The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android(theatlantic.com) |
The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android(theatlantic.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
Would you care to mention names of couple of dev shops that has 100 Android models?
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.
Once goolge starts shipping good hardware, other carriers will follow them for compatibility.
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:
> 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.
I'm not sure that I'd describe that as "The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android".
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?
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"
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.
http://blog.steventroughtonsmith.com/2012/05/2007s-pre-m3-ve...
There is also a video, pretty similar device.
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.
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).
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 native, installed apps were just a by-product.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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".
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.
http://gizmodo.com/377601/crazy-popular-asian-blogstar-prefers-fake-chinese-iphone-to-the-real-thingThe 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.
Exactly. As a wise man once said, "Good artists copy, and great artists steal".
If only I could remember who....
Those are edge cases though. On the whole capacitive screens are better, but they do have downsides.
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.
If you need a stylus to read mails, use the web or normal stuff, you'll probably need a better UI, not a stylus
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 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.