I'm from one of the poorest countries. I could buy my first smart-phone because of the availability of cheaper Android phones. I'm bit of geek because of the openness of Android, at least I'm aware of what software runs inside my phone. I expressed my true sentiments and my post was down voted. What a irony!
It is interesting to note that the term "Open Source" was coined as a counterpart/in opposition to "Free Software" by those who were interested in sharing code but who did not ascribe to some of the more extreme aspects of Stallman's philosophy. It is interesting, because really, what has Android being "Open Source" really done? Are customers less beholden to telecoms for their devices? Have prices dropped or competition increased? What percent of Android device owners have compiled their own kernel? Have read the Android source?
> In ten to fifteen years' time, we will look back and regard Android as the technology that enabled even the poorest people in this world to have access to the web (and thus, knowledge), just like we regard Nokia as the company that put the mobile phone in every corner of the globe.
...and just like we regard Microsoft as the company that put computers into every home.
I think prices are lower than they would have been without android. Without debating the openness of the software, Android still gave phone manufacturers a huge code base for their smart phones that they would have had to develop otherwise, and their software probably wouldn't have been as good. Just look at the selection of "free" smart phones from T-mobile: http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/?shape=smp
I doubt the diversity and quality of those phones would have been possible without Android.
The cost of a Windows license was never a material factor in the cost of a computer. Windows just happened to work on the widest range of hardware, much like Android. Being "open" has little to nothing to do with that.
What I find lacking in all of this Android chest-bumping is the recognition of what made it possible for so many smart phones to be priced reasonably: the decreasing price of flash storage. If we're going to point to anything as the cause for smart phone ubiquity, shouldn't we consider what Apple has done to drive down the price of flash?
The difference in this case is that Android can be customized and tailored however a carrier or manufacturer wants, because the source code is in fact available. Windows never allowed for that.
I think the biggest thing Google brought to table isn't necessarily the code for the OS, but a platform with momentum that others could easily tap into. I'm sure Huawei could have developed their own mobile OS platform, but convincing a ton of developers to develop for it would have been hard.
Ok, I know it's cool to make snarky comments about Microsoft, but what Microsoft has managed to achieve with Windows during the 90s was a truly historic leap. They created incredibly accessible OS that could be used by the masses even without any previous computer experience. And to give credit to Microsoft marketing, they sold this product so well that they had over 90% of market share. It's debatable whether that's a good thing or not. But if it weren't for Windows 3.1, 95, and 98, I am pretty sure millions of people wouldn't have purchased their first computer for years to come during the 90s.
My comment wasn't intended to be snarky. I do not begrudge Microsoft their success. Rather, I wanted to point out that Android's success, much like Microsoft's in the 90s, is due to it being a commodity OS during a period of rapidly decreasing commodity hardware costs. "Open" really has little to nothing to do with it.
Good heavens, that's a complete rewrite of history. It certainly wasn't the case that Microsoft created this incredibly accessible OS. What they did was make a crude and far less accessible copy of the Apple OS. What they did well, was allow it to run on generic hardware (what we used to call "IBM clones"). It was simply a strategic marketing decision that made it affordable and therefore brought it to the masses.
Windows and Mac OS both derived their GUI idea from Xerox lab. While it is true that Gates got a glimpse of it initially from working with Jobs, Windows is hardly "a crude and far less accessible copy of the Apple OS". This statement you made is the one that's sensationalist and fictional rewrite of history.
Yeah, the Apple OS source code (loaned to microsoft for the purposes of writing Word for Mac) that ended up in the windows code base was just .. uh... That was really from xerox. Honest! Oh no wait, it was just an accident, and had nothing at all to do with copying the Mac OS and it'll never happen again.
Microsoft's monopoly power originated from their success with Windows, and was used to abuse competitors later on. Without the initial success of Windows, they wouldn't have had that power. Make no mistakes, Microsoft was evil (and probably would be if it wasn't such a shell of its former self), but the initial success of Windows was (more or less) legitimately won.
