Android Ice Cream Sandwiches

and iPads and related technology. So of course I decided to be contrary and to do an episode about the history and evolution of Google Android. This is really going to be part one, the first half of Android's existence. And you know, Apple can grab the attention of the entire tech journalism world for a couple of hours with these annual events. When they hold them, they stream them live. People will stop their day lee rituals and watch this stuff.

And Android continues to be the dominant operating system in the smartphone world all the while. Estimates very but analysts say that Android accounts for somewhere between seventy and eighty five of the operating systems on all the mobile devices on the market. Now that's a pretty big range five and it shows how frustrating it is when you start to look at things like market share. It all depends

upon the analysis firm that does it. So I don't know precisely how much Android makes up on the smartphone mobile operating system world, but I know that it is the majority, far far greater than iOS. Now full disclosure, I use a Google Android phone. My current phone as of this recording is a Pixel two XL that is very much ready to be replaced, but Google has not yet made the Pixel for available as I'm according this. But I'm not a Google fanboy. While I prefer Android

to iOS, I am also quite critical about Google. The company and the history of Android has some dark stuff in it, which we will get to in our next episode in particular, and also this episode is in no way, shape or form sponsored by Google. That's completely independent. Now, to understand the origins of Android, it's first helpful to think back before either Android or iOS had debuted, so

back in say the nineties. Back then, most folks, if you had a phone a mobile phone, it was a regular cell phone and not a smartphone, probably not even a feature phone. There were some smartphones that were on the market, but nearly all of them aimed at executives as sort of the niche market, and there was a lot of emphasis on productivity features, you know, things like

calendars and email. Uh. Some cell phones had a little bit of Internet browsing capability, nearly all of it was just text based, and there was little opportunity to develop apps for phones, largely because of carrier restrictions, handset restrictions, and some of the quirks of the various operating systems out there. Those operating systems at the time were dominated

by Windows Mobile symbian and chief of all the productivity smartphones, BlackBerry. Now, the story of Android is largely wrapped up in the story of Andy Ruben. It's a story that I think Google would love to redact parts of, considering the allegations against Reuben that relate to sexual misconduct. But let's focus on what happened many years ago before we get into all of that salaceous material in the second episode. Reuben studied computer science at Utica College in New York. He

graduated in nine six. He worked as a software engineer for a company in New York. Then he went over to Switzerland for a little bit and worked as an engineer there and he met an Apple in eineer named Bill Caswell, who then offered him a job at Apple. So Ruben accepted that job and he joined Apple as a software engineer. In nine he would join a spin off that kind of left out of Apple. It was

called General Magic. General Magic was originally called the Paradigm Project when it was still part of Apple, and the goal was to develop a small handheld computing device that could also serve as a phone. Essentially, he was an early attempt to build an Apple smartphone. The idea was a good one, but a little bit ahead of its time. The company worked on developing products like operating systems and programming languages, all the stuff that would be necessary to

make such a device actually work. But General Magic was unable to find much success, partly because Apple would end up competing against it with the ill fated Newton device, and since John's Gully, who was then the CEO of Apple, was also on the board for General Magic. A lot of people at General Magic saw this as as betrayal, as Scully looking to see what General Magic was up to and then racing to beat them to the punch

with Apple. General Magic would essentially close up shop in two thousand two, and all of its assets were sold off by two thousand four. But Reuben wasn't around when that actually happened. He didn't stick around to see General Magic crumble. He had left the company way back in and joined a different company, that being web tv, and that was founded by a couple of other General Magic employees,

Steve Hurlman and Phil Goldman. Microsoft would then acquire the company in n for the princely sum of four hundred

twenty five million dollars. Now during his tenure at web tv, Bruben was listed as the person who registered the dot tv top level domain name, which I've find pretty amusing because at the time, no one really knew who Ruben was, or of course the no one knew where he was going at that point, and the fact that he had registered dot tv was something of a shock to the government of Tuvalu, is an island nation which expected to have dot tv as its country code, you know, like

dot UK is for the United Kingdom. This caused a bit of a dustop, and eventually web tv was stripped of ownership of the dot tv domain name and it was handed over to ta Valu. The country actually really depends upon revenues from other entities that are registering second level domains from dot TV. That ends up being a viable source of revenue for the nation. I think it's kind of interesting that they are largely dependent, not entirely.

