How Android was created

Let's also not forget about Windows Mobile. The first smartphones powered by it (marketed as "Pocket PCs which also happen to be a phone") started coming out in ~2002, with touchscreen and everything. I own a collection of phones with this OS, including a HTC Wallaby (the phone that the XDA-developers community was originally about), and even that old thing supported true multitasking, mobile data (GPRS), the best Internet Explorer they could put on such things at the time (it was Microsoft, after all), media player, handwriting recognition (inspired by the Palm devices, I believe)... in many ways it allowed one to do "smartphone tasks" well before Android or the iPhone came out. In fact, UX aside, when the iPhone came out, the Windows Mobile users I knew weren't impressed, because in terms of "technological possibilities" there was no news.

I used another more recent HTC device (Blue Angel), second-hand, for a couple of years as my main phone, from 2011 to 2013 IIRC. With WiFi and Bluetooth, decent web browsers available (Opera Mini and Mobile, plus some WebKit forks/wrappers), Google syncing through ActiveSync, for a long time upgrading to a newer phone and OS was not a priority. I only stopped using it for a Android phone two years ago (with the "appification" trend, a web browser is sadly no longer enough).

Coincidentally, the Blue Angel was an early Android target[0], and people have made it run versions up to 2.3 (at which point it's too slow to be usable by today's standards).

I doubt that Android owes much to WM, after all it was a closed-source OS and certainly there wasn't any motivation to do things the "Windows way". It's important to point out that platforms like WM and Symbian existed well before iOS/iPhone OS and Android even had their names decided, and failures apart, the idea of "smart phone" was not the result of solely Apple or Android Inc./Google. Unfortunately, even in many tech circles this is not the idea that prevails.

I also own a Symbian-powered Nokia phone (without touchscreen, forgot the model), and I have no doubt it is a "real" smartphone OS. I can confirm it allows for all that you described and certainly even more in the newer devices with touchscreen.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu-Yy0phw7U

I had a Symbian UIQ phone years before the iPhone and it's remarkably similar in overall design. One big touch screen with no face buttons, rows of icons for launching apps, etc. All the pieces were really there.

But the Symbian OS itself was terrible; I coded for it and it was a mess. It was quite functional, didn't really crash, but it seemed like it achieved that through sheer effort and will rather than good design.

Android was influenced by all of these prior efforts, at least indirectly. I was at Orange prior to Android getting started (and before Miner left to join Rubin).

At Orange we had built apps for Symbian S60, UIQ, and windows mobile. We also had seen the limitation of these platforms, especially Symbian which was getting long in the tooth with its baroque memory management architecture. I personally had seen the limitations of trying to get something working on Series 60 working directly with Nokia Engineers and getting held up by the platform limitations (and Nokia's own internal issues).

Another player at that time was Savaje - they had built a completely java based phone OS and were trying to sell it to carriers. Unfortunately they were too early to the market (among other issues).

So Rich had seen all of these issues with early smart phone systems and the European smartphone ecosystem, and presumably applied some of the learnings to Android's development.

I've read, though I can't remember where, that a number of languages were under consideration.

But the Android team mostly came from Danger, and Danger used Java. So the Android team had considerable experience designing a Java VM for a device with very limited resources. Although Android never shipped on such a device, the design target was 200Mhz CPU, no GPU, and, IIRC, 128 or 256MB RAM. That's luxurious compared to a Danger Hiptop, which IIRC had only 32MB.

If you look at how many VM instances get started when an Android boots, it's pretty amazing that it doesn't take 15 minutes.

Also it enabled them to piggyback on a very mature toolchain by translating from Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode as the last thing before packaging an app. At the time, XCode had nothing like the linting and refactoring Eclipse had. If they had a similar toolchain for Danger, that would be another reason to stick to Java.

I'm sure Java was chosen because it was the dominant smartphone programming language at a time.

And not for any actual good reasons.

And we (Android developers) still need to suffer through their poor initial choice of platform; things would be so much better if they exposed a C API as a first-class citizen of the OS, rather than making Java the only first-class way to access Android.

The Zaurus devices are an odd duck. Sharp had their own OS that the devices shipped with in Japan, iirc. But for some reason they opted for putting a home grown Linux distro on them when offering them abroad. Not that they were easy to get in the first place...