[HN Gopher] How Google bought Android
___________________________________________________________________
How Google bought Android
Author : samizdis
Score : 202 points
Date : 2021-08-13 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| kumarm wrote:
| Slightly off topic.
|
| Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java community
| and now in Android community.
|
| Thanks Romain Guy and Chet Haase for everything you guys do.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| > Chet Haase and Romain Guy both were treasures in Java
| community
|
| How so? Anywhere I can read about their contributions during
| Java time? Thanks.
| kumarm wrote:
| Their Rich UI clients with Java Swing was common presentation
| during Java One's. They wrote a book later:
| https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-
| Applic...
| tdeck wrote:
| I got to play with that original Android demo; it's floating
| around Google and I even wrote an internal Google doc tour of
| what I found before I left. For those that work at Alphabet you
| may find it interesting to search that out. The demo itself is
| basically a bunch of JavaScript.
| swetland wrote:
| Fun fact: The original, original demo (pre-acquisition) was Lua
| based. Andy was skeptical that enough people would know what
| Lua was so I shifted it over to Javascript. So for a while we
| were Javascript + 2d render engine. Smells a bit like WebOS or
| Flutter (though much less fancy in that early sketch).
| Jyaif wrote:
| Shifting from Lua to JS is not trivial! What JS engine did
| you use?
|
| And can you tell us a bit more about the choice of Java to
| create apps? Wasn't it frustrating for all the C++ coders in
| your team to use such a "slow" language for apps?
| swetland wrote:
| At the time (very very early) there was only a small amount
| of code and small amount of native bindings, so it only
| took a couple days to rebuild the lower layers and I recall
| Chris got the "framework" running again in js pretty
| quickly after that was done. I think maybe we used
| spidermonkey? It's been 15+ years... somebody at Google
| with access to the fadden demo should be able to figure it
| out quickly enough.
|
| As for Java, it worked well enough for Hiptop at Danger on
| a 24MHz ARM7TDMI platform. We felt we could use a similar
| approach (use Java more for "business logic" and do the
| heavy lifting in native libraries and services) to get
| sufficient performance on the 200MHz+ ARM9 platforms we
| were looking at, and take advantage of having a real MMU
| for process protection and eventually supporting native
| code (the latter, more contentious).
| asadlionpk wrote:
| It's titled "A Tour of the Original Android Demo"
| dvirsky wrote:
| No go link for the lazy? :)
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Isn't it weird to name it "ORIGINAL android demo" since that
| implies that the author new that in the future there would be
| other android demo.
|
| It'd be like asking a solider in 1915 what war they were
| fighting and they respond "WW1" (as if they new in advance
| that there would be a second world-war 30 years later).
| tdeck wrote:
| Since I wrote most of this doc in early 2020, it takes a
| look at the demo from a modern point of view.
|
| In fact, when I was using the demo it felt like the color
| flip phone I used to have around the mid 2000s, and in
| retrospect it's hard to tell why Android became what it did
| today. There wasn't much unique "smartphone" functionality
| in that demo from today's perspective, although I didn't
| see the original materials about how it was positioned.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| I'm seeing more of this in HN where folks hint at something
| that's available only if you're an employee at one of the tech
| giants. I feel like it used to be gauche and isn't now. (No jab
| at you specifically tdeck, just a trend I'm not fond of.)
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| It's overwhelmingly a Google thing in my experience, because
| they're used to everyone else being part of their own insular
| club (and ignoring the rest of the plebeians incapable of
| getting a job there).
|
| It's still gauche, you're not going crazy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The original commenter is not working at Google or part of
| that "club"; the comment states that they left that job.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| They're still part of it because they were there.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Xoogler is a term. How many other companies have a term
| like that? They even have a website internally for people
| who leave and they call them "alums". Nobody thinks I'm
| impressive or worthy of respect because of where I work,
| but people like OP continue to promote an elitist view of
| the world.
| tdeck wrote:
| It's because more than 100,000 people work at Google. If I
| had written a comment saying "if you're ever in [small
| city], you might want to check out [thing]" I suspect
| nobody would have a problem with that.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| You can walk into a city. You have to be judged to be in
| the top 1% of intelligence to work at Google.