I don't mean to suggest that they get all their revenue from people registering dot TV domains, but it provides a significant amount to their yearly revenue, which I find interesting. Reubens stuck with Microsoft for another couple of years before he left in to co found a new company called Danger, and he did that along with Joe Britt and Matt Hershensen. This company also focused on developing an operating system and

some hardware for a sort of proto smartphone. The focus was to offload a lot of the storage needs for the phone onto company servers. So, in other words, this was an early example of cloud storage, at least early in terms of consumers using a device that actually relied

on cloud storage. So instead of worrying about filling up the small amount of memory space you might have on such a piece of hardware, all your stuff would be stored in the cloud, so you could have a lot more images than you would be able to store on say a handheld device. The company built out a phone that had a screen that would swivel and rotate up

to reveal a physical keyboard underneath it. So when the screen was in place, like it when it was folded down, essentially, then it looked like a smartphone with a touch screen interface. But then you would push the screen just a little bit on one side, it would swivel and rotate and snap out, and then you would have the keyboard revealed underneath. And this would end up really setting this device apart.

It was called the hip Top when it was under Danger, and it really set the Hiptop apart from other phones on the market, which were mostly in either flip phone or a candy bar phone form factors, canny Bar being that solid little brick of a phone. T Mobile would partner with Danger and then rebrand the hip Top as the phone called the Sidekick. It's an incredibly popular phone of its time, and it really caught on with a

younger demographic. It was very popular because it was great for texting, which was starting to become a dominant means of communication at the time. One of the really innovative things about the hip Top slash Sidekick wasn't technological at all. It was the business model. Danger was banking on the phone's services as the revenue generator for the company, rather

than selling the hardware for a profit. So companies like Apple were known for selling devices with high profit margins, so they were selling the products for much more than it costs to make them. A lot of people talk about Apple products commanding a premium price that you might look at an Apple product and you're paying two dollars for the name Apple on top of whatever the device is worth. Uh, that's being a bit dramatic, but Apple is known for having pretty big profit margins on it's

on its various products. Danger was going a different route. They were aiming to sell the hip top at a price that was really close to what it cost to make the darned things in the first place, so essentially selling it for almost the same amount of money that it costs to manufacture them. Danger would instead focus on making money by sharing service revenues with T Mobile, so this was more of a long tail approach to generating revenue. The idea being will make money off people using this

device rather than people buying the device. The hip Top had some basic Internet features built into it, including a simple browser, and that simple browser happened to have Google set as the default web search engine, which endeared the hip Top too. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of whom were often seen using Sidekicks for quite some time. The hip Top debuted in two thousand two, and the following year, Reuben would leave the company to

co found yet another company. This one would focus on building out a robust operating system for a true smartphone. This company was called Android. Danger, by the way, would later get acquired by Microsoft long after Reuben had already left the company, and there was an incident in two thousand nine in which Microsoft lost all of that stored data for Sidekick users. The servers that had all that

data failed and it was all gone. So unless you were one of the users who had paid for a specific app that lets you store local backups of some but not all, of your Sidekick data, you lost all that stuff. This would become sort of a message of warning that cloud storage is not always full proof. So sometimes people point to that and say, yeah, do you remember Sidekick. Just because you store in the cloud doesn't mean it's going to be safe forever, which is true.

