The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android | Hacker News Reader

The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android

theatlantic.com

85 pointsbluekitten82 comments

This sort of cements the idea that Android really is a copy of iOS in most ways. Of course they've made some of their own innovations, and there are a few things that work better than on iOS.

I think Steve Jobs was probably justified in his furious reaction to Android.

disclosure: Android user, I dislike many aspects of iOS, namely the restrictive policies of the app store, and the totally broken app sharing UX.

I think it's more a "no one can get away with the old shitty UIs anymore". Touch screens and iOS were a better way of doing smart phones, and not adapting was suicide for the companies that chose not to.

>I think Steve Jobs was probably justified in his furious reaction to Android.

iOS was more of a copy of palm (which in turn was a copy of Newton..) than android was a copy of iOS.

The biggest innovation was realizing capactive screens made things much nicer, and made browsing possible. But it is hard to fault Google for copying their browser when Apple themselves based it on LGPLed KHTML; the license dictates that they share.

"Copy of Palm?"

I was an continuous palm user from 1998-2006, I owned four different treos, (and a handspring).

Trust me when I say there was almost no relationship (let alone "copy") between the Palm and iPhone. Except, maybe, they could both make phone calls.

I watched the Apple keynote, swearing that under no circumstance would I ever purchase an apple toy - 2 minutes after I touched the iPhone/Google Maps (even with it's crappy GPRS/EDGE network) I was heading to go line up at the Apple Store.

I think there's a difference between acknowledging that Steve Jobs was justified in being angry and holding that Google shouldn't have been allowed to do what they did. I think the most certain thing is that both iOS and Android are better off because the other exists. The competition has allowed for a lot of mutual copying, just as we'd seen in the PC market before it, and in just about every other technological development since the stone age.

Steve Jobs is justified in being angry because he feels ownership of his ideas. Is anger is held impotent because we recognize that a healthy degree of copying is good for innovation. Both of those are OK.

Jobs' anger wasn't at all related to WebKit.

> iOS was more of a copy of palm

Bullshit. I used tons of Palm devices and iOS has basically nothing in common with PalmOS.

The only thing in common between the initial iPhone and a Palm device is that they have a large touch screen.

Palm's application launcher was very similar to the iOS Springboard.

"very similar" -> "nearly identical", especially on the first iPhone version before there were multiple pages of apps. At least it was on mine.

The difference was the quality of the apps and hardware. The screen was gorgeous, it had horsepower for web-surfing and youtube, it had multitouch and used it reasonably well, and it cost about the same as a decent Palm since it came with a service agreement.

>realizing capactive screens made things much nicer

In what way? Inaccuracy and the inability to use a stylus or wear gloves?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66RBfrBgL2E

edit: surprised at the downvotes. Is there a capacitive screen even remotely comparable to the accuracy and pressure response of a 4 year old resistant N900? I'm open to examples.

Inaccuracy and the inability to use a stylus or wear gloves?

Those are edge cases though. On the whole capacitive screens are better, but they do have downsides.

What's better about them? Resistant screens are more accurate and pressure sensitive. Capacitive screens are...

...more fluid-feeling. I realise that's not an exact science by any means, but it's what you'll generally hear if you give an iPhone and a <resistive touchscreen phone here> to Doe on the street. These are being sold to your average user. Being able to manipulate what's on screen smoothly without any physical/cognitive effort or a stylus is what makes capacitive screens "better".

>...more fluid-feeling.

I don't know what this means, and have yet to experience it. The only difference I've noticed between a capacitive iPhone and a resistive N900 is that my touches frequently don't register at all on the iPhone.

If only someone could come up with a way to use a stylus on a capacitive screen... Oh wait...

Nah, nowhere near the same.

Look, I love capacitive screens. But nothing beat a stylus for accuracy when you've got a 2.4" QVGA touchscreen, and for certain tasks that was a lot better than a 3.5" capacitive one. That was when I used my M600i (then my P1i) for managing my entire life.