|
| People like me are untermensch to folks like you.
| javert wrote:
| I feel lucky to hear these stories and "hang out" with these
| engineers, even if I can't personally get access to what
| they're discussing.
|
| I think it's absolutely awful that you and others in this
| thread are actively discouraging this kind of wonderful
| discussion.
|
| I think you are going against the hacker ethos and the Hacker
| News ethos.
| tdeck wrote:
| Sorry about that. I love computer history and put a lot of
| work into documenting the demo and want people to be able to
| learn about it, but it's very unfortunate that people outside
| Google (including me) can't see it. Basically it was a
| collection of screenshots and some notes on the code / commit
| log iirc.
| harshaw wrote:
| This was a very interesting time in the development of mobile
| technology and as was mentioned you clearly could see the writing
| on the wall but the challenge was how to get to a useful mobile
| platform from all the crap that predated Android / Iphone. When I
| was at Orange I hacked on all sort of devices: Symbian / UIQ,
| N60, Windows mobile, etc. They all sucked in one way or the other
| - mostly due to crappy tooling and crappy devices. Or completely
| broken understanding of software ecosystems which doomed Symbian
| and others. We all knew that there was going to be an explosion
| of cool things and a better platform was critical.
|
| There were some other companies doing interesting things - one
| was a startup called Savaje that had a complete java based phone
| environment up and running. However, they weren't a silicon
| valley company and didn't have Andy's connections (or reputation)
| from Danger.
| miohtama wrote:
| I worked with Series 60 teams. For Nokia Series 60, an external
| developer was not a stakeholder, but a thread clamped down with
| NDAs and horrible permission system. Apple App Store changed
| this mentality and was what truly changed the mobile industry.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's interesting that pre-acquisition Android seems like it was
| very much tailored to high-end feature phones. There was no touch
| screen support, and even "apps" themselves seemed to be a bit of
| an afterthought, although of course better planned than the 'J2ME
| profiles' mentioned in OP. The closest thing to it today would
| probably be KaiOS, even pure Linux on phones is aiming quite a
| bit higher. (Albeit with sxmo https://sxmo.org/
| https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sxmo being a bit more
| minimalistic, even that is way above most feature phones.)
| jaywalk wrote:
| iPhone changed everything.
| pier25 wrote:
| Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty much
| inevitable. The same components were available to everyone.
|
| I think Apple's stroke of genius was in the software and
| UI/UX.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| No one else was working on a capacitive touchscreen device.
| oblio wrote:
| Easy there, rewriting history.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
|
| > It was first announced on 12 December 2006.
|
| > It is the first mobile phone with a capacitive
| touchscreen.
|
| > The LG Prada was announced shortly <<before>> Apple CEO
| Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007.
|
| > After the release of the iPhone the head of the LG
| Mobile Handset R&D Center was quoted saying he believed
| Apple had stolen the idea from the KE850 after it was
| announced as part of the iF Design Award.
| swetland wrote:
| Yup, Apple made software and UX important. And had the
| clout to ship their device with their software and ignore
| the carriers' obsession with random checkbox features.
|
| Which, in the end, helped us a ton with Android -- post
| iPhone announcement everyone wanted to compete with that,
| nobody knew how, and the carriers eased back a bit on their
| absurd requirements documents full of random features
| nobody cared about (WAP?).
|
| At the time iPhone was announced we were already running on
| the prototype of what became G1 (Dream), with multitouch.
| We just expected it would be the second form factor to
| ship, after a more "traditional" blackberry wedge sort of
| thing (Sooner). Post-iPhone it seemed silly to ship such a
| device first (you can imagine the reaction), so we skipped
| it and shifted focus to Dream.
| oblio wrote:
| > WAP
|
| WAP made sense for its time: limited computing power,
| limited bandwidth, super low data caps.
| swetland wrote:
| Sure, but it made a lot less sense on a device with a
| much faster data network and full featured web browser...
| even so carriers had their lists of all the features
| _required_ for phones to be certified on their networks
| and it was very feature-phone-centric at that time.