But the same thing is also true if you save stuff locally, stuff can happen to local drives too. It's just that you feel like you have more control when it's in your session. So I think for some people it's more about the sense of surrendering control than anything else. Anyway, let's get back to Android. Rubens co founders at Android

where Chris White, Nick Sears, and Rich Minor. Although you almost always only hear about Ruben when it comes to the founding of Android, they had a pretty prescient view

of what a smart device should entail. They thought of creating a device that would use location based services that would tie your experience of using the device into what was going on in the world around you, so sort of a geo tagging geolocation integration with the use of the device, and that the device itself would learn more about what you preferred as you used it, so the more you used it, the more it would tailor itself to the way you used it. It would become sympatica

with you. So it sounded like the goal was to make a device that would get a deeper understanding of the person using it and then adjust its performance accordingly, which was the stuff of science fiction back in two thousand three, no one really was convinced that you could actually do such a thing. Reuben would reveal in the two thousand thirteen speech that originally the team was actually thinking not of smartphones, but an operating system that would

be used for digital cameras. But they also recognized that digital cameras we're starting to give way to less powerful but more pervasive cell phone cameras. You know, people were starting to use their cell phones to take pictures of stuff, and it just was it was evident that, yes, digital cameras are capable of taking much better photos than cell phones, at least the cell phones of the time. But better isn't always the most important element. Sometimes convenience is more important,

and accessibility and multi functional use. And so for that reason they decided they would pivot away from creating an operating system for digital cameras and instead create one for cell phones. And they thus decided to create a mobile phone operating system. Now, Reuben's goal was to build out a mobile operating system that would be open to any and all software developers. He really wanted a rich, robust environment for apps of all shapes, sizes, and purposes. He

wanted to take an approach similar to personal computers. He didn't want it to be walled off and siloed. He wanted it to be a playing ground where lots of different people could contribute apps to that ecosystem because everybody would benefit from that. So Reuben hired a small team of engineers to start developing the operating system. And he had made a pretty decent fortune in his work at the various companies he had worked for, so he used

some of that to fund this fledgling company. Because they literally had no product to sell for a couple of years, they had no way of generating rem new so he largely funded it out of pocket, with you know, some investors adding some extra money in here and there. One decision he made very early on was to use an open source approach to developing the operating system. And I've talked a lot about open source, but here's a quick

rundown of the basic philosophy. Essentially, an open source project is transparent, meaning anyone can look into it and see what makes it tick. So in the case of open source software, you're talking about having access to the code to see how the code is constructed and how it makes the app do whatever it does, or in this case, the operating system. With many open source projects, often you are allowed to freely download tweak and then re upload

code to share with a community. So you could take the basic code for an operating system and say, you know, this is good, but it could use X, Y and Z features, and I'm going to build those out and incorporate them into the code of this operating system, and then I'll upload it as a new version. And that's a way that you can actually work within the developer

community of an open source project. So in this way, the team of developers expands from whatever in house group you happen to have to what amounts to the entire world becomes your developer community. Anyone can contribute to the code. People can add functionality, people can patch vulnerabilities, they can make offshoot programs, all that sort of stuff. Now I should add not every open source project allows for all of these things, but the basic philosophy is that a

community of developers can contribute to a project's progress. When it works well, you end up with really rapid innovation and evolution, and you aren't dependent upon any one person or groups work. Now, when it comes to Android, the way this would play out is that you would have an internal group of developers who would create the basic version of the Android operating system, whatever version that might

be at that given time. They would finish this completely in house, and then only after publishing the operating system pushing it out to users, would they then make the code available for others to download and tweak. So this was sort of a hybrid approach. You would have an in house team developing versions of this operating system, and then you would have the release of the open source

code to the community afterward. So the team got to work establishing the foundation for this operating system, and from two thousand three to two thousand five they began to design what would be a web connected operating system capable of supporting apps. In two thousand five, Android would solicit investors for funding with a business plan dependent on this mobile OS model. The company got a lot of attention in general, but it was Google that would sweep them up.

Google's founders were actually really keen to establish a stronger presence in the mobile world. Google's revenue depends upon ads and typically you know, it's largely a built on the search engine service that Google offers. Google's business isn't search,

Google's business is advertising. So Page and Brin had the goal of getting Google's search engine on more phones as quickly as possible, because already people were starting to get the sensation that mobile computing was going to be the next big thing, that people were going to start transitioning from using laptops and desktops to mobile devices. And this is still years before smartphones would become a mainstream consumer product.

