I reached for the phone that was held just out of my grasp while trapped in a bean bag chair. This modern smartphone wasn’t like others. The first smartphone to run Google’s new Android operating system was the T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream outside of the US. And I simply had to get my hands on it.
No, my fingers weren’t going crazy over the slide-out screen, the recessed QWERTY keyboard, or the navigational trackball. The thing that caught my eye was instead how the pixels were arranged on the 3.2-inch panel.
Just down the street from The Tech Fun San Francisco office, I attended the bean-bag-adorned Google developer conference in 2009 for one reason only. As a novice mobile app reviewer, it was my responsibility that day to test the first batch of Android-compatible apps, Google’s audacious response to Apple’s wildly popular iOS for iPhone. And lucky for me, I was able to watch those shows before practically everyone else on earth.
The original Android “applications,” as we referred to them back then (back then, “apps” was still the appetizer you ordered before a restaurant meal), were nothing like the lightning-quick, visually appealing apps we take for granted today. Loading progressed slowly. Failures during live demos were common. The experience was reminiscent of Web 1.0, and the graphics were on the verge of being childish. However, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page scarcely needed to use rollerblades to attract attention on September 23, 2008, when Android made its premiere.
I mean, this was Google. On a smartphone. They had our attention.
Android is the most popular mobile operating system worldwide as it approaches its 15th anniversary. According to Google, there are more than 3 billion active Android devices worldwide (not only mobile phones). According to StatCounter, Google’s phone OS was being used by seven out of every ten phones as of August 2023, which is a startling 70% of all phones. The fact that Android dominates the world market not only illustrates how Google’s mobile strategy has endured, but also a profound social change: According to estimates, there are more than 4.6 billion smartphone users worldwide, replacing standalone cameras and, in many cases, personal computers. Moreover, anyone can utilize them.
(In the US, Android is second to iPhone, owning 46.5% of the US market in March 2023, according to Statista.)
According to Statista, there are already more than 2.5 million Android apps available in the Google Play store (Google refuses to provide specific figures). About 35 apps made up the basic Android Market when it initially launched, and these early apps were slow and weak in comparison to other smartphone apps at the time. For instance, the first Android phone didn’t even let you modify the camera settings.
However, it wouldn’t take long for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android to completely alter the smartphone landscape. To build Android a platform where mobile apps were widely available and dead simple to use, Google simply needed to channel the same innovative zeal as Apple, whose iPhone made an impact in 2007.
The success of Google was not a coincidence. The once-hyped dessert-themed Android versions Cupcake (Android 1.5) and Lollipop (Android 5.0, 5.1), strategic alliances with hardware manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola, and a desire to outperform Apple in key areas like push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, mobile payments, and wireless charging have all contributed to the creation of the all-purpose phones that the majority of us would feel lost without today.
Google is also working on the next chapter. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and other tablet-sized smartphones with foldable screens have ushered in an era when apps can now leap and stretch from one configuration to another, even across multiple screens.
I certainly wasn’t the person who anticipated that Android would rule the world after glancing at the first Android applications. I was probably too much of a newbie to have predicted the demise of every viable competitor that wasn’t an Android or iOS app. especially considering that Symbian, a former rival, had held 70% of the global market. The BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms were luminaries in and of themselves, and Palm’s revamped WebOS later blossomed into a tech media favorite. These long-standing competitors far surpassed Android and Apple in terms of strength and sophistication.
Looking back, Google’s choice to copy Apple and strip programs down to their core was revolutionary given the direction smartphones were headed. Was it always the goal?
As is often said, context is everything. Hold on to me here. I’ll draw you a picture.
Google’s first “phone” set the stage
The iPhone by Apple? That was reasonable. The popularity of the iPod, Apple’s iconic portable music player, helped the company gain mainstream recognition while remaining cultish and boutique. The iPhone, at that time, was comparable to a bigger, better iPod that also made calls and, in a previously unheard-of feature, allowed you to navigate by placing your finger directly on the screen. However, Google was a web search company that also sold a lot of advertisements. Did it make sense—a Google phone?
I described a planning session I went to before the 2008 launch as “someone feverishly scratched a dry-erase marker on a corporate-size whiteboard.” Would it be referred to as the G Phone or the Google Phone? It turned out to be neither. The first “pure Android” Pixel phone, without an additional software layer or visuals from the phone brands themselves, wouldn’t come out until eight years later, in October 2016. And Google didn’t appear to care at all.