| Someone wrote:
| It may look like that in hindsight, and given advances in
| hardware, something with lots of sensors would have been
| built, but I'm not sure how similar it would have been.
|
| The removal of the keyboard, in particular, was far from
| universally perceived as a good idea at the time.
|
| I also think it would have been quite a while before
| anybody would have had the guts to not provide a slot for
| memory cards or to not have removable batteries.
| swetland wrote:
| I dunno, touch-only had been done before (Newton, Palm),
| and I think it would have surfaced again. The UI/UX Apple
| built on top of the technology that was in everyone's
| (manufacturers) hands, I still think, was the biggest
| factor in pushing things forward industry-wide.
| oautholaf wrote:
| As important was Apple's brand power. Everyone already
| had an iPod in their pocket and loved it. That gave them
| legitimacy to set terms with carriers.
| macintux wrote:
| > Hardware wise, the iPhone or a similar device was pretty
| much inevitable. The same components were available to
| everyone.
|
| I agree (more or less) with the fact that someone would
| have come out with something similar. I strongly disagree
| that it would have changed the world.
|
| Apple had the "courage" to go all-in on the form factor
| with the retail footprint to sell it, and of course the
| built-in fan base and long history of innovation to make it
| interesting even in its fairly primitive form.
|
| Any other manufacturer would have either been too small to
| be so influential, or would have hedged their bets with a
| dozen alternatives, and their "iPhone" would have just been
| another dusty device in the corner of an AT&T store that no
| one knew how to use.
| pier25 wrote:
| > Any other manufacturer would have either been too small
| to be so influential
|
| Maybe small manufacturers, but if Nokia or Motorola had
| done it first (with good software) maybe we'd be a in
| different world.
| macintux wrote:
| You left out the rest of that...
|
| > or would have hedged their bets with a dozen
| alternatives
|
| Nokia or Motorola wouldn't have bet their phone business
| on a single UI/hardware combination like Apple did, and
| so I don't believe it would have had the technological
| impact the iPhone did.
| pier25 wrote:
| That's a good point. Maybe you're right, who knows.
| toast0 wrote:
| Nokia pissed off too many US carriers around this time.
| They were pushing a preinstalled VoIP client, and US
| carriers responded by dropping their phones.
|
| Even if they had something great, the US focus of tech
| media would have made it hard to see, and the US/EU
| frequency differences would have made it hard to use in
| the US unless Nokia made a US version, but lack of
| distribution makes that less likely.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| LG Prada changed everything. iPhone was a lame ripoff of that
| device.
| jaywalk wrote:
| You think iPhone ripped off a device that was announced
| less than a month earlier? Really?
| lostlogin wrote:
| If you entertain the idea, what has that thing got that
| the iPhone could be accused of copying?
| jaywalk wrote:
| I don't think either company copied the other.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Not really. It was going to happen with or without Apple. The
| first touchscreen smartphone was in 1992. Microsoft had
| touchscreen Windows devices from the late 90's through the
| 00's. Symbian and BlackBerry were things. And the LG Prada
| which was released before iPhone.
|
| iPhone just did what Apple's good at, taking existing
| technology and packaging it nicely, but it would have
| happened with or without them.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The biggest thing the iPhone did was come up with a user
| interaction method that made using a mobile computer/phone
| intuitive.
|
| >Chris DeSalvo's reaction to the iPhone was immediate and
| visceral. "As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one
| immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought 'We're
| going to have to start over.'"
|
| "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,"
| DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are
| obvious when you see it."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-
| d...
|
| Android was nearly ready to launch as a Blackberry clone
| when Jobs demoed the iPhone.
| crmrc114 wrote:
| The reason I left my Treo for the OG iPhone was the data
| plan. No one could touch that unlimited data at the time.
| To me that is what sold the iPhone. I don't know that it
| ever would have taken off if it had been constrained per KB
| as was popular at the time. Also the data plan was a bit of
| a requirement considering the first iPhone was all webapps.
| I was so pissed when I found out it lacked copy and paste.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| But Apple had a two years leap in front of everyone else
| shipping a useable touch interface.