People could see the writing on the wall and they said, well, if we want to get ahead of this, we want to make sure that the Google Search engine is the default search engine on as many platforms as possible, because that's where we generate our revenue now. On July eleven, two five, Google acquired Android for an undisclosed but presumably princely some The general figure that's bandied about is fifty million dollars, which isn't bad at all. The acquisition was

kept pretty quiet at the time. In fact, I found a c net piece about the acquisition that was written in two thousand seven, which was two years after it actually had happened. Google was keeping the smartphone project it was working on under wraps. Now, while Rubens team was working on building out the operating system, Google itself was searching for a hardware manufacturer to supply the actual physical handset that would be the first to host this new

operating system. Google wasn't gonna build it itself. He needed to find a manufacturing partner, so Google selected a company out of Taiwan called HTC. And here's a quick note about Taiwan. Now, if you listen to my recent episode about why Everything is Made in China, you'll remember that I mentioned that in nineteen twelve, a government called the Republic of China established itself as the new leadership structure

for what had previously been an imperialist nation. In ninety nine, the People's Public of China, which was a different thing. You had the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China. Well, the People's Republic of China was a communist organization and it still is and rested control of China, and many officials with the older government the Republic of China would flee to Taiwan. So Taiwan has operated in a sort of nebulous designation being sort of but not

really part of China. Uh. The China would argue that Taiwan is very much part of the country, and if you don't agree, then China will not work with you at all, uh. And that ends up being an issue for a lot of other countries. So they all effectively agree that Taiwan is part of China. Meanwhile, Taiwan is just not so fast there. We really are our own thing. It's a complicated issue. So anyway, this Taiwanese company got to work building a couple of prototype handsets upon which

Android would be installed. And I'll have more to say about those in just a minute, but first let's take a quick break. Okay. So HTC had started out as a computer manufacturer, that would be the Taiwanese company and question, but it had been designing and producing mobile devices since the late nine so it wasn't brand new to this. It had built a touch screen smartphone in two thousand and had built Windows based smartphones in two thousand two.

It also produced p d A s, which are not public displays of affection in this case, but rather personal digital assistance. It's kind of like a smartphone without the phone part, but would end up being Android. That would elevate HTC's status in the smartphone arena, at least for a time, and it was actually something of a risk

for HTC. The company had been making Windows mobile based phones for a while and Microsoft and Google weren't exactly best buds, so it was possible that if the Android phone would flop, HTC's involvement might be enough to convince Microsoft to take its business elsewhere, and then HTC would have backed the wrong horse. Now, the company had two basic prototype designs in those early days for the Android phone.

One was code named Sooner, which sported a small color screen, had a resolution of three two pixels, had a physical keyboard that was positioned under that screen, and it kind of looked like a more boxy version of a typical BlackBerry phone. It was all one piece. You had the screen on top and the physical keyboard beneath it. The other prototype, called Dream was kind of like the old Sidekick design. The handset screen would slide up to reveal

a physical keyboard underneath. Now, unlike the Sidekick, the screen slid up, it did not pivot and rotate up, but it was basically the same concept. Things were progressing at Google meanwhile, and then in January two seven, Apple would upset the well the the Apple cart by unveiling the upcoming iPhone, and the iPhone design was aesthetically pleasing. It is showed all the physical keyboard elements entirely put the keyboard on the screen, though the iPhone still supported a

few physical buttons. I'm sure to Jobs dismay it wasn't the first full touchscreen smartphone, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was. But based on how Steve Jobs was promoting it, and it was clearly in a league of its own. It was sleek, and the gesture controls like swiping or pinch to zoom got a lot of attention, and some companies like BlackBerry and Microsoft largely dismissed the iPhone, at least publicly stating it's a fat it's never gonna