Now, with the advent of 7" tablets I use that instead, for that sort of high info density work :)

Capacitive stylii are terrible. All the downsides of needed to have something in your hand to poke at a screen with none of the accuracy that a stylus with a resistive one had.

You can make a stylus for a capacitive screen by making a capacitive stylus. My wonder is why one would make using a stylus a more difficult and expensive proposition in order to have a lower quality screen input.

How many use cases are there for needing a so precise stylus? Apart from drawing, I can't really think of anything that hasn't benefited from capacitive screens + fingers...

If you need a stylus to read mails, use the web or normal stuff, you'll probably need a better UI, not a stylus

Fingers work just as well on a resistive screen as on a capacitive screen.

I bought the Nokia 770, N810 and N900 on release day. Capacitive screens made everything much nicer by being usable.

What's unusable about your N900 screen?

Having used resistive screens on phones in the past, they feel much more clunky. Having to physically press down on the screen rather than just brush your fingers over what you want makes you feel less like you're interacting with technology and more like you're interacting with apps.

Per your other posts, you said you were having difficulty with touches registering on the iPhone; if that's the case, I can't imagine any circumstance in which the iPhone would seem better to you, but that's not the typical circumstance (though I do have a friend who has MS and the screen doesn't recognize her either).

Still, for those people who have the typical experience with capacitive touchscreens, the difference is like night and day.

I think what made Jobs understandably furious was that the CEO of Google was on Apple's board. Not that he wouldn't have been litigious otherwise, but I think that moved it into vendetta territory.

However, notice that if this article is true, then it also implies that Google was caught completely flat-footed by the iPhone, CEO on the board of Apple or no.

That theory never made sense since Schmidt joined the board only 3 months before the official Apple unveiling in January: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric...

Yeah, I find that part interesting. Given Apple's secrecy would the board even have specific details for a new product?

If you have the chance, it really is worth going back and watching the original iPhone release video. It's pretty amazing to see some of the things that were so new and exciting a few years ago now so much a part of the phone landscape that we can't even imagine a phone without them. It's almost more amazing to see how basic it seems compared to what we have now, just 6 years later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ

Keep in mind that most of those things that were "new and exciting" weren't new; it was just that most people hadn't seen them before, or not done well before.

For example, nobody used capacitive touch screens because they were horribly imprecise. The iPhone included some tricks to make them less precise, but mostly they just embraced the imprecision: all tap targets on the iPhone are thumb size.

Another thing that bothered me was Steve's description of the screen as the highest resolution screen available on a phone, when there were several gadgets available with much higher resolution screens, such as the Nokia N770.

My experience with the N770 definitely made me dismissive of the iPhone. The n770 made me well aware of the value of having a web browser in your pocket. But it had an 800 pixel screen at a time when that was the minimum width that many web sites designed for, along with a highly accurate stylus that you could use to accurately click on tiny links. There was no way the web was going to be usable on a 480 pixel screen without an accurate stylus. Which meant that every web site had to be rewritten to be iPhone friendly.

Who was going to buy an iPhone when virtually all websites were unusable? (remember at that time there were no apps). And who would rewrite their website to support an iPhone that nobody was buying? Classic chicken and egg problem.

Steve told us the answer: an incredibly polished product and incredible salesmanship.

"Who was going to buy an iPhone when virtually all websites were unusable? (remember at that time there were no apps). And who would rewrite their website to support an iPhone that nobody was buying? "

Which of course was why MobileSafari and it's "pinch-to-zoom" functionality was revolutionary - it solved the chicken-and-egg problem by not requiring a site to be rewritten (although as experience has since demonstrated, you can certainly improve the user experience by optimising for mobile devices).

"nobody used capacitive touch screens because they were horribly imprecise. The iPhone included some tricks to make them less precise, but mostly they just embraced the imprecision: all tap targets on the iPhone are thumb size."

This is definitely not true today and I don't believe it was true when the iPhone was introduced either. I remember how remarkable it was that I could hit targets on unzoomed web pages accurately.