|
| I remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first touch screen
| phone by RIM launching at the same time as the iPhone 3G.
| No Wifi, slow janky scrolling, no apps (well, sure, if you
| don't mind downloading some random .jar that have to be
| recompiled for the custom fork they ran on that device).
| Felt like a rushed beta.
|
| Meanwhile the iPhone just worked. Smooth scrolling, fast
| browser especially on Wifi. You could get apps from the
| AppStore, no friction.
| foobarian wrote:
| The thing I remember about non-iPhone touchscreens in
| those days is seeing the little mouse icon jump to where
| you pressed, and tiny scrollbars. And having to get out
| the stylus to better hit the targets. And seeing the
| cross-hatch X-windows background while the phone was
| booting up. It felt like using a handheld oscilloscope.
| At least the UI was not done in Tcl/Tk :-)
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| iPhone's capacitive touchscreen was new and revolutionary.
| Microsoft had some success in the early 2000s with Windows
| Mobile but they inexplicably stopped investing into it
| after 2005. Without Apple it might have taken many more
| years before the mobile revolution kicked off in earnest.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| LG released a capacitive touchscreen phone before Apple
| by a month. The technology was out there and was always
| going to get used by someone.
| techrat wrote:
| You must also think Apple invented the notch, fingerprint
| scanner, capacitive touchscreen phone, music playing
| device, the desktop GUI and mouse.
| swiley wrote:
| The iPhone changed nothing and has, infact, been holding
| mobile computing captive in the 2007 era. Modern hardware is
| more than powerful enough to run decent desktop OSes without
| all the crap that Apple and Google insist is necessary on a
| phone.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Mobile computing was _way_ more limited prior to iPhone and
| Android. Mobile phones are embedded devices, and the
| embedded ecosystem has always been messy irrespective of
| raw computing power. Even today, this is clearly the main
| obstacle to running "desktop" Linux on phones. (Though one
| shouldn't underestimate the UX challenges involved in
| building a viable phone OS, these are largely solved by now
| thanks to Plasma Mobile and Phosh. What remains is 99%
| hardware bugs and lacking support.)
| swiley wrote:
| I run a desktop UI on my phone. The only place it really
| doesn't work is when I'm driving and that's illegal
| anyway.
|
| The main obstacle is SoC drivers that are kept closed.
| pjmlp wrote:
| While Symbian C++ might have been a pain to use, the
| phones could run J2ME, Apache (yep that web server),
| Python, Flash and Web Widgets (PWAs before it was even an
| idea!).
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Android can do that today too.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Symbian was doing that in 2004.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Modern hardware is more than powerful enough to run
| decent desktop OSes
|
| Good luck running a desktop OS optimized for keyboard,
| mouse and large screens on a mobile phone with a small
| screen and only touch as input.
|
| Oh. WinMobile was like that. And the original Android was
| like that. People went over to iPhone _in droves_ , and
| Google had to scramble to change Android to mimic iOS.
| realusername wrote:
| I'd say the iPhone 2G changed everything, the first one did
| not really make a revolution on the mobile landscape.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I could not disagree more. No handset manufacturer ever
| dared to make the demands that Apple did, including full
| control of the software with no ability to customize or
| even pre-install apps. It was completely unheard of, but
| that's what they got Cingular to agree to with the first
| iPhone. And they maintain that control to this day.
| lostlogin wrote:
| You disagree but then state that Apple did something no
| one else had ever done?
| jaywalk wrote:
| What? I disagreed with the statement that there was no
| revolution until the iPhone 3G, because what I stated was
| done with the original iPhone.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Apologies, I misunderstood your point.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| And nobody has done that since. Can it really be an
| industry revolution if it's still a solo act over a
| decade later?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Google has, with Pixel. And even though the other Android
| OEMs allow for carrier apps to be preinstalled, it's
| nothing at all like it used to be. Verizon at one point
| was requiring feature phones to run a custom Verizon OS.
| Carriers would arbitrarily disable features on phones.
|
| The carriers had complete control over everything up
| until Apple came along. Even Android enjoys the fruits of
| Apple's initial demands.