take off. But several of the team members at Google paid attention and really re evaluated the progress of Android. According to Christa Salvo, who worked on the Android team, the Android OS looked dated in comparison, like it had come from the nineteen nineties. Until Apple unveiled the iPhone, Google had been leaning toward the Sooner handset prototype as the first piece of hardware to support the Android operating system,

but the iPhone changed that entirely. It was obvious to everyone at Google that the Sooner style phone would look too stodgy and too dated next to the sexy iPhone, and so the decision was made to focus on the Dream prototype, which was the one that had the sliding

screen and the physical keyboard. And they also decided that they would give the Android operating system a bit of an overhaul in the process, which would mean launching Android a little later than they had planned, but the general feeling was that this would help keep the project from being a big flop after Apple's splashy debut. Now, the iPhone would officially launch later in two thousand seven, while Google was still at work on the first Android phone.

In fact, Google didn't really officially acknowledge its phone efforts until around November of two thousand seven, which was months after the iPhone had launched, let alone been unveiled. The company led the effort to establish an organization called the Open Handset Alliance, with companies like T Mobile, Motorola, and Texas Instruments. In that alliance, Google would not be ready to launch until late two thousand eight, so a year after the iPhone had come out. The flagship phone was

the HTC G One. At least that's what it was called. In the United States and other parts of the world, it was called the HTC Dream. And just take a listen to these amazing specs. The phone had a single core processor that could run at a blistering five hundred twenty eight mega hurts. The phone had one two megabytes of RAM. The display measured a whopping three point two inches on the diagonal with a resolution of three hundred

twenty by four pixels. And yes, I'm being a bit cheeky as I celebrate these specifications because we have come a long way since two thousand. The iconic Android character, sometimes called the bug Droid internally, was one of several designs that were kind of trying to create a mascot or logo for Android Arena Block, a graphic artist would design the logo. She's still with Google today, though now she's a product design lead for Google AI and Research.

The phone launched with Android version one point oh, which did not have a code name, neither did its successor, Version one point one, but then with the third version of Android, the third released version, which was confusingly version one point five, Google would assign dessert names in alphabetical order, so those would become the code names for the operating

system versions. Version one point five would thenceforth be known as Cupcake, so he skipped over A and B, and that did not stand for alpha and beta since they were actually real releases of the operating system. They were not internal test builds, as an alpha and beta typically would be. But the third version would be called Cupcake, and the naming scheme would continue until the most recent build of Android OS, which was released on September three,

two thousand nineteen. That one is just called Android ten, presumably because finding a dessert name that starts with the letter Q was a little tricky. One thing Android had over the iPhone operating system, which you know we'd later call iOS, would be a few capabilities like copy and paste and true multitasking. The Android operating system could simultaneously run multiple applications, whereas on the iPhone you would have to be satisfied with running one application at a time.

You could switch between apps on an iPhone, but it would mean that the apps in the background would not be running. They'd essentially be frozen in stasis until activated by the user. Again, Google's Android was different, and keep in mind that the iPhone didn't include support for third party apps when it first launched. The g One slash Dream did. The Android market contained dozens of unique, first of a kind Android applications, according to Google, So can

you imagine that dozens? Again? I'm I'm being cheeky, because of course, back in those days it was very slow going. Google included a browser which predated Chrome, and support for Google services like YouTube and Google Maps was native for the device. The phone had support for three G cellular service, something the original iPhone lacked, though, to be fair, the second generation iPhone, the iPhone three G, would include support

for three G cellular service. That also launched in two thousand eight, so it wasn't like Apple was trailing way behind Android. It's just that they didn't include it with the initial iPhone release. On top of that, Google chose to follow an over the air update strategy, which meant that operating system updates would get sent out to all the handsets out there, at least in theory over cellular data rather than as a download that you would save to a PC and then you would transfer over to

the phone via a cable. Apple did it that way for a long time. In fact, they would not support over the air updates until iOS version five. Now, the advantages weren't necessarily evident to the mainstream public, but there were a lot of geeks, including me, that felt these