The iphone may have had a lower resolution screen, but the performance and responsiveness of the OS and browser were the real innovations. The power of Safari as well as the way you could zoom made it a game changer for surfing the web on your phone.

Blackberries from that era were very responsive. The web browser sucked, of course.

I was surprised by the fact that it was an "internet phone". They didn't even talk about apps really. Just a few "widgets", like Google Maps.

The native, installed apps were just a by-product.

There's a great story by one of the engineers about this presentation, whole thing was still pretty prototype and crashed a fair bit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-sa...

Also to put this in context, go watch the original Android sneak peek. Anyone who claims Google didn't completely rip off Apple is delusional. Android sucked pre-iPhone. Can't find the video now with a quick google.

It didn't make sense to talk about apps, because there were no third-party apps at the time.

they didn't even open up to 3rd party developers until the release of the 3G - over a year later (Jan 2007 - Jul 2008).

Symbian, Psion and PocketPC were what then?!

The OP pretty obviously was talking about the iPhone specifically.

From my understanding, the OP was making the typical statement that before the iPhone there was nothing on the mobile space.

I read it as "Apple didn't talk about apps because Apple didn't have apps". It's not good practice to call out things your product is missing unless you have a great reason for not having those things (like a stylus).

Yes, I saw it a while ago. It is something very rare, how many videos of this kind introduces something that completely revolutionizes the way everyone uses a piece of technology?

As someone that has a lot of Apple products I'm glad they have competition. I don't think any one company should have a monopoly on the modern touchscreen smartphone concept. That being said I wish more Android fans would accept that Google directly copied a lot of ideas from their competition. And that's okay. It would be one thing if Android looked like a direct copy of iOS but it doesn't. It just uses the same technologies. On the other hand, when unscrupulous companies like Samsung try to capitalize on Apples success by directly copying the product they should be slapped down and reminded to do their own thing. It's all about balancing the rights of innovators and the protections for consumers.

"That being said I wish more Android fans would accept that Google directly copied a lot of ideas from their competition"

1. I wish Apple fans would accept that Apple does the same instead of seemingly believing that every feature Apple has ever added was brought down on chiseled stone tablets received on Mount Sinai :)

2. FWIW: Roughly this exact same story could be written about any good competitor reacting to any good launch by any company ever. It sounds sensational because it's "Google" vs. "Apple" or whatever, but realistically, companies react to each other.

> instead of seemingly believing that every feature Apple has ever added was brought down on chiseled stone tablets received on Mount Sinai :)

My impression of Apple has changed dramatically in the past few years. I think a lot of it started with the iPad. I waited years for Apple to release a modern touchscreen computer. As a designer, I basically wanted a portable Wacom Cintiq so I could bring the Adobe Creative Suite with me and work anywhere. When Apple finally announced the iPad, based on iOS instead of OS X, it changed my opinion of them. Don't get me wrong, I like the iPad. I use it to browse the web, check e-mail and other basic tasks. But the iPad wasn't what Apple users had been asking for. We had been asking for what turned out to be the Microsoft Surface. And I'd own the Surface (Pro) today if it weren't for my annoyances with Windows 8.

Any decent company reacts to competitors to survive: witness iOS notifications in response to android notifications. Consumers benefit when companies are busy one-upping each other.

re: 1, obviously this is true in any element of creative work. there is, of course, a line, where a creative work becomes distinctly new and reasonably un-plagiaristic even though it clearly draws upon the work of others.

in other words, pointing out copying by a copier does not make them a hypocrite, since there isn't just one definition of copying, and anyone doing creative work is by definition a copier. Apple defenders would argue that all of the other products they've built have been sufficiently innovative and improvements over their predecessors so as to make them genuinely new things. It's a hard case to make for Android if you consider iOS a predecessor to its design process, which it sounds like was rebooted upon iOS's reveal.

> re: 1, obviously this is true in any element of creative work. there is, of course, a line, where a creative work becomes distinctly new and reasonably un-plagiaristic even though it clearly draws upon the work of others. in other words, pointing out copying by a copier does not make them a hypocrite, since there isn't just one definition of copying, and anyone doing creative work is by definition a copier.