| realusername wrote:
| I'm not in the US so that's why my perspective is maybe
| different but the first generation iPhone did not have
| MMS support, which was a critical feature at the time and
| pretty much killed it as a mainstream phone.
| wmf wrote:
| _high-end feature phones_
|
| This kind of classification only makes sense in retrospect.
| Blackberries and Danger Hiptops were pretty much the best
| phones you could get in 2005. Sure, keyboardless phones existed
| but they weren't necessarily better.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As ex-Symbian user/dev I beg to differ, specially the
| communicator models.
| rootsudo wrote:
| HTC 6700 and palm too. There were better phones.
| bane wrote:
| It's really useful to look at the context of the market at the
| time. High-end phones ran a mobile variant of Windows, or were
| Blackberries. Screen sizes _were_ getting larger and having
| data coming to your phone at all was still considered a bit
| exotic but was starting to happen. Touch, if there was any, was
| usually on a non-capacitive screen and was generally pretty
| terrible. The integration of sensors, data, GPS, etc. was
| starting to happen, but wasn 't ubiquitous.
|
| The market was also _incredibly_ fragmented both on the
| hardware _and_ software side. The hard divide between feature
| phones and smart phones hadn 't yet been delineated in a
| general sense (the Windows phones were just kind of clunky and
| weird, and Blackberry basically had it's own market segment and
| represented "smart phones" in the press). Phones just kept
| getting higher and higher end, and adding more and more
| features.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/best-mobile-phones-of-2006/
|
| The most anticipated phone for 2007 was Nokia's N95, the press
| called it a "multimedia device". It came with GPS, quad-band,
| 5MP camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, an accelerometer, a Web
| Browser, a big screen, apps. It looks vaguely like an older
| iPod, but has a pop out numeric keyboard.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
|
| At the time it was considered one of the best phones ever
| released and sold 10 million. At the time it was sometimes
| called smartphone, but I think today we'd call it an advanced
| feature phone.
|
| Android thus came out in this market, and the phones it
| originally targeted looked more like the N95 than the iPhone.
| When Apple introduced the iPhone, they rethought the form-
| factor and simplified it, getting rid of most buttons and
| making touch not suck. But functionality-wise the iPhone was
| about on par with the N95, and so was Android. However, the
| first iPhone didn't support user apps, had limited connectivity
| and sold only 6.1 million devices.
|
| When Android started supporting phones with iPhone-like form
| factors, it wasn't a given that it would become the predominant
| form factor for phones. The first few generations of Android
| phones still features lots of vestigial keyboards and buttons
| and rollers and sliders and such carried over from the N95 and
| blackberry style phones that Android devices were also looking
| like. Once the iPhone style form factor started leaving
| everybody else in the dust, Android phones (and the OS) simply
| dropped that stuff also.
| majormajor wrote:
| The high-end Symbian phones ticked all the boxes for "smart"
| I can think of. Not sure how they'd get bucketed as "feature
| phones." Browser, apps, fast cellular, GPS, camera... several
| things (like local filesystem management and access for apps)
| considerably before the iPhone.
|
| It was all just a bit of a pain to DO. Mount on a PC, copy
| video or ebook files over to certain directories, operate
| through the numeric keypad, etc... the cumulative friction of
| all that compared to the iPhone was pretty groundbreaking
| even if it in a lot of ways it was just a lot of things being
| "a little bit" easier.
|
| But I still held on to it for a few years because it took a
| while for the iPhones to really be able to do all the same
| things.
| ufmace wrote:
| It's the app ecossystem that really changed things and
| makes a true smartphone. Symbian could technically install
| and run apps. I think there was a Nokia/Symbian app store,
| but it only had like 10 crappy apps. I never had any idea
| where you would even start if you wanted to build one of
| your own or get it on the store. I'm pretty sure even power
| users of those phone never had more than one or two
| aftermarket apps. Rumor was that the development experience
| was terrible. I used Symbian phones for like 10 years I
| think, and never saw any improvement whatsoever in the app
| situation.