Remember DOS? The operating system, if you could call it that, of the original IBM PC, and MS-DOS, the OS that ran on all the IBM-compatible clones? The PCs that took the market away from Apple? The ones that established Microsoft's monopoly?
The market was different back then. There were a lot of choices, like PC-DOS, and even other computer systems like Mac, Atari, Amiga etc. MS-DOS itself did not give them a monopoly. It was an advantage of course, but not a "competition killer". It could have been IBM's OS/2 that would have "won", or a world with more cross platform development.
What Microsoft managed to achieve in the market with Windows was impressive. Windows itself has never been particularly interesting interface-wise, or technologically. Microsoft was successful at putting their software in front of people. If they didn't, someone else would have - in all likelihood, someone else with superior software such as Apple or Commodore.
What it's largely done is allowed people who are nothing to do with Google to produce devices with the OS on them, and made it possible for things like CyanogenMod to exist.
>> It is interesting, because really, what has Android being "Open Source" really done?
You mean, besides this (from the G+ post conversation): "Historians are, however, going to make note of how the open source Android platform (or its later forks and clones) played a role in facilitating everything from low-cost solar-powered devices in the remotest villages in India and Africa, to a hundred million tablets computers in the classroom each revolutionizing education for children all across Asia and the Middle East, to putting an Internet-connected smartphone in the hands of every man, woman, and child in America, even those from the perpetually overlooked majority that simply can't afford a shiny brand-new iPhone or Galaxy Nexus every Christmas."
This is already happening. Now. And it is happening because Android has successfully commoditized the mobile OS. I'm seeing it happen where I grew up. Where people cannot afford iPhones and Galaxy Nexuses. But they can now afford an Android smartphone.
From the G+ post, again: " That there's now an eminently capable open source mobile operating system, one that is free to use and free to fork, means that the knowledge advantage can be better and more evenly distributed across the planet than ever before."
Anyone, anywhere can build and distribute their own Android-based device. They are already doing this. Isn't that one of the cornerstones of an open source project?
>> " Are customers less beholden to telecoms for their devices? Have prices dropped or competition increased? What percent of Android device owners have compiled their own kernel? Have read the Android source?"
Do you ask this of Apache, Asterisk etc?
You say elsewhere that "The cost of a Windows license was never a material factor in the cost of a computer.". For you perhaps, but it definitely was a factor in my part of the world.
My question to you is why all of this should be attributed to Android and not to the open source movement as a whole? That Google has contributed immensely, more so than any other company of a comparable size, to the open source community is undeniable. However, I would like to believe that the open source community is larger than just Google. Call it Android, call it Linux, call it what you like...just don't get into the mentality that "without Google we wouldn't have all this". That sort of thinking can lead to a dangerous over-reliance on a single, corporate, profit driven entity.
My question to you is why all of this should be attributed to Android and not to the open source movement as a whole?
Because it takes significant financial effort to push forward a complete smartphone OS with a set of basic apps.
Do you know OpenMoko (http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page)? They were (are?) working on the same goal as Android, just more open and less subsidized. For years they struggled to create an OS which would allow dialing a phone number without invoking a terminal emulator.
What about Moblin/Maemo/Meego? Another Open Source attempt at Smartphones that failed due to inconsistent/missing support from its main financial contributors (Nokia and Intel).
Of course the whole thing is about standing on the shoulders of giants, and all these projects profited immensely from the availability of the Linux kernel, GCC and other large OSS projects. However, all these projects do exist for a long time already, and as the other examples should indicate, it is all but easy to create a SmartPhone experience from them.
With all that said, I do not it like very much either that Android is so closely-coupled to Google. However, they made the breakthrough now and it does not look like there is any "real" OSS competitor left.
> However, they made the breakthrough now and it does not look like there is any "real" OSS competitor left.
That is precisely why it is so significant that Android is also open source.
The bestseller "Android" tablet of this year is probably the Kindle Fire, that is completely divorced of Google. There have been consistent rumors that Amazon will step in with a few more tablet variants and a phone in the coming year. Facebook - Google's direct rival - was rumoured to be trying out an "Android" phone of their own.
All this is possible only because Android is open source.