features set Android ahead of the competition. Apple would catch up, of course, implementing features in future versions of iOS, but always seeming like Apple was kind of lagging behind on certain features, perhaps purposefully to make sure that the implementation wouldn't affect the experience that Steve Jobs wanted to create with the handset. Google's approach was more you know, lucy goosey with that sort of thing. That being said, Apple was light years head when it came to graphic design

and aesthetics. The iPhone's design philosophy extended all the way to the icons that you would see on the display. Google's user interface looked like it had been built by and four engineers. It worked, but it wasn't, you know, sexy, and it wasn't quite as intuitive and interface as what Apple had created. There was a bit of a learning curve to Android, which was somewhat smoothed out when handset manufacturers began to create what amounted to special skins for

Android to make them more user friendly. They could do that because, again, the operating system was open source, so handset manufacturers could take that basic version of Android and then tweak it a little bit so it might run a bit better on that particular hardware. The HTCG one was my first smartphone. I jumped on the Android bandwagon about as early as I could. I had held off

getting a smartphone for many reasons. I didn't care for Apple's closed garden approach, and besides, I already used a lot of Google's services like Gmail and Google Docs, so I figured going with Android would make the most sense. These days, I look at all the Google stuff and I think, man, that's a company that needs to get broken up. But at the time, I was just excited to have a phone that would, at least in theory, work seamlessly with all the services I was already using.

More importantly, Google would take a fundamentally different approach than Apple. Over at Apple, the smartphone operating system was a jealously guarded property. Only Apple phones could sport iOS if you wanted to use that operating system, you had to buy a phone from Apple. No one else would be allowed to create a phone running that operating system. In this way, Apple was following the same philosophy it employed with its computer systems, apart from that one shaky period when Steve

Jobs wasn't at Apple and the company began to allow macclones. Google, however, was going the opposite direction. The open source Android was available for at least in theory, any manufacturer to use, so handset manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung began to develop their own handsets that would run the operating system. Moreover, it wasn't tied to specific carriers, although it took a

while to get support for all the different carriers. So when the iPhone launched in the United States, Apple had made an exclusivity deal with A T and T. That story could be its own podcast episode, the whole story behind a T and T and Apple exclusivity in the early days of the iPhone. But the point is that for a couple of years in the United States, iPhone users had no option when it came to service providers. It was a T and T or it was nothing.

Android would have no such restrictions, but this would introduce other problems. I'll explain more in a second, but first let's take another quick break. Android Cupcake would provide support for on screen keyboards, both from Google and from third parties, So this is a case where Google had to catch up to Apple, which had skipped the physical keyboard step entirely. Cupcake also added other features, such as the ability to

record video using the handsets camera. Android Donut would add even more features, including support for c d M A networks, which were used by companies like Verizon and Sprint in the United States. So c d M A is one type of cellular phone technology and then G s M was the other one. Uh, you can think of him

as two branches of cellular technologies. Most of the world was using g s M, but in the US you also had a couple of networks using c d M A, and once Donut added that support in and meant that companies like Verizon and Sprint could actually offer Android phones. So at that point, Android could theoretically exist on any compatible hardware on any cellular provider, and that leads into

the problem I was mentioning earlier. The main problem was fragmentation, meaning there were several different active versions of Android out on the market at the same time. Some hands that manufacturers would augment Android with software of their own, so that you'd have a slightly different flavor of Android on Samsung than you might find on Motorola, for example, And that's perfectly legit, because, as I mentioned earlier, Android is

an open source project. Google set up some rules. However, anyone who wanted to tweak Android would have to submit it to the Android Compatibility Program that would make sure that the build wasn't so different that it would no longer work with key components of the Android ecosystem like

the play Store or the Google Mobile Services. So while a company like Samsung could release its own version of Android, it would first have to submit that code to Google to make sure that could still play nice in the Google sphere overall, and carriers didn't necessarily push out Android

updates to users all at the same time. So you might have a handset that's technically capable of running the latest version of Android, but the carrier you are on hasn't distributed the OS update, so you're stuck in an older version. Then carriers could also include bloatwear that would change the nature of Android. This whole fragmentation was a point of frustration not just for users but also developers, who couldn't be certain that their work would be usable

