Apple changed the mobile industry with the iPhone, and has been known to suggest that others have copied it along the way. Now, one of Android’s original software architects admits that Google had “to start over” the day the iPhone was announced.
When the iPhone was launched in 2007, Android had already been in development for two years. An excerpt from Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, published on The Atlantic, explains how Chris DeSalvo, who worked with Andy Rubin at Danger before joining Google to build Android, admitted the iPhone’s arrival forced the team into realising that they were “going to have to start over.”
Elsewhere, it cites Andy Rubin as saying “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone,” in relation to the first iteration of the Android phone Google was planning to launch, which was codenamed Sooner. Indeed, the panic eventually led to the HTC-built T-Mobile G1. Which, well, let’s not dwell on it — but at least it started Android off on what’s proven to be a fairly successful course. [The Atlantic]
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