It is fine to wish that Android is less loosely coupled from Google. Personally I think this is the only pragmatic choice. Android is not pure software, it is tightly integrated with hardware. Linux's achilles' heel for a long old time was device drivers. Android has mostly sidestepped this issue due to Google "owning" the project and working with the hardware vendors.
It would be nice to allow community input (commits, patches etc) into Android, but that I can understand why they don't right now. The thing is, anyone can create a more open fork that does this - and it wouldn't matter due to lack of hardware support.
The next best thing is to work downstream of the hardware, which is what Cyanogenmod and other teams have done. And they have been mighty successful at it too. When you see community teams boot Android on iPhones, Playbooks, Kindle Fires and so on, you are witnessing the benefit of having a free open source mobile OS.
Android may be the Linux variant that has succeeded in the mobile world, but that doesn't mean Android variants can't exist.
Mozilla is still working on Boot to Gecko, which borrows from Android for some of the hardware interface:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
Needless to say, only possible because it is open source.
I agree with all that you said, and I like the different directions Android-based hard- and software is developing.
However, the first thing many people try to do on their Fire, and something well-integrated into CM's installation process is the addition of Google apps, especially Android Market. And here we have a strong dependency on Google which even Amazon can not break with its own distribution channel (google for "install android market on kindle fire" for evidence).
I think the iPhone set the bar for user experience and helped pull everybody out of the dark ages of jamming scaled-down desktop experiences on a tiny screen.
I really agree with the post though. One day enough people with time on their hands will be able to adapt Android to all sorts of cheap hardware which might scale greatly for the developing world.
I think the wrangling over Apple's sold/shipped devices is a little over the top - unlike some of the unreliable figures released for adroid tablets, for example, I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that Apple doesn't sell the large majority of the devices it ships.
I can already see how much of this thread is going to play out. Before we get into a fight about whether Android is "open" enough or not, can we defer to the thread about Macro's post? There have already been dozens of comments about the subject today.
Wow. Scumbag HN, downvotes comment asking to refer to discussion that occurred minutes before. Repeats discussion that occurred minutes before. I guess I don't mind if this gets downvotes, the dozen or two comments in the middle of this are more or less copy and pasted from the discussion that occurred earlier today.
"whiny douche"? Well, that pretty much put the nail in the coffin. Guess the other reply today about proggit compared to here was probably right. Tis a shame.
Sorry the "post by Marco" wasn't relevant enough when it was sitting right next to this link, said "marco.com" and had hundreds of comments.
Dasil003, you're really going to call me a douche when you were even commenting in that thread? Sorry, I'm not going to resort to calling you a name.
You can talk up your favorite team, principle or country without a point by point attack on your rivals. Apple has had some great successes and failures that open source can learn from and can stand on their shoulders to make an even better product. Characterizing Apple and Jobs as some one dimensional boogy man doent really contribute to growth. No need for flame ware rehash.
But the article has a perfectly good point to make. That it's couched in the usual rivalry terms is unfortunate, but hey, that's the way of the world.
It's legitimate to say that Android will be the driving force for commoditizing smartphones, however. iOS will not be that force, and I think that's fine. That has never been Apple's goal, and it shows. It's like saying Mercedes won't drive commoditization of the latest feature in their car (e.g., HUDs or auto-parallel-parking). No, that'll be a smaller company. Mercedes is in charge of being up front putting it in to begin with for the people willing to pay more to get it. Once it's become cheaper, Ford can then integrate it in their upper lines, and then their mid-levels, and then it becomes a standard feature for pretty much all cars.
Similarly, Apple basically rewrote the book on smartphone UIs. There is very little you can say to truly countermand that. They may not be the 100% originators of all of the ideas, but the iPhone was the first phone of its kind. Android followed along, and started out expensive, then got cheaper, and now they're moving towards ultra-cheap smartphones running Android. Same evolution. The products have different purposes and different targets, that's all.
The only reason I bring this up is that I really don't often see flamewars between Mercedes drivers and Ford drivers. I suppose this might be because car companies differentiate tiers by brand, while in the case of Android, there are both high-end and low-end Android phones that are marketed under the exact same name, and these will obviously provide a different experience.