Exactly. As a wise man once said, "Good artists copy, and great artists steal".

If only I could remember who....

Igor Stravinski may have said "Good composers don't borrow, they steal".

I think the problem is the word "copied", it always comes with a whiff of "and hence worthless".

Apple annoys me with how closed off they are in many ways, but this is the example I always bring up when people are trying to HATE Apple for being so closed off - they destroyed the most destructive force in mobile UX ever - the phone company oligopoly. Besides also presenting the only ever true competitor to the Microsoft PC, that's their biggest contribution to openness (whether done intentionally or not).

> Larry Page: “We had a closet full of over 100 phones [that we were developing software for], and we were building our software pretty much one device at a time,” he said in his 2012 report to shareholders. In various remarks over the years he has described the experience as both “awful” and “incredibly painful.”

... and now nearly every Android dev shop I know has closets full of way more than 100 phones, with feature white and blacklists all around.

We are an Android Dev Shop with decent success (US Based). We don't carry more than 4 models of android Devices.

Would you care to mention names of couple of dev shops that has 100 Android models?

Some big game shops do, IIRC. That was a while back too, when there was 1.6 devices still being used. In my experience, 4 phone devices is about right for Android (and 2-3 iPhones for full testing).

For game shops, the reason they might have more is for GPU compatibility - where actual OpenGLES features can very between devices and you do have to worry about different code paths.

What do you do when someone reports a bug on a device you don't have, and you can't reproduce it on one of the devices you do have? Genuinely curious (I'm a software developer but not on Android).

Usually its not device specific issues but Manufacturer specific issues. Same issues you encounter on Galaxy S4, you would notice on Galaxy S3, Note etc. Having a handset from each of major manufacturer is good enough for 99% of devs.

And if you're doing that you're doing it wrong.

This whole myth of you needing vast amounts of devices to do Android testing is mysteriously propagated by those that stand to benefit from it, such as game QA companies or departments.

In reality you can do massive scale deployment with a relative handful of devices, assuming you understand what you're actually doing and not just writing stuff that's specific to whatever device you're testing on.

Very true. The difference is in the profit. Google arguably will put up with it considering they are selling more phones.

Once goolge starts shipping good hardware, other carriers will follow them for compatibility.

Yeah, that part definitely made me chuckle :D

This is not actually true, although it makes a good myth.

Android seems to have been targeting a variety of form factors from pre-iPhone times, and had a touchscreen interface implemented before Apple released the iPhone:

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264

From the article:

> Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives. A phone with a touchscreen, code-named Dream, that had been in the early stages of development, became the focus.

So, "They prioritized a form factor they'd already been working on"?

I'm not sure that I'd describe that as "The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android".

"had a touchscreen interface implemented before Apple released the iPhone:"

Your link says November 12 2007 was when Google demoed a touchscreen phone.

The iphone was announced Jan 9, 2007, and went on sale Jun 29, 2007.

What calendar are you using where November is before June?

Oops. My mistake -- I admit, I only skimmed it, since I knew what I expected it to contain. Take a look at the Samsung Switch, which was leaked in Jan 2007: http://gizmodo.com/229579/google-switch-phone-by-google-and-...

How do you reconcile your view that this is a myth with this:

"But for the Google Android team, the iPhone was a kick in the stomach.

'What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,' DeSalvo said. 'It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.'"

Either the Android team already had something like the iPhone but it was so far out that it may as well not have existed or even their work on the touchscreen version was not nearly good enough to ship after the iPhone. I don't think you can read that passage and think that Google was ready with an iPhone like touchscreen design. Even their early touchscreen designs that I saw were still smallish screens with physical keyboards attached.

I was interning at RIM (now BlackBerry) during the era around the release of the iPhone. RIM also had prototyped iPhone form factors at the time. They were backwards, poorly implemented, and generally turds. You may remember the BlackBerry Storm. You may wish you didn't remember it.

