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from the if-Google-won-did-we-the-people-lose? dept.
Android is 10 years old this week. In part one of a larger story, The Register looks at the beginnings of Android, including some early competition, and a brief comparison to Microsoft.
Google was in the game, at a time when others didn't realize what the game was. Or did, and couldn't turn the ship around fast enough. Android succeeded because it was just about good enough, and its parent was prepared to cross subsidize it hugely. Android wasn't brilliant, but it was better than Bada, and uglier than WebOS. Symbian simply wasn't competitive. If you were a Samsung or Sony or HTC, then Android gave you what you needed, it gave users a better experience. Developers were happy writing for a Java OS, it was a doddle after writing for WM and Symbian.
[...] Motorola also had a significant part to play in Android's success . . . as did Verizon. Carriers like Verizon had been snubbed by Apple's carrier exclusive strategy, and Verizon was badly burned by the BlackBerry Storm. It went all in.
[...] Android is far bigger and far more invasive than a PC could ever be. Google's dominance over our personal lives is far greater than Microsoft's ever was. The clunky laptop in the corner did not track your every movement or read your emails.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @12:16PM (9 children)
How Google won the smartphone "war": Easy, there were no opponents.
Google had the only working iPhone alternative without the Apple Jail (R)(tm), so if you wanted a touch screen smart phone that you controlled, Android was what you bought.
Blackberry needed a keyboard. Meego was killed by the CEO from Microsoft. And Microsoft themselves were so far behind that they had lost before they started playing, and they still haven't even figured out whether Windows 10 is going to be a desktop or a touchscreen OS.
Btw, why this fascination with the word "war"? Why does everything have to be a war? Browser war, smartphone war... I'm starting to get the feeling that people who label every market segment with competition a "war" are longing back to the old days of the Soviet Union where there would be no such thing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @01:11PM (6 children)
Microsoft's biggest problem with mobile operating systems was that they kept launching them and abandoning them. If you were a Microsoft fanatic, you had PocketPC 2000 - which they dumped. Then you had Windows Mobile 5 or 6, and they dumped those too. Windows Phone 7 received heavy promotions and investment from Microsoft, and then Windows Phone 8 came out and yet again was incompatible.
Contrast that to Android. It's the first mobile OS that Google launched. And if you wrote an application for Android 2, you can reuse almost all of the code in Android 8. So despite Google's tendency to kill other projects when they don't gain momentum fast enough, here they stuck with their original architecture and just kept enhancing it. So consumers, OEMs, and application creators never had to start from scratch.
As it is? I wouldn't be surprised if Android eats the world. I expect Google to incrementally add features that support traditional desktop computing until casual home users have Android device docks in their monitors and home power users have dedicated Android desktops. God save us all. (If there is one.)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:29PM (3 children)
There are already signs of this. I first recognized it in about 2012 when I could plug an OTG dongle into my Android phone and then connect a mouse or keyboard -- both of which were supported by the Android OS. The mouse especially. Suddenly, Android had a pointer! And moving the mouse moved the pointer. It occurred to me that each "activity" (an Android term) could really be a "window" on a "desktop".
Later when Android could run multiple apps at a time, side by side, on a phone, that realization was even stronger that there would one day be the year of the
LinuxAndroid desktop.When Chrome OS could run Android Apps, I could see the handwriting on the wall.
Remix OS is a great proof of concept. I think one of the remaining nits to work out is that Android apps (activities) need to be adaptable to dynamic resizing while running. Thus the app could run in a "window" without being aware of it, yet the window is resizable.
Seek and ye shall find.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:53PM (1 child)
Well, now I'm being nitpicky. There are signs of the features that Android needs to gain ground on the laptop and desktop market. But what I am not seeing is actual consumer adoption of Android in laptops, all-in-ones, or desktops yet. I expect it to happen, but I'm not seeing it.
Three or four years ago you could buy Android monitor all-in-ones and there were docking stations for phones and attachable keyboards for tablets. But it was too early, Android didn't have the features it needed for a pleasant desktop experience and the hardware lacked the processing power and RAM required to come near the performance of a cheap traditional laptop. I bet a laptop with Android 8 and a Snapdragon 835 with 6GB of RAM would work pretty well for more than half of the people currently using a Microsoft Surface or similar.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 14 2017, @03:08PM
I think Google is to blame. They don't recognize the opportunity. It is probably internal infighting and factions, just like what killed Nokia. But Android vs Chrome OS. Ok, now Chrome OS can run Android, so problem fixed, right?
How about if Google got behind a pure Android desktop OS? Introduced the necessary APIs so that developers could adapt their apps to run in dynamically resizable windows.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @07:29PM
Google can't seem to make up their mind about Android on the desktop or not.
Yes there seemed to be a push towards that around the release of the tablets-only 3.0 version.
But then much of the effort were rolled back during the later 4.0 releases, and Google tried to push ChromeOS instead.
Note btw that ChromeOS was current CEO Pichai's baby, while Android was originally a Andy Rubin startup (and he ran the division like his own fief, even nixing Android for tablets for a long time by insisting that every Android device have a mobile network radio).
And the Android rollback coincides with Rubin first moving to robotics, and then leaving Google, while Pichai first taking over Android management and then ascending to CEO-hood,
All this suggests there was a power struggle internally at Google, and pichai came out on top.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @04:04PM (1 child)
The ironic thing is that Microsoft was once the king of compatibility; in Windows they even maintained a list of quirks from earlier version of Windows to enable for specific programs so they continue to work. And I'd say this compatibility was one of the keys to their long-time success. You simply knew that if you got a new Windows, your old programs would continue working.
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:38PM
Well, sort-of continue working.
Programs would work (or appear to work) well-enough that you could never conclusively prove what had gone wrong without first investing significant time into resolving the issue and then you were left with a sunk cost. And thus the cycle began all over again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @07:23PM
MS was not far behind, they scuttled their own ship by breaking backwards compatibility upon the release of WinPhone7.
That, and Google was giving away the OS while MS insisted on license payments.
End result was that they needed a "willing" collaborator in all this. And after having lost/alienated their Asian options, they hijacked Nokia by targeting the boardroom.
Damn it, Symbian still held a high star outside of USA and those parts of Europe that are now not iPhone bastions (Aka UK and Scandinavia).
And frankly iPhone was not a big deal outside of the MSM that were already deep in Apple's pocket thanks to Mac historically being their go to graphics platform. This and the link back to iTMS and iPods was what sold iPhones initially, as outside of the touch screen it had nothing that really made it a "smartphone". Feature by feature you could get more done using a cheap J2ME "featurephone" from Samsung or like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @04:44AM
You are waging war on over-use of "war".