|
| Apple and Google now both run app store hosting millions of
| apps, they both maintain their own development environments
| and adopted more advanced languages to make it easier. It's
| easy to submit apps (relative to Symbian days) and even
| nontechnical users commonly install and use dozens of them.
| The development tech and available APIs are being added and
| improved at breakneck speed, relatively speaking.
| foobarian wrote:
| One other thing that played a huge part is how Jobs beat
| AT&T over the head to provide an unlimited data plan. We
| don't think much of this today, but in those days data
| was _expensive_. It put a huge cognitive load on any kind
| of data operation. Merely turning on the data modem was a
| "will I be able to eat through payday" kind of decision.
| It was very stressful! And suddenly Jobs comes along with
| the cool new phone AND takes away this barrier. Now you
| could have data always on, not worry about how big the
| app was you were about to download. You could browse the
| web and go to any website, with images turned on, without
| fear.
|
| I remember the day this was announced and even though I
| never bought into the Apple ecosystem I remember feeling
| that it was a game changing move.
| Izkata wrote:
| > and the OS
|
| At least as of Android 8, the OS still supports hardware
| keyboards (and likely the rest); my current phone has one and
| can scroll by swiping on the keyboard.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I always wonder if Android was a success for google from a pure
| business perspective. Did it really help them make more money?
| samizdis wrote:
| > This time, there were more people in the room, and Google was
| ready to talk specifics. Andy and his team had assumed they were
| coming to give an update on the company's progress since the last
| meeting. But in the middle of the presentation, Nick remembered,
| "They just said, 'Let us interrupt you there. We just want to buy
| you.'"
|
| > Google turned what Andy's team thought was a meeting of Android
| pitching to Google into a meeting in which Google was pitching to
| them instead.
| kyaghmour wrote:
| Yet another example of how what looks later as a slam dunk / sure
| winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the
| process.
|
| Also, not sure if it's covered elsewhere in the book, but it
| would've been interesting to get to understand Google's
| motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google
| understood mobile was important and given that, at the time,
| network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the
| fear was that they could control access to the search engine and,
| hence, exclude or take control over Google.
| 6510 wrote:
| I don't get why investors would have doubted that all it took
| is money after Microsoft made Windows such a success looong
| before. I also cant think of any motivation for google bigger
| than their competition with MS.
| thepangolino wrote:
| Worked so well for windows mobile !
| 6510 wrote:
| Greed is overwhelming in MS. Its success made it into a
| very different company.
|
| In hindsight the camera OS was also a brilliant idea. I
| primarily use my phone to take pictures, make calls and
| send text messages. SMS can do that well enough.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's
| motivation for doing this deal
|
| Motivation was that Microsoft at the time was developing
| Windows Mobile or whatever it was called and Google got scared
| that they will put Microsoft Bing as a default internet search
| engine on millions of Windows Mobile phones that were suppose
| to conquer mobile phone industry.
|
| It's funny how Steve Jobs was mad at Google because Android was
| chipping away Iphone's dominance but in the reality Android was
| about and against Microsoft not Apple and Iphone.
|
| Search for an article on HN or Google I can't find it atm. But
| the article talks about just like I said how Google was
| developing competition for Windows Mobile then famous 2007
| Iphone presentation happened and Google engineers realized
| touch UI and UX is the future not QWERTY plastic keyboard and
| then they pretty much copied most of the Iphone and iOS
| features.
|
| Edit: here is the article:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Definitely give _Losing the Signal - The Untold Story Behind
| the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry_ [0]
| a read if you're interested in the genesis of mobile. In many
| ways Google was actually late in comparison to Apple, but was
| able to leapfrog the ecosystem by focusing on abstracting to
| the operating system platform/layer that is Android.
|
| This is also why I personally believe Microsoft failed but
| Google was ultimately able to succeed in competition with
| Apple.
|
| [0]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_the_Signal/oE-
| TB...
| avh02 wrote:
| definitely taking a look at this book - spent a short part of
| my career as a blackberry OS developer - worst dev experience
| of my life, so I'm glad they're dying a slow and excruciating
| death for it.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| Why do you say that? (Worst dev experience)
| vnorilo wrote:
| Maybe BB saved you from Symbian though?
| enjo wrote:
| I spent 6 years slogging through Symbian work. The whole
| "C++ but not quite" approach was infuriating, and the
| system level API's weren't much better. It was _very_
| difficult to work with. The original iOS SDK felt like a
| revelation in comparison.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| MeeGo ended up being not too bad, it used Qt.
|
| https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/13567772811889
| 377...