Android was clearly in a similar situation. (In fact, they were clearly playing catchup until at least Android 4.0). However, there was something working. The concept was there. A prototype implementation was there. The execution was not.

Interesting to see how this report has been buried on HN

This post is on page 3 and ranked 75. it says "59 points by bluekitten 2 hours ago"

Meanwhile on page 1, the number 21 item says "35 points by cromulent 4 hours ago" and the number-29 item says "64 points by AndrewDucker 8 hours ago"

Having more comments than points it will have triggered the controversial filter.

Android already existed before Google bought it, and at the time it was built mainly as a competitor to Blackberry (before Google bought them). So Google continued on the same path, as they were less interested in "changing the paradigm of mobile UX" than in killing the Real Fragmentation that existed before, with each OEM having its own OS, and unifying them under the open source Android.

There's something to be said about how fast they reacted to iPhone once they saw it, though. I mean how many big companies react as fast the moment they see a disruptive technology and realize its potential for the future? In comparison it took Nokia 4 years after the iPhone, to even admit Symbian was a dead-end, and it also took Microsoft 3 years to come up with something that wasn't just an evolution of Windows Mobile. So kudos to Google for realizing early on the potential of the iPhone-like user interfaces and iPhone-like touchscreen smartphones.

> * they were less interested in "changing the paradigm of mobile UX" than in killing the Real Fragmentation that existed before, with each OEM having its own OS, and unifying them under the open source Android.*

The article alludes to this, but I think at the time Google wasn't interested in killing "real fragmentation" so much as killing the carrier control that was stopping them from pushing search and ads to mobile.

When it came to negotiating with carriers, Apple had a huge advantage. They had a strong hardware brand, and the iPhone was exciting. Google didn't have that. When they went to talk to AT&T, Telefonica, Verizon, Vodafone, etc, to get Google services onto devices those companies were basically holding them to ransom. And quite rightly Google though: "hey, rather than spending all our money getting carriers to promote our services let's spend it making something carriers will want from us".

A big +1 here. Microsoft and Palm were quoted in articles at the time saying stuff like "you can't just expect to enter the market and be successful immediately" and "we're not worried, we're the dominant player in the market". Google correctly went "well, shit, that's the new standard - let's catch up".

Always knew Balmer was a goof - however this one will go down in history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

The best part is when he goes over the "checklist" of features their phones have.. it'll do email! - quality products are more about checklists of features, something Microsoft still does not get.

I think it's pretty clear that Ballmer is fronting in that clip. The fact that he has a list of anti-iPhone talking points ready to run through doesn't suggest that he's unconcerned about the iPhone, rather the opposite.

Mocking it for the cost was especially silly considering the Motorola RAZR - a pretty but otherwise run-of-the-mill flip phone - launched at a higher price and sold like hotcakes.

It really didn't take long for the Chinese phone modder contingent to clone the iPhone:

  http://gizmodo.com/377601/crazy-popular-asian-blogstar-prefers-fake-chinese-iphone-to-the-real-thing

Steve doesn't get enough credit with many HN types. He was also the spark that launched the multi-billion dollar mobile industry. Samsung, Google, etc now all aggressively compete with huge resources. Hopefully, Elon will do the same with the electric car and rockets. If Elon, is successful enough with electric cars, for example, then others will follow, and more resources will be thrown at the problem.

When I first saw the headline, I thought the article would be about throwing Dalvik away and going with AOT compilation (as in the new ART). I've heard a lot of people complain that Android is more laggy/less smooth than iOS, and I always suspected Dalvik is a big part of that.

I wondered what Sooner was like, closest I could find:

http://blog.steventroughtonsmith.com/2012/05/2007s-pre-m3-ve...

There is also a video, pretty similar device.

That is definitely the Sooner. I used one while working at an OHA partner company in 2007. It was just an HTC reflashed with Android.

It's a lesson that head starts, no matter how revolutionary, can always be overcome.

Seems like an admission of guilt over patent infringement. /s

Could this be done if this was a startup going after a phone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com