> It's legitimate to say that Android will be the driving force for commoditizing smartphones, however. iOS will not be that force, and I think that's fine.
I'm not sure about that, cheaper iPhones have been available with every new release, last year european operators already offered 0€ iPhones with 2 years contracts, and the 3GS has gotten one more year lease on life being advertised as a $99 phone in the US.
edit: -1 without any discussion because I point out iphones are available "for free", which seriously sounds like commoditization? That's an interesting HN dynamic.
Subsidy purchasing is not free. Most low end markets are hugely bias to pay as you go due to income variances from agriculture incomes. iOS devices in that regard are a much higher price of entry point than alternatives.
Not that I down voted but this is may be why.
Yeah, masklinn, you make a decent point in richer markets, but I think it's unlikely we'll see a $25, no-contract iPhone or iPad, while we've already seen (extremely crappy) Android devices that are remarkably close to that range. frankydp is right in that the free 2-year-contract iPhones are still quite expensive without a contract when we're talking about poorer nations.
Or perhaps I should hedge and say I think Android will get there first, and probably much before. Who knows whether Apple will decide to go after that segment or not in the long run (though it's not exactly their style).
>You can talk up your favorite team, principle or country without a point by point attack on your rivals.
I think that applies more to Gruber and Siegler than anyone else, as their attacks on all things Google and Android have only become more vicious as Android's marketshare started taking off.
For the first time, a smartphone operating system is going to impact more than rich people in the US and Europe, and that is pretty darn revolutionary.
Simply and powerfully put. As third-world countries come online they are going to be starting and staying with the mobile web. You can already see this at work in a number of African countries where mobile payments have proliferated and matured at an astonishing rate. That is just an early signal of the tectonic shift occurring.
I just hope that the poor of the world don't end up with a $180 phone bill like I have to deal with in order to have mobile web access. Sadly, in some countries that would be almost 6 months' income.
Here in the UK, my mobile phone bill is £3.33/month and I get 500MB of data with that.
EDIT: I do this by using T-Mobile PAYG and buying their 6 month Internet booster for £20, twice a year. I've managed to convince all my regular contacts to use Kik Messenger instead of SMS, so I don't have to pay for SMS. I very rarely make phone calls, but I have VOIP with localphone.com when I have to.
Just checked out ovh. Looks good, but because of ovh's 99p/month charge, it still works out cheaper to use localphone unless you make at least a couple of hours of calls per month.
I end up using 700 minutes per month just on my line, but I really only talk for about an hour. The majority of my calls are 5-30 second messages from my employer.
You do get an incoming number that would cost a lot more with localphone. You see localphone is a business and needs to make money. OVH thinks it's a charity just like Google. Maybe a little more generous. I absolutely love their kimsufi.co.uk servers.
At the time I wrote the post, Google's conversion told me it was in the high $4 range. Right now it's saying it is $5.17. Close enough to let the point stand.
More people in India have mobile phones than have access to sanitary toilets.
The average Indian user is worth about 0.03c to a network, with no contracts or lockins, and people frequently switch network to network depending on deals.
In fact, in order to avoid fees, a new system has appeared. Calling, letting it ring once, and hanging up. It doesn't cost but it DOES ping the other person.
These call-backs are becoming so pervasive that businesses let people call-back and the business calls them back, at their own expensive, to offer whatever service. Some Indian apps are also incorporating the call-back system into their communication structure.
Don't think that just because we have dumb contracts and bills that the developing world will as well.
Data rates are much cheaper in places where telecom companies don't have to recover the cost of old and outdated equipment. For example, the rates in India are very reasonable, even from mainstream operators
> You can already see this at work in a number of African countries where mobile payments have proliferated and matured at an astonishing rate.
This, however, has been going on for half a decade and has absolutely nothing to do with smartphone and smartphone OSes.
