Comment by rezonant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rezonant | Hacker News Reader

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> Android was initially designed so that operators could customise it. The idea was apps were developed (and sold) only by operators, and everything else would be via the browser.

I'm not sure where you got this information. The Android Marketplace arrived with version 1.0 of Android on the T-Mobile G1. Side loading has been available since the very beginning.

What you describe more closely resembles what iPhone did, except that it was never a given that Apple's carrier partners were going to be able to ship their own user facing software on the device.

Operators and OEMs can absolutely customize Android and it was more allowed in the beginning than now. As a way to reduce fragmentation and gain more control over the platform, Google started attaching more and more stipulations to allowing it's suite of software (including Marketplace, now known as Google Play) to be included on handsets.

Was there ever a case of a mobile operator launching their own software store on Android? Certainly OEMs did it, with the Samsung app store being the most prominent. Genuinely curious here, as others do note that (see the Japanese handsets post) OEMs have and even still do a bunch of customization and pre installed apps.

> I'm not sure where you got this information.

I was working in mobile games at the time and ended up working with Google on the Play Store launch, among other things.

But what I mentioned was not some big secret. Everyone knew Android was supposed to be the response to google having to keep stashes of j2me devices in drawers, which is ironically what everyone ended up needing to do with Android devices.

People have memory holed just what a shock the iphone caused, not just technically but strategically, and how it altered who has the power over distribution. The whole industry (google included) did not see this coming because of the power of the carriers.

Windows Mobile phones had apps distributed by wherever, you could go get them on a CD from Bestbuy if you wanted.

> I was working in mobile games at the time and ended up working with Google on the Play Store launch, among other things.

Well, mobile games are distributed via ads, not the "stores."

I don't know. This distribution, network effects story. It's sort of, whatever. People were using chat apps then, and people are using chat apps now. The iOS App Store and Google Play are such shit shows, they are glorified installation wizards for 99.9% of people. Whether you have to install-wizard via sideloading or via a deep link or whatever, it's not super material nor revolutionary. I think this comes from conflating Steam with the App Store, ultimately Steam is a real, bonafide store, and the mobile app stores are more like technical restrictions that someone is using to take a 30% cut of revenues. Which is what everyone is saying anyway.

> Windows Mobile phones had apps distributed by wherever, you could go get them on a CD from Bestbuy if you wanted.

This was also the case for Palm smartphones. Since they were an amalgam of a Palm PDA and a cell phone, they kept the app model of Palm PDAs. IIRC, you could even transfer apps from one Palm PDA to another through their infrared port, or through Bluetooth if both were fancy ones.

I think a lot of people forget that the iPhone was not the first smart phone. I was downloading apps, checking email, and sending IMs over the AIM network with Verichat on my Treo 650 well before the iPhone was a thing.

The two huge innovations of the iPhone were decent web browsing (I had a Treo, it sucked for the web) and the multitouch screen with corresponding gestures. Nobody else was doing anything like this yet, and I remember this being the thing that blew everyone away at the keynote.

Multi-touch was such an enabler, because it meant you could do an on-screen keyboard properly, which meant you could replace the physical keyboard with more screen.

I remember everyone scoffing at the "lol you can't type on it" dramatically missing this point.

Also the keyboard wasn't.stuck with QWERTY! You could swap keyboards. You could have big numbers when typing phone numbers, and letters when texting. You could type Californian street names correctly! Write math! Etc.

Yeah. By our own metrics, the first iPhone wasn’t even a smartphone because it couldn’t load apps.

Even back then, people were exactly clear on those two things being the true revolution of the iPhone.

+1. I've done the same with SymbianOS.

> Everyone knew Android was supposed to be the response to google having to keep stashes of j2me devices in drawers, which is ironically what everyone ended up needing to do with Android devices.

It was still a better situation. An Android app might need tweaks but at least you're dealing with the same SDK/API (maybe with proprietary extensions?)

Those J2ME phones felt like you needed to start from basically scratch for each phone model.

I remembered it the way you told it.

>Was there ever a case of a mobile operator launching their own software store on Android?

I believe Verizon launched their own app store at one point. It was called V Cast.

A quick search led me here: https://www.pcworld.com/article/498393/verizons_android_app_...

Previous versions Android were nothing like T-Mobile’s G1. It was more like if Nokia made a BlackBerry device.

Just something else I was thinking about with Android. I love the Android OS but Google’s implementation is far and away the best version and while you could technically run Android with just the bare necessities and without google apps, it may as well be unusable. So, google has “technically” made it available without their services but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to get it working how you want it.

Yes, before it was launched it was a different OS. The iPhone forced a pivot.

Nonetheless, the very first phone that shipped with Android on it was the T-Mobile G1 (also branded as the HTC Dream).

> Just something else I was thinking about with Android. I love the Android OS but Google’s implementation is far and away the best version and while you could technically run Android with just the bare necessities and without google apps, it may as well be unusable. So, google has “technically” made it available without their services but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to get it working how you want it.

Yes, it's unfortunate that AOSP is a shell that is missing so much-- it's more an OS framework than a complete OS at this point.

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