Android Ice Cream Sandwiches

We look at the history of Google Android from its development to the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich. This is part one of The Android Story.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
iHeart Radio and How Stuff Works and you know what
hellove all Things deck and I'm recording this episode the

(00:24):
week of September ninth, two thousand nineteen. That's the same
week that Apple held its annual event hyping new iPhones
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.

(00:48):
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

(01:11):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:35):
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

(02:59):
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,

(03:24):
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

(03:45):
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

(04:07):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:50):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:33):
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,

(05:54):
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

(06:18):
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

(06:40):
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.

(07:05):
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

(07:26):
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

(07:47):
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,

(08:10):
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,

(08:34):
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

(08:57):
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

(09:19):
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

(09:41):
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

(10:02):
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

(10:24):
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

(10:47):
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

(11:10):
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

(11:32):
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

(11:52):
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

(12:15):
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

(12:36):
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

(12:58):
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

(13:21):
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,

(13:42):
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

(14:04):
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

(14:27):
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

(14:48):
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

(15:11):
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

(15:35):
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

(15:56):
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

(16:18):
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

(16:39):
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

(17:03):
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

(17:25):
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

(17:45):
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,

(18:08):
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

(18:30):
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

(18:55):
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

(19:16):
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

(19:36):
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,

(19:58):
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

(20:20):
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

(20:42):
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

(21:02):
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.

(21:24):
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

(21:47):
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

(22:08):
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

(22:30):
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

(22:52):
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

(23:14):
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

(23:34):
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,

(23:55):
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

(24:17):
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

(24:39):
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

(24:59):
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

(25:19):
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

(25:40):
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,

(26:03):
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

(26:26):
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

(26:47):
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,

(27:08):
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

(27:31):
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

(27:52):
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

(28:16):
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,

(28:37):
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

(28:59):
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

(29:21):
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

(29:43):
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

(30:05):
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

(30:27):
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

(30:49):
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.

(31:10):
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

(31:33):
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

(31:54):
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,

(32:15):
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

(32:36):
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

(33:05):
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,

(33:27):
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,

(33:50):
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

(34:13):
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

(34:36):
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

(34:57):
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

(35:17):
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

(35:41):
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

(36:02):
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

(36:22):
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,

(36:47):
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,

(37:07):
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

(37:30):
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

(37:50):
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.

(38:11):
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.

(38:33):
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

(38:54):
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.

(39:19):
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

(39:41):
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

(40:03):
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

(40:24):
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

(40:45):
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

(41:07):
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

(41:29):
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

(41:52):
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,

(42:14):
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

(42:36):
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,

(42:57):
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.

(43:22):
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

(43:46):
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

(44:08):
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

(44:29):
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

(44:49):
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

(45:12):
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.

(45:36):
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.

(45:58):
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

(46:20):
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

(46:40):
Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.