If anything, smartphones and their terrible battery lives can only hamper that kind of efforts in places where access to electricity is unreliable and a common charging technology is handcrank-powered.
edit: ah, so going against the completely nonsensical (because absent) link implied by richardburton between smartphones and african mobile payments (let alone Android and the latter) yields graytexting. Thanks, I guess?
> This, however, has been going on for half a decade and has absolutely nothing to do with smartphone and smartphone OSes.
No, but more and more smartphones (hopefully with better battery life than the top of the line stuff we get in the west) will start being sold in Africa and from the looks of it they will be powered by Android.
I have been to Africa. Its quite big. Most people have the regular nokia phones. But there are still a large number of people (tens of millions) with smartphones. And the most popular smartphone appears to be the blackberry. It completely dominates. Maybe because the networks bias their dataplans towards the blackberry and maybe the messaging, I don't know. And there is peer pressure. My android phone was looked at with scorn and there were many helpful suggestions to switch to the blackberry to which I had to constantly explain that I was happy with my phone. The android tablets fare better though.
Could it be Blackberry is popular because of the free "ping" service? At least that is what seems to drive the mass adoption of them (and the peer pressure) among teenagers here in the Netherlands: the free unlimited "texting" with other Blackberry users.
This is an interesting take on the long view of the smartphone market. I think the linked google plus comment is more insightful than the article itself, if you skipped it the first time go back and give it a read.
Apple is building a luxury device.
Google is turning what was once luxury into a commodity.
It makes sense too. The difference in revenue streams boils down to, Apple makes cash from the upgrade train, Google makes cash when people use the web. Getting the web in everyones hands is a plus for google, but a huge plus for humankind. I'm glad that their interests so closely line up with the big picture in this situation.
Not specific to phones, I just love it when things get commoditized. It means that the next round of new and exciting things built upon it can finally gain some steam.
"I'm even more excited about seeing a $25 mobile device that has access to a killer web browser and endless mobile apps, and watching that device appear in the hands of a billion school children over the next 10 years."
I would be excited to see that too. Can anyone point me towards such a device?
"What Nokia did for the mobile phone, Android is doing for the smartphone."
I don't see how, because Nokia is a hardware manufacturer who actually makes phones, and Android is just an operating system. It seems to me the hard part of getting to the $25 unlocked price point is the hardware, not the OS. Android is not even the only open-source phone operating system--how about Meego, created by (aptly) Nokia, and hosted by the nonprofit Linux Foundation?
Android is a cool product, but I have a hard time swallowing the self-congratulatory posturing. So far Android has not done a single thing for the 3rd world poor. As far as I can tell, so far all it has done is provided the skeleton for a bunch of proprietary implementations by first-world hardware manufacturers and mobile operators.
"The iPhone is heralded as the most revolutionary mobile phone in human history, but the cold and harsh truth is that for all the cheering and punditry, the iPhone's impact on the world is negligible."
Don't care for Android vs. iPhone arguments but lets at least admit that iPhone was a significant catalyst that moved forward the smartphone movement initially at the least. Androids would probably still exist if Apple never put out the iPhone but the iPhone has certainly been one of the biggest influences on Android's development not to mention the entire mobile industry. In that regard I see the author's statement as pretty narrow. Its like saying Unix had no impact on computing because Microsoft had the lion's share.
The Unix Windows analogy was the first thing I thought of when i read that quote. also, the author's definition of revolutionary seems to oscillate between impact on the world and the impact on the industry.
I don't think the Unix-Windows analogy is very apt, actually, as both have been revolutionary in different ways (by any measure). *nix has gone on to power much of the software on which the Internet runs. Windows powers much of the software user's directly interact with. By comparison, Apple/iOS and Android are competing more directly.
The author of the article is arguing that more revolutionary than being the first (or even the best) at something is subsequently making that innovation accessible to as many people as possible. This is something both Unix and Windows have achieved, Android is trying to achieve, but I'm not sure Apple is even interested in.
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be the invention of the automobile vs. the assembly line. True, the automobile was a genuine innovation, but the assembly line put the automobile within reach of everyone.
With this view in mind, it's okay that Apple wants to focus on pushing the envelope in what its car can do. Likewise, it's okay that Google wants to focus on making those or similar innovations accessible to as many as possible.