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It was probably the best phone OS at that point in time.
| It was just a little too late for Nokia and they
| disastrously threw their lot in with Microsoft.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| It's funny that BB10 was in many ways similar to MeeGo,
| it also used Qt/QML and had a similar UI. I went to BB10
| after wanting the next closest thing to the Nokia N9 I
| had before.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| BB10 was QNX-based, otherwise I wonder if RIM and Nokia
| could've pulled their efforts along with other big guys
| (Samsung and Intel who went on to do Tizen) to set up a
| compatibility layer between their respective platforms to
| allow an app ecosystem to flourish.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| One of the big thing was that it was a perceived as a career
| upgrade to go from BlackBerry to Apple or Google. But the
| opposite was unheard of.
| samizdis wrote:
| > ... what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition
| is anything but for those involved during the process
|
| Exactly.
|
| > ... it would've been interesting to get to understand
| Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is
| that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at
| the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile
| software, the fear was that they could control access to the
| search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.
|
| That's sort of hinted at in the article:
|
| _When Android met with Google, Larry Page observed that it
| would make sense for Google to acquire the small company, to
| help them build a platform that would enable Google to enter
| the mobile market._
|
| Perhaps we all need to buy the book to find out ...
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by
| Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so
| far ahead... excerpt:
|
| > This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with
| Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a
| prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone...
| but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were
| plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a
| workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do
| that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB
| on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly
| mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at
| Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I
| knew that Android was going to be huge.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember
| running gdb targetting a Handspring/Palm way before the ARM
| transition, late 90s or the like. In fact m68k gdb was the
| only option available if you couldn't pay the big compilers.
| Damn gdbpanel.
|
| Not to mention that in 2005 Nokia already had the 770, which
| was basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device, with Gtk+,
| Gnome and everything. You could run gdb on the device itself.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember
| running gdb targetting a Handspring/Palm way before the ARM
| transition, late 90s or the like.
|
| From the description it sounds as if gdb was running off-
| target (same as it would for debugging Palm), except
| perhaps it connected via gdbremote-over-TCP instead of a
| 68k debug stub via RS232 or similar. And in this case, the
| phone's TCP stack is running over the phone's radio.
|
| > basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device
|
| From the sound of it, this device likely could have matched
| these claims.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > except perhaps it connected via gdbremote-over-TCP
| instead of a 68k debug stub via RS232
|
| (he clearly says "plugged in" in the audio track, which
| does not hint to a over-the-air solution).
| jcun4128 wrote:
| The full couple of paragraphs is kind of lengthy to paste
| here but I think the main "coolness" is that while
| debugging, the phone rang. Not sure if in the other cases
| people are mentioning, the phone couldn't run. Also the
| development turn around time was much faster for
| Android's case apparently.
|
| > ...whereas the engineers that other companies, they had
| the big breadboard prototypes, the big full sized
| prototyping board, and the phone would run on that, and
| it was not connected to a radio so they couldn't actually
| use it as a phone.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > Which is a ridiculous assertion
|
| To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because
| of their limited view of the world. I always take claims of
| being first with a grain of salt for this reason.
|
| That said, I completely agree. I definitely used remote
| debuggers and on-device debuggers on mobile before
| Android/iOS existed.
| cat199 wrote:
| > To the person who made the claim, it was the first,
| because of their limited view of the world.
|
| Then one would say 'it was the first i've seen'
|
| We have language for a reason. Despite what you hear on
| daytime talk shows about 'your truth', back in reality,
| actual truth is objective
| ipaddr wrote:
| Isn't that what everyone is saying. To say otherwise
| would mean you have a perfect understanding of something
| static.
|
| It is the first they know about. It may be defined
| differently.