by the majority of the Android install base. Developers typically want to take advantage of the best hardware and operating system features that they can, but when there's a lot of fragmentation in an operating system, that becomes difficult to do. This was one of those things that Steve Jobs thought would spell the end of Android, and while it was a point of pain and frustration, it didn't kill the

operating system. By two thousand nine, Apple was sticking with a T and T in the U S and Google was trying to get more carriers to offer Android phones on their networks. One big target was Verizon, and Verizon was searching for a good alternative to the iPhone because it still didn't have access to it, so it banked on an interesting alliance. The parties included Verizon, HTC, Motorola, Google, and a little company called Lucasfilm. Alright, so the Lucasfilm

thing is a little bit misleading. The big contribution that Lucasfilm would make would be to license the name Droid, which it had trademarked from the Star Wars film franchise, and it licensed it to Verizon. Thus, HTC and Motorola would manufacture handsets running the Android operating system for Verizon, which then marketed those phones as the brand Droid. In addition, the handsets were the first to feature Android version two point oh otherwise known as a Claire now like the

old HTCG one the Motorola Droid. The original Motorola Droid had a slide out physical keyboard, and if you preferred, you could use the on screen keyboard, so you had some options. The phone featured voice recognition technologies like voice Search, so you could actually engage the voice search feature, say something into the phone and it would search for that

term for you. The Droid also contributed to the death of another company, and that would be Palm, which was famous for its p d A s. Back in the

good old nineties. Palm had created a smartphone running on web os called the Palm pre and had another version called the Palm Pre Plus that was supposed to run on Verizon's network, but Verizon would largely neglect the Palm pre Plus, instead focusing its marketing power on the droid, and that helped spell the end for Palm, which would end up getting acquired and then kind of sort of

fizzled away and died. Now you could argue that Verizon got a little bit of come upance for all that, because in Verizon launched a phone from Microsoft called the Kin K I n never remember when I talked about Danger, the company that Andy Rubin co founded before he moved on to Android. Well, Microsoft had acquired Danger, and then several people from that team had worked on the Ken smartphone.

It was meant to be a phone that sort of straddled the gap between cell phone and smartphones, sort of a feature phone with lots of social media type applications in mind. But the phone was seen as a lackluster effort, and Verizon would end up discontinuing the sales of the Kin about a month and a half after launching it, and it was a bust. Now the Droid wasn't a bust.

It would become the most popular Android phone in the United States at that time and would help drive Android's success, which reached a level in which the OS became the dominant operating system in the smartphone market. Google began to outpace Apple starting in two thousand eleven, with Android available on more phones than Apple's iOS, and it would increase year over year until it reaches the crazy levels it's

at today now. However, it's very important to note that comparing iOS market share to Android market share is a little bit like comparing apples to oranges. So many Apple puns. Well, what I mean by that is that Apple has consistently taken aim at the high end market for its phones. The premium cost for Apple phones drives profits. Google's Android is available across a wide range of smartphones and price points. Google is not consume concerned about selling expensive phones because

Google doesn't sell very many phones at all. It mostly just makes the operating system available. It's more concerned with getting the operating system out there as much as it possibly can. And remember, most of those phones are not coming from Google. The company doesn't really care about how expensive any of those handsets are, so Google continues to make money off the services it provides. So, just like in the world of desktops and laptops, the real product

Google selling isn't phones or even operating systems. It's the data of users. People like me and you, especially people who use Android phones. People like me. We're generating so much data that can then be profited from in various ways. And yes, that is not something I am particularly happy about.