> Androids would probably still exist if Apple never put out the iPhone
While Android would definitely exist (it predates the iPhone's unveiling by years) it would be a very, very different beast. It might have moved towards its current state over time, but its first handsets would have been much more similar to the Blackberries of the time. In fact, this (recorded) origin still plagues the platform to this day, it's one of the sources of the structural issues leading to "insufficient" responsiveness.
Android was released September 20, 2008. The first iPhone, thus iOS, was released June 27, 2007. I fail to see how Android predates iOS by years.
*Edit for folks who are voting this down:
I am not making any kind of argument in favor of one platform or another. I am simply commenting on what was said in the parent comment.
The release dates are simple fact. Go to Wikipedia like I did and find it for yourself. Apple got to the market over a year before Google released its first product based on Android.
The first version of iOS was in development for a long time, as was the first version of Android, before the world ever really got to see them. Thus, saying that Android was in development years before iOS implies that iOS was some last minute project Apple threw together. It's simply not true in either case.
No one is making any kind of argument that Android is an iOS clone. At least I'm not.
Yes, both were in development for years before the world got to see anything. To the original point of my comment, though, Android didn't predate iOS by years as the parent comment says. That comment implies that iOS copied from Android, which I am refuting.
The word you've missed is "unveiling". He did not claim that Android came before iOS, but that it was under development for long before iOS was unveiled.
EDIT: The point that you're refuting was never made. He simply said that Android would still have existed, even if iOS hadn't. And to prove that point, he correctly stated that Android was under development for a long period of time before iOS was unveiled
Correct... That isn't being disputed. The comment was:
"While Android would definitely exist (it predates the iPhone's unveiling by years) it would be a very, very different beast."
The "controversy" is around the claim of Android existing before iOS. That claim wasn't even made though if you read that comment correctly and notice the word "unveiling"
Incorrect. That image is banded around just to serve a particular viewpoint. There was already a capacitive touchscreen android device in the prototype stages at the same time. Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
> Android was released September 20, 2008. The first iPhone, thus iOS, was released June 27, 2007. I fail to see how Android predates iOS by years.
Google bought Android (the company, whose sole purpose was to make the corresponding OS and sell itself) in 2005. Therefore Android existed long before the unveiling of iPhone in 2007.
> The release dates are simple fact.
Yes. I was not, however, talking about release date but about existence. This could have been clearer. The first public/commercial Android release followed iPhone by a year (and significant reworks, see... everything following the parenthesized section of my original comment).
> The first version of iOS was in development for a long time, as was the first version of Android, before the world ever really got to see them. Thus, saying that Android was in development years before iOS implies that iOS was some last minute project Apple threw together. It's simply not true in either case.
That is not even remotely close to what I stated. What I stated was that Android's existence predates iPhone's unveiling by years. At no point did I say (or even imply) anything about iOS's development period.
I think the iphone had two innovations that moved the industry forward: (1) a first-class finger-driven interface and (2) a desktop-class browser optimized for mobile viewing instead of a dedicated mobile browsing engine.
Android would probably have gotten the high-quality browser with or without the iphone, but the touch interface wasn't likely to happen in isolation. The notion that the way to improve the UI of mobile devices was to make it much less precise is preposterous, and it took apple to show people the way.
So yes apple did have an impact, but from the context of what the article considers meaningful, it is indeed not a very big one.
1. Google did not build Android from scratch, Google bought the company which created Android, and built it to a releasable platform from there.
2. Inferno has nothing to do with Google, the only (remote) link is that Inferno is that Ken Thompson worked on its predecessor (Plan9). I'm not even sure Thompson worked on Inferno itself.
3. I've never seen any claim that Google uses Inferno anywhere.
So a better question would be: what makes you bring up Inferno in a place where it has no reason whatsoever to be?
Maybe webOS will have its chance to play the same role. Android is getting hit hard by the patent wars. webOS is soon to be open, has a strong community of tinkerers already, and to develop for it all you need to know are HTML/CSS/JS - much like developing for the mobile web. If HP plays their cards right, and Android as a platform is enervated enough by the companies that have an interest in it muddling it up with suits and countersuits, perhaps webOS will get its chance to shine.
