HOW GOOGLE’S ANDROID CONQUERED THE SMARTPHONE INDUSTRY

What is the likelihood that the average smartphone is running Android? Around 75%! And this has increased in the past few years and is only likely to increase.

Even while the Android operating system gained popularity after 2010, its origins date back to 1989—not in Silicon Valley, but rather in the Cayman Islands. It was there that Andy Rubin, a?robotics engineer, had taken a holiday. He happened to come upon a man dozing off in a chair outside early one morning.

It turns out that one of the top software engineers at Apple had recently had his girlfriend evict him from his own beach property. Andy showed him compassion by providing a place to stay. At the height of the Macintosh’s popularity, he received an offer to work at Apple in exchange. With the help of this fortunate event, Andy began a fantastic career in Silicon Valley, working for Apple on the Macintosh Quadra before joining General Magic, the firm most known for creating the predecessor of the present-day smartphone.

Andy would constantly work on his own side projects while he was employed by these companies. Usually, they included his creation of bizarre robots, and soon enough, coworkers began referring to him as Andy the Android. Remarkably, Tony Fadell, the man who would go on to design the iPod and the iPhone, was one of Andy’s coworkers at General Magic.

The Hiptop

Despite the fact that General Magic’s concept was genuinely cutting-edge, the company failed because it was at least ten years ahead of its time. Nevertheless, Andy never gave up on the smartphone concept, and in 1999, he and his engineering friends established their own business to carry out that ambition.

In the end, they created the Hiptop, a phone that could wirelessly connect to the internet and had a keyboard. The Hiptop was still?a pioneer, even though it didn’t have any groundbreaking hardware.

When mobile phones first came out in 2002, they were mostly seen as corporate tools, and there had been little real effort to promote them to youngsters. Although Andy’s concept for the hip-top was an ideal combination of online access, instant messaging, and portability, he encountered a challenge prior to launching the product.

The carrier corporations dominated the mobile phone sector almost entirely back then. For any phone manufacturer, they served as the ultimate gatekeepers since, without them, phones were essentially useless. Carriers controlled almost every element of mobile phones, including pricing and marketing strategies. Andy had a hard time convincing any carrier to invest in the hip-top since it looked like a very uncertain venture.

The T-Mobile Sidekick

Ultimately, he was forced to reach a terrible agreement with T-Mobile, the only business that showed even a passing interest. They got to rebrand Andy’s phone and release it as the T-Mobile Sidekick in addition to demanding a sizable portion of all sales. Although it was largely adopted by wealthy city youth, it was only moderately successful.

Enter Larry Page and Google

Nevertheless, Larry Page, a Google co-founder, managed to get hold of the phone. At the time, Google wasn’t nearly as well-known as it is now. In actuality, it lagged behind search engines like Yahoo and AOL. For this reason, Larry was pleasantly delighted to see that Google was Andy’s phone’s default search engine.

Larry believed that smartphones had enormous potential and wanted Google to produce their own, but he was aware that the carriers would never permit an outsider to steal their earnings. So he hesitated because he believed it was still too early for Google to take on the carriers. By chance, Andy would go on to create a new business model over the next three years that would allow the carrier monopoly to be ended.

Android

Danger Inc., Andy’s?previous company, was a typical manufacturer that relied on sales of hardware to generate revenue. This directly conflicted with the carriers’ desire to keep their customers on the same phone as long as possible in order to keep them from moving to other providers. Andy came up with a really clever plan to resolve this conflict of interest.

Rather than?relying on sales of hardware, he would provide his software at no cost, collecting a cut of the carrier service charges. Andy intended to make his operating system open source so that anyone could use it and create applications for it because he was aware of the challenges faced by developers of phone apps at the time. In 2004, he brought these two concepts together to start a new firm dubbed Android. While the rest of the world mocked his idealism, Google realized that this was the moment they had been waiting for.

After?a year, Android was still limited to a barely functional demo but?Google paid $50 million to acquire the entire firm. Google had?very obvious intentions. They intended to offer their services on a specialized platform since they anticipated the growth of mobile computing. That’s exactly what Andy and his group were brought in for, and they were even given their own building at the Googleplex.

They would transform their ground-breaking concept into a working operating system over the course of the following two years. However, that was only the initial step. To really market it, they still had to work with a carrier to build a phone that would run the OS. It was not too hard to find someone to construct the phone, but it was somewhat tough to persuade a carrier to voluntarily cede control of the phone market.

The iPhone is introduced

Google was in fact?rejected by every single carrier they reached out to. The iPhone was then introduced by Apple on January 9, 2007. The very following day was a complete mess at the Android workplace. Although they had dabbled in touchscreen technology, no one had anticipated that Apple would incorporate it entirely into their phone. Andy’s team entirely revamped their product over the course of the following nine months, incorporating touchscreen functionality on top of the pre-existing keyboard. Strangely enough, the arrival of the iPhone really benefited Android.

Andy was keen to shatter the carrier monopoly, but Apple wasn’t nearly as desperate to do the same. Steve Jobs had simply followed the trend,?securing an exclusive agreement with AT&T in order to expedite the release of the iPhone. However, the other carriers became alarmed upon realizing just how popular the iPhone was; they feared that AT&T would eventually take the lead in the smartphone industry as a result of its early advantage.

T-Mobile and the HTC Dream

T-Mobile was ultimately persuaded to sell the HTC Dream, the first Android phone, as a result of this panic. However, it would require an additional year for Andy’s team to ultimately release it, so providing Steve Jobs with ample opportunity to seize market share.

However, Google was not unprepared. With the extra time, they forged partnerships with manufacturers, software developers, and carriers. Apple’s partnership with AT&T made it clear to all of them that cooperation was required. The threat by Steve Jobs to disrupt their entire business model increased the economic value of Android’s open-source offering. Carriers and manufacturers could be sure that Google wouldn’t misuse its control over the Android platform because Android wasn’t a closed-off system like iOS. Thus, the Open Handset Alliance was established in November 2007. But the battle against Apple would not be simple; by the middle of 2009, iOS accounted for 40% of the smartphone market.

Verizon and Motorola Droid

Older iPhones ran on the aging Symbian OS, which contributed significantly to its market share. With the Motorola Droid, Android achieved its first significant win in the midst of Symbian’s downfall. When the Droid was released in 2009, Verizon directly invested $100 million on marketing it as an alternative to the iPhone because the carriers were afraid they?would become obsolete. The Android OS swiftly gained widespread market acceptance after that.

Android surpasses iOs

Since the low cost and variety of Android were the exact antithesis of Apple’s motto of premium price and exclusivity, the company hardly made an effort to curtail it. Android eventually?became the most prevalent mobile operating system in the world by the end of 2010; it continues to maintain this title even now, having already eclipsed iOS in terms of market share by May of that same year.

Android continues to be the most widely used mobile operating system worldwide, despite harsh criticism on a number of concerns from many quarters. Malware problems and vulnerabilities haven’t reduced Android’s appeal. As of August 2017, Android has over 2 billion monthly active users and holds 72.7% of the global mobile phone market. The only thing separating Android from monopoly at the moment is iOS, and Android isn’t slowing down.

—

Boney Maundu

Tech Contractor & Writer

Slim Bz TechSystems: Nairobi