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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Any of them? In 2008, they all had more market share than Android and were all in active development.

Android won because they followed the Windows Mobile model of letting OEMs run the OS with their own hardware and UI flavor. The first successful Android device was the Motorola Droid which had a Blackberry/HTC-like hardware keyboard. Later devices like the Moto Atrix offered a desktop environment inside Android when hooked up to a monitor. This idea was later extended by Samsung with Dex Mode.

That is what OEMs wanted. They didn't want to be an interchangeable manufacturer competing on price, which is what happened to Windows PC makers.

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> Any of them? In 2008, they all had more market share than Android and were all in active development.

The marketshare argument does not hold any water as, for some reason, you are considering feature phones alongside smartphones. The two are fundamentally different devices.

To be frank, the main reason why Symbian and other legacy OS failed to compete with Android in this new market is accumulated tech debt and just overall technical and design decisions made over the years to cater to feature phones.

It wouldn't be impossible to overcome that handicap, but why spend more money and even more importantly time, to try to fix something when you (a) have the option of a more modern platform in Android (b) you already are starting from behind and need to catch up to Apple.

Google were generous to give the terms that they did. But even if they didn't, it wouldn't have affected the outcome. Perhaps 1-2 OEMs would've tried to go to market with a retrofitted Symbian and fail within a year or two.

> you are considering feature phones alongside smartphones. The two are fundamentally different devices.

Did Blackberry or Windows Mobile make a feature phone I'm not aware of? The world's best selling smartphone in 2007 was the Nokia N95. Any one of these would have trounced Android in terms of market share until Samsung put out the Galaxy SII in 2011.

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