point Google said "Ok, if you're banning our stuff then the deal's off" and put multitouch in Android. So it's not clear how long Google might have held back multitouch if Apple had played nice (I'm sure the answer isn't "forever", but they might have gone much longer).

I'd say they're not too closely related, as the two were already bitter with each other before that point. Google Voice was rejected from the iOS app store: July 2009 Multi-touch on android SDK commenced around: November 2009, sure they could have been developing it earlier, however in the following January google launched the nexus one with multitouch, which would have needed more than the short development time from July 09.

I.E. they're both as guilty as each other.

> sure they could have been developing it earlier,

Actually there is evidence they had developed it much earlier. Some people examining the source tree found it was basically present in the G1 but commented out. They were even able to enable it with some crazy hacks - more info:

http://openhandsetmagazine.com/2009/01/the-story-of-multitou...

> the following January google launched the nexus one with multitouch

No I'm pretty sure the Nexus launched without multitouch; it was enabled in a release (2.1 update 1, a couple of months after launch). Again, an indication that even as late as January 2010 Google was still holding back - whether it was out of fear or through some hope of reconciliation - no idea. But I suspect the latter. Android was still small enough at that point that getting barred from the iPhone wholesale would have been horrible.

I think we're more or less agreeing here. I guess my only point is that to talk about any one incident in the chain in isolation is highly misleading.

What I don't get is the idea of theft.. Of course it cannot be code theft. They are different implementation of an idea. It could be that the idea originated in the iPhone, but if the customers ask for a virtual keyboard, for example, are they supposed to restrain from implementing that feature because it was "not invented here"? Quoting from George Bernard Shaw: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

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