|
| You cannot claim absolute truth on most things you can't
| can't claim absolute understanding of the language people
| use to express things.
|
| If you expect absolute truth in a variable world you're
| in for disappoinment.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah that's completely ridiculous. BlackBerry in the x86/C
| and ARM/Java eras could be attached to a workstation and
| debugged with Visual C or the later RIM JDK, setting
| breakpoints and single-stepping on real hardware live and
| on the air. Was debugging on the BlackBerry 857 over serial
| port attached to PC in 1999.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think that's just a case of someone being relatively
| ignorant of how things work in embedded contexts. gdbserver
| has been a thing since well before 2005, and remote debugging
| was not at all new, even then.
|
| If nobody at Motorola, Symbian, or Nokia could do
| (specifically) that, it just means that they didn't have GDB
| ported to their OS. But they absolutely certainly had other
| remote debugging tools; it's preposterous to suggest they
| didn't.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I was at Nokia back on those years and also didn't get his
| point.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Here's the podcast and a transcription:
|
| "The Untold Story of SQLite"
|
| https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The interesting thing is that the company Google feared might
| push them out on mobile was Microsoft.
|
| >Google worried that if Microsoft made it hard enough to use
| Google search on its mobile devices and easy enough to use
| Microsoft search, many users would just switch search engines.
| This was the way Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet
| Explorer in the 1990s. If users stopped using Google's search
| engine and began using a competitor's such as Microsoft's,
| Google's business would quickly run aground.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
| ksec wrote:
| That was the era when everyone thought Microsoft was un-
| defeatable. Including myself. Little did I know how Microsoft
| was totally incapable to execute anything. Windows Mobile (
| Or heck Pocket PC ) was there years before Android was even
| founded.
|
| And Bill Gate blame it on Anti-Trust and monopoly lawsuit
| against them.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Yea he blamed it on antitrust lawsuit and said that
| Microsoft lost $400bn because of missed mobile OS
| opportunity or in another words because Android beat
| Microsoft and its Windows Mobile/Phone.
| oblio wrote:
| > Little did I know how Microsoft was totally incapable to
| execute anything <<mobile>>.
|
| Fixed that for you.
| contingencies wrote:
| I worked in mobile video in 2009-2010 and was chummy with our
| CEO who was hobnobbing with all the mobile device manufacturer
| executives. We did headline work for HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung,
| Sony-Ericsson, etc. and sold to HTC in late 2010.
|
| The way he explained it, the mobile phone industry in many
| markets, particularly the US, used to be such that the customer
| was owned by the carrier.
|
| iPhone changed the status quo in 2007: Apple could pick and
| choose carriers on their terms, the smartphone class device
| became a primary network interface for the customer, and the
| customer was effectively owned by the device manufacturer. This
| was a _huge_ threat to Google, but also the carriers.
|
| Android launched in 2009 as Google's hugely successful ally in
| their response to commodify their complement.
|
| Google politically aligned themselves with carriers and the
| status quo and maintained a 'half-open' rapid-change policy
| which has created constant API and language churn. Great
| potential futures from recent smartphone history like Samsung
| Dex (phone-based dockable Linux workstations), wireless mesh
| networking as a first-class connectivity paradigm and
| standards-based IOT control never had a chance to mature.
|
| By now we could be running UUCPesque media feeds over local ad-
| hoc wifi with free educational resources, reliable dockable
| workstations in our pocket and a self-organizing community
| economy rewarding social and environmental values. Instead we
| pay for VPNs and watch TikTok while our right to repair,
| understand or modify are wholly eroded under the auspices of an
| "open" platform shepherded by well-paid corporate lawyers and
| doublespeak.
|
| The phone industry is absolutely terrible now. It's like a
| conspiracy against society focused on capturing consumer
| attention, surveilling consumers, using them as intelligence
| nodes for building global wireless infrastructure maps and
| media OSINT and actively preventing off-carrier cooperation
| among the population. We desperately need open mobile hardware.
| oblio wrote:
| > We desperately need open mobile hardware.
|
| There's no money in it. It's dead on arrival.
|
| I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
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