
How Android was created - aaronbrethorst
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-android-was-created-2015-3
======
ahomescu1
Wish the article had more about the creation of Android, and less about
Rubin's personal history.

~~~
w1ntermute
Fred Vogelstein's _Dogfight_ [0] covers the rise of mobile computing (both iOS
& Android) in depth.

0: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0374109206](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0374109206)

~~~
pavlov
"Both iOS and Android" misses a whole decade of mobile computing, though!
Before the iPhone was even announced, Symbian had already shipped 100 million
smartphones.

For an in-depth look into how the original smartphone OS came about, I can
recommend David Wood's _Smartphones and beyond: Lessons from the remarkable
rise and fall of Symbian_ :

[http://www.amazon.com/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-
remarkable-...](http://www.amazon.com/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkable-
Symbian-ebook/dp/B00NAZTCTW)

David Wood was an R&D executive at Symbian. He's brutally honest about the
company's failings... But he also paints a fascinating picture of how the
vision for smartphones evolved in the late '90s, when nobody had a clear idea
of what the form factor could be and what actual people might want to do with
the devices.

(There's a widespread belief that Symbian wasn't a real smartphone OS... Yet
it supported 3rd party apps, multitasking and background services, 3G data,
touch and keypad UIs, had a mobile WebKit browser before anyone else, GPU-
accelerated OpenGL in 2005, and so on. In many ways Android owes a lot to
Symbian, IMO -- for example the Activity lifecycle is fairly similar to the
base concepts in Symbian.)

~~~
gbl08ma
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu-Yy0phw7U)

~~~
stormbrew
> the best Internet Explorer they could put on such things at the time (it was
> Microsoft, after all)

Say what you will, the IE on my HTC Windows CE-based phone (I forget the
model) was actually better than its contemporary IE in supporting standards
correctly.

~~~
digi_owl
And you could always buy a copy of Opera Mobile if IE didn't get the job done.

------
nicpottier
It's funny that they don't talk about Danger a bit more. Anybody who ever
worked in that environment can tell you that Android is pretty much just
Danger v2, even the APIs were similar upon launch. (they have evolved quite a
bit since then and veered off, but the first Android SDK was mighty familiar
to anybody working on Danger stuff)

It really seems like it was the blueprint of what Android became.

~~~
joeyspn
Did you work with sidekick devices? I've just learned about them. I find
interesting that they were manufactured by Sharp which back then was
manufacturing also the Sharp Zaurus SL series (able to run several Linux
flavours)

I used to play a lot with those devices, we were an small but passionate
community wanting to get a full Linux on mobile. I remember people running a
full debian desktop distro in a Zaurus... crazy stuff for 2004.

I've always wondered if Android had the same roots as OpenZaurus or similar
mobile distros. It looks like Sharp is at least a common denominator...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus)

~~~
blinkingled
Early Zaurus owner - still have it lying around somewhere. I highly doubt the
Zaurus OS had anything to do with Android - it used Qt toolkit IIRC.

~~~
digi_owl
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...

------
bshimmin
I love how insane Page and Brin look in the photographs they chose. (I'm
pretty sure BI does this deliberately.)

------
amelius
It is sad that with recent updates, my Android has become slower and slower.
With great products comes great responsibility, and I hope that they can set
some higher standards for the future.

~~~
samsaga2
You're lucky. None of my phones has never got any upgrade (huawei, samsung and
sony).

~~~
amelius
If I could downgrade to my original system, I would do so instantly.

------
hobarrera
I'm genuinely curious: why the strong _need_ to sell via carriers? Couldn't
Android just sell directly to the end-user?

I'm pretty sure that by the time it belonged to Google, they had the resources
for proper marketing.

------
thesausageking
Does anyone know much about the fourth founder, Rich Miner, and why he didn't
want to accept the offer ?

