This sort of cements the idea that Android really is a copy of iOS in most ways. Of course they've made some of their own innovations, and there are a few things that work better than on iOS.<p>I think Steve Jobs was probably justified in his furious reaction to Android.<p>disclosure: Android user, I dislike many aspects of iOS, namely the restrictive policies of the app store, and the totally broken app sharing UX.
If you have the chance, it really is worth going back and watching the original iPhone release video. It's pretty amazing to see some of the things that were so new and exciting a few years ago now so much a part of the phone landscape that we can't even imagine a phone without them. It's almost more amazing to see how basic it seems compared to what we have now, just 6 years later.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ</a>
As someone that has a lot of Apple products I'm glad they have competition. I don't think any one company should have a monopoly on the modern touchscreen smartphone concept. That being said I wish more Android fans would accept that Google directly copied a lot of ideas from their competition. And that's okay. It would be one thing if Android looked like a direct copy of iOS but it doesn't. It just uses the same technologies. On the other hand, when unscrupulous companies like Samsung try to capitalize on Apples success by directly copying the product they should be slapped down and reminded to do their own thing. It's all about balancing the rights of innovators and the protections for consumers.
Apple annoys me with how closed off they are in many ways, but this is the example I always bring up when people are trying to HATE Apple for being so closed off - they destroyed the most destructive force in mobile UX ever - the phone company oligopoly. Besides also presenting the only ever true competitor to the Microsoft PC, that's their biggest contribution to openness (whether done intentionally or not).
> Larry Page: “We had a closet full of over 100 phones [that we were developing software for], and we were building our software pretty much one device at a time,” he said in his 2012 report to shareholders. In various remarks over the years he has described the experience as both “awful” and “incredibly painful.”<p>... 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.
This is not actually true, although it makes a good myth.<p>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:<p><a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/25264" rel="nofollow">http://www.osnews.com/story/25264</a>
Android already existed before Google bought it, and at the time it was built mainly as a competitor to Blackberry (before Google bought them). So Google continued on the same path, as they were less interested in "changing the paradigm of mobile UX" than in killing the Real Fragmentation that existed before, with each OEM having its own OS, and unifying them under the open source Android.<p>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.
Steve doesn't get enough credit with many HN types. He was also the spark that launched the multi-billion dollar mobile industry. Samsung, Google, etc now all aggressively compete with huge resources. Hopefully, Elon will do the same with the electric car and rockets. If Elon, is successful enough with electric cars, for example, then others will follow, and more resources will be thrown at the problem.
I wondered what Sooner was like, closest I could find:<p><a href="http://blog.steventroughtonsmith.com/2012/05/2007s-pre-m3-version-of-android-google.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.steventroughtonsmith.com/2012/05/2007s-pre-m3-ve...</a><p>There is also a video, pretty similar device.
When I first saw the headline, I thought the article would be about throwing Dalvik away and going with AOT compilation (as in the new ART). I've heard a lot of people complain that Android is more laggy/less smooth than iOS, and I always suspected Dalvik is a big part of that.
Interesting to see how this report has been buried on HN<p>This post is on page 3 and ranked 75.
it says "59 points by bluekitten 2 hours ago"<p>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"