The secret to Google’s brand of genius was working with device manufacturers like the up-and-coming behemoth HTC to create a rainbow of compatible hardware while Google provided the Android software. Inviting a large number of independent developers, many of whom were eager to profit from Android as they were beginning to do with Apple, was another way to inject new apps into the new platform.
As a result, I finally found myself tapping my way through a slew of new Android apps—many of which were fashioned after equivalent iPhone apps—while curled up in a bean bag in a peaceful corner of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
That day, I remember leaving the conference with five app demos, my initial writeups having vanished into an internet obscurity. One that comes to mind is TuneIn Radio, which later iOS version a colleague once called “near-perfect” for the time. In the demo I watched, you could choose radio stations from all around the world and check the app to see what other users were currently listening to.
A world map and a list of the most popular songs were displayed on separate screens. When a portion of the demo didn’t work, I was instructed to focus on the description and use my imagination to fill in the blanks. The executive running the demo beamingly praised the app’s limited features from the bean bag next to mine.
Cool, I recall thinking. though is that all?
I had a lot to learn — and unlearn, too, like everyone else.
“Radical” Android apps helped flip the script
What you need to know about apps in the early 2000s is provided below. A groundbreaking idea at the time, the complete simplicity of this new generation advanced by Apple and then Android was the complete antithesis of what everyone else was doing.
In the words of my late father, who once described the late Steve Jobs, “riding the horse backward,” Apple and Google were doing. (Dad would know; he attended the Silicon Valley Homebrew Computer Club alongside Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Wozniak.)
I had begged and pleaded with my hardware-reviewer colleagues to allow me to play around with feature phones and smartphones like the Samsung BlackJack, Palm Treo 650, Nokia N95, and Blackberry 7100 when they weren’t using them so I could learn about and write about their apps as part of my personal campaign at the time to become the go-to mobile app reviewer on the CNET staff.
Like the gesture-based writing called Graffiti that operated Palm Pilots, an electronic handheld organizer (not a phone!) popular with the executive set, I sought to comprehend their secret, sophisticated languages.
In my search, I used tiny stylus tools to tap the screen, smashed tiny QWERTY keyboards that appeared to have ingested Alice’s shrinking potion, and peered into nested file systems and folders with fonts that were so small that I had to squint to read them.
Before the iPhone and Android, portable devices frequently imitated desktop PCs in size. These early smartphones were extremely potent, forward-thinking technologies in their own time, with a logic primarily geared toward the suit-and-tie business professional. They attracted a select clientele and were also pricey. Not the kind of personal device a young person or a marginally interested late adopter could purchase, let alone pick up and use.
Exactly for that reason, Android and iOS stood apart from the other “top” mobile platforms of the time. They succeeded because they weren’t attempting to duplicate anything obviously sophisticated or intricate. Google, on the other hand, saw that by removing the friction and pain points of the (wonderfully nostalgic) small portable computers that came before, simple programs on devices that were simple to use could be life-changing.
In contrast to other device generations, Android does not require you to be highly technologically adept, to memorize specific navigational instructions, or to have excellent hand-eye coordination. Early Android apps didn’t always feel sophisticated. They have an intuitive feel similar to iPhone apps.
Android’s “one more thing”
The attractiveness of Android to a previously untapped group of popular users was one of its secret sauce ingredients. Listen, though. One other thing that Google did that Apple’s iPhone didn’t is crucial to Google’s distinctive brand of success.
Google de facto accepted difference because it didn’t go for a top-to-tail ecosystem from the start and instead worked with HTC and other phone manufacturers, owning the platform rather than the hardware.
With just the right number of hardware standards, Android could therefore be used anywhere. Recall Android Go? Because of its adaptability, Android is now available on devices with a wide range of sizes, costs, and hardware specifications.
Yes, different device combinations, software versions, and prices all contributed to the dreaded fragmentation—a complex issue for another day. (The 2014 campaign “Be together” was a response to the fragmentation issue. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google and formerly the senior vice president of Android, introduced “Not the same.”)
Regardless of the reasons someone had for choosing one phone over another, Android phones were available with a wide range of alternatives, fragmentation difficulties aside.
Was this, in the end, the solution that was staring me in the beanbag the entire time? Could it be that, rather than supporting a select group of exclusive gadget owners, the secret to Android’s extraordinarily widespread success was its courage to let people in wherever they were? Now that I’m looking back, it all seems so obvious.
“Cool… but is that it?”
Maybe so. Or just maybe, the philosophy driving Google’s Android domination was so simple, it’s actually profound.
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