For the author revolutionary seems to mean "reaches the most people". My definition is closer to "radically new or innovative".
The iPhone drastically redefined the smartphone market including the competitors that followed it. Hard for me to swallow that its effect on the world has been negligible.
Nope. It doesn't mean "reaches the most people". It means "has the most impact on the world". I think that Android will be the technology that allows people in poorer places of the world to have the internet - and thus, knowledge, and thus, power - in their pocket. That is going to change the world in a significant way.
Even something as simple as this: the internet may have information on the best way to treat sick cattle, or how to best treat certain crops. Heck, in more developed areas, it may cut the reaction time of aid services drastically.
But in the context of what the OP is saying, what does that matter? The point is that an open source Android will be available to many, many more people worldwide than the iPhone ever will. Where their UI inspiration came from isn't really all that relevant.
Really? I guess we can wait and see, or we can already start attributing accolades to Android that have not happened yet. I still see people bringing up Xerox Parc all the time with respect to the GUI, so maybe where UI inspiration comes from is relevant?
> I still see people bringing up Xerox Parc all the time
> with respect to the GUI, so maybe where UI inspiration
> comes from is relevant?
That's a very good point. Some talk as if Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC 1:1 and just reimplemented what he saw. In reality he saw only the concept, and Apple hugely expanded it, implementing lots of stuff what was not there (as "simple" as overlapping windows e.g.). And PARC was compensated for the ideas too.
Time will tell. I think you're wrong. Most of the third world doesn't even have a reliable cell phone service and, of course, little money, so there are few consumers to target ads at.
On a practical note, battery life matters in impoverished regions, best of luck with your "might last 24 hours, 36 if you're really lucky" Android handset.
Your second paragraph is warm and fuzzy nonsense, you should be ashamed of yourself for writing it.
Smartphones are designed for the needs of the developed world, the less developed world has it's requirements too, I doubt that internet enabled smart phones are high on the list.
And those alleged $80 handsets, how long exactly until they break and require servicing? Google "android failure rate", (less than e.g. iPhones, you can check), compare it those to conventional mobile phones.
I don't think it's as bad as you make it seem, but not by much: internet access is definitely nonsense in countries where mere electricity availability is spotty to start with (which is a common issue in sub-saharan Africa, communal charging for cell phones is common), it requires both electricity and a much higher density of cells than basic GSM voice and text; and battery life on current smartphones makes them a very hard sell in such countries (see: spotty electricity availability).
However I do think smartphones are a logical and valuable extension of cell phones in developing countries, not in that they improve communication but in that they make "offline" information more readily available, things like medical knowledge applications are not really possible on a "dumbphone" (limited screen real estate and controls) but a smartphone can replace stacks of books, can be carried and can be kept "current" by updating its applications a few times a year.
I see value in that, lots of it.
Oh, and $80 handsets are not even close to fixing this, the majority of sub-saharan africa (in terms of population) lives below the UN's poverty threshold. Which is under $2/day.
I see these $80 handsets going to the "upper crust" of these societies more than to the poorest segments.
> Most of the third world doesn't even have a reliable cell phone service
Wrong. Most of the third world has excellent cell phone service and they're using cell phones for far more stuff than we do. In Kenya, for instance, you can make small payments using your regular, non-smart cell phone.
> of course, little money, so there are few consumers to target ads at
They have advertising in the third world as well. I doubt that's because there's no money going around.
> On a practical note, battery life matters in impoverished regions, best of luck with your "might last 24 hours, 36 if you're really lucky" Android handset.
This needs to be solved, agreed. Chances are, however, that the phones that solve this problem will run some form of Android.
> > On a practical note, battery life matters in impoverished regions, best of luck with your "might last 24 hours, 36 if you're really lucky" Android handset.
> This needs to be solved, agreed. Chances are, however, that the phones that solve this problem will run some form of Android.
