It’s virtually impossible to imagine now, but back when the iPhone was launched in 2007, Google wasn’t planning to make Android for touchscreen devices. Revealed in court documents that form part of the current Apple-Samsung legal argument, a Google report explains that Android “was designed with the presence of discrete physical buttons as an assumption.
However, there is nothing fundamental in the product’s architecture that prevents the support of touchscreen in the future.”
Elsewhere, the document details many of the features of Android which endure — removable storage, third-party application support, widgets, notifications and all the various Google services — but the thinking was that physical buttons would do just fine. But then the iPhone appeared, and touchscreens didn’t just need to be supported; multitouch became a requirement. Thank goodness. [Scribd via Recode]
Picture: Masahiko Futami/Flickr