Sometimes we trade uh convenience, you know, well, we'll get convenience and we'll trade off some security and privacy and things like that, and then later on we wonder if we made the right choice and then think we've gone too far. But now we're going down my psyche. Let's get back to Android. Backtracking a little bit. Google unveiled a flagship phone on January. It was the Nexus one phone, which was manufactured by HTC, just like the g One had been, and it sported the Google logo on the

phone itself. The Nexus was closer and designed to the iPhone compared with other Android phones on the market, including the Droid. It had a one giga Hurts processor, It had an m o led display with a hundred by four a d resolution, had five twelve megabytes of storage, and uh five megapixel camera. This is back in the days when smartphone cameras still were just okay. This phone also would feature a pure Android build when no manufacturer

or carrier add ons, bloatware or anything like that. It was meant to be as pure a version of Android as you could possibly find, so obviously I needed to get one of these phones, and I did. Now that's not to say that the launch of the Nexus one was without its problems. For one thing, Google and HTC apparently never worked out which party would actually be responsible for providing customer support, so when something went wrong with a person's Nexus one, there wasn't really anyone to turn

to for help. Now Google would eventually address this and create a customer support department, but the lack of support on launch was a bit of a misstep, and that's putting it lightly. It was actually a really big problem. Now, rather than cover all the minnutia of Android over the next few years, I figured it'd be good to skip ahead a little bit. So Android's user interface was still a bit of a dated and clunky experience. To address that,

Google would hire Matthias Duarte. Duarte had previously worked for Ruben's old company Danger, then he went to work for Palm in the development of web os. That was largely part of his work, and he would end up working with a team to overhaul the look and feel of androids user interface. He would become essentially the Director of User Experience at Google, though his title would get juggled

around in various ways in different interviews. Duarte came in just as Google was preparing to push out the Gingerbread update to Android that was version two point three. Now. According to an interview he gave to Engadget at CS, he really didn't have time to have a big impact

on the operating system for Gingerbread. He did get involved in a conversation around the idea of parrying the OS with a specific phone, which would end up being the Nexus S. That was a phone that was produced by Samsung, but Duarte would have more of an influence on Honeycomb or Android version three. This was a peculiar version of Android. It was meant specifically for tablets, not for smartphones, so it was never released for smartphones. It was only released

for Android based tablets. Unfortunately, this would also be a version of Android that essentially fizzled out. It sported a so called holographic user interface and was the Android OS featured on the Motorola Zoom spelled x O O. M Apple had once again set the conversation by introducing the iPad tablet and succeeding where no one else had in

the consumer space. The Zoom and Honeycomb were supposed to be Google's answer to that, but it wasn't a very good answer or Early reviews criticized the lack of apps optimized for Honeycomb, and this was made worse because Google had not released the code for Honeycomb the way it had for previous versions of the Android operating system, and for the most part, Android Tablets and Honeycomb were seen

as a misfire. Now that being said, some of the design elements from Honeycomb were also in the next Android operating system for smartphones. That one was called ice Cream Sandwich or Android four point oh. Where hunting Comb and the tablets fell short, ice Cream Sandwich seemed to succeed. Critics overall liked the updated appearance of the UI. Duard was heavily involved in the design and implementation of Android four point oh, and his work was receiving praise from

critics and users. While Android had already proven itself to be a popular platform for smartphones, it was ice Cream Sandwich that helped establish a cohesive feel for the operating system. And the user interface. You know, you can look at the iPhone U I and you could say I get it. I get the esthetic, I get how it all connects together. I get what the overall vision is. The same was not true for early Android phones, so this marked a change where you could actually say, oh, I see where

the aesthetic is. I see where the design components are with Android. Now, in our next episode, we will continue the story of Android's evolution leading up to present day. We'll talk about more about rubens uh controversies, which are truly terrible allegations that are are against him, really awful stuff. So I'm kind of glad I saved that for the next episode so I don't have to go into it right now, But it does mean that Friday's recording is

going to be a doozy anyway. We're gonna conclude Android's evolution in the next episode, at least so far. Obviously, the operating system is still very much alive and well today. And if you guys have any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, you can reach out to me the email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line by popping over to the social media networks that I happen to frequent, being Facebook and Twitter. It's tech stuff HSW For both

of those. You can go to tech stuff podcast dot com to go to our website, where we have an archive of all of our past episodes. Every single one that's ever published is there. You can also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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