It is worth noting that some Android phones are already doing impressive things on this front. See, for example, the Samsung Replenish (that can slowly charge from sunlight with an alternative battery cover):
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/10/samsung-replenish-review/
Most of the third world measured by area or population? The areas that is densely populated often have pretty decent connectivity. It is also improving very fast as operators are investing heavily to continue to meet the increasing usage.
Android is a linux clone which itself is a unix clone. It features an iphone clone ui layer and a java clone application framework. There's was a lot of great execution in Android but very little that was revolutionary.
If Microsoft buys Android instead of Google and keeps it proprietary the third world still gets cheap linux-based smartphones.
If Apple doesn't release the iPhone real webkit browsers still make it into phones based on linux (and Opera Mobile's compressed web is probably superior for many third world data rates anyway). Maybe it takes a bit longer for touch ui to popularize but that's not indispensable to accessing the web knowledge base.
This is a pointless argument about how much credit iPhone deserves for what Android / WebOS / Windows Phone did later. People give varying degrees of credit for different reasons and that's fine.
What's not really cool is MG Siegler criticizing Android's open-ness by means of some weird roundabout mockery of a non-event. He's so extremely smug in his post criticizing Android about something that iOS is orders of magnitude worse at any way you slice it. If you like iOS you should be glad there is viable competition to keep Apple honest because competition is good for everyone. Without competition to Apple the future is a world where you do what Apple says you can do, and you pay out the ass for it. I love Apple stuff, but even I'm not fool enough to believe they have my best interests at heart now and forever more.
I'm afraid the article is far too partisan to take seriously. I realize that's Thom Holwerda's usual schtick, but the idea that Android is a world revolution while the iPhone has had negligible impact is silly.
Sure, Rubin's definition of open ("mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make") would still apply today without the iPhone but let's be real: Android, without the iPhone, would at best be a Blackberry clone. One could argue the market would have ignored it because it would have offered very little new. It had wide adoption among hardware manufacturers were desperate because they needed to compete against the iPhone. Would the same have been true if they were still competing against Blackberry, a Blackberry clone and whatever Microsoft would eventually come out with?
Android is what it is today because of Apple and the iPhone.
Smartphone-proliferation requires a strong network capable of moving bytes in much larger scale than currently feasible or economical in most 3rd world networks. Hell, many 1st world countries struggle with growing data.
The OS of the phone is much irrelevant (Windows, linux, meego, webos etc. are "cheap and good enough" if you really have the demand of billion such devices. Having open source OS helps, but I'd say it's more about who can sell the network cheap enough to suit the smartphones.
can we please stop responding to MG Seigler? I don't read his blog so i don't know if he actually does post intelligent thought sometimes, but every single thing the blogs have picked up from him is pure fanboy trollbait.
Probably because he is a one purpose writer, setting out to 'support Apple in every way, always', similar to John Gruber. I like Apple too, but the way these two always conclude that Apple is right in whatever they did, and anything Apple does is better than any other company, isn't very interesting to read.
This article is in reference to a previous boosting by M G Seigler, not one by Seigler himself and this article is as much "pure fanboy trollbait" as anything published by Seigler.
People keep fixating on the fact that Android is not Free Software. It doesn't matter.
Android is giving us the option to use an open source OS on arbitrary commoditized hardware without paying any license fees or asking anyone for permission. The Android OS can and has been ported to all manner of devices without any first-party support.
When the only other comparably advanced mobile OS is totally proprietary AND only available on proprietary hardware made by the OS manufacturer, the existence of Android is a massive leap forward for openness and choice.
iOS is great, I love it. But it will be forever locked to Apple's hardware, and you will only ever have access to that technology in the forms that make good business sense for Apple. That is not true of Android.
"I'm even more excited about seeing a $25 mobile device that has access to a killer web browser and endless mobile apps, and watching that device appear in the hands of a billion school children over the next 10 years."
All those billion kids who did got Android or Blackberry instead of iPhone for Christmas are currently crying over Twitter about how they hate their parents...
156 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadFrom the Hacker News welcome:
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial.
The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything?"
I'm also from a poor country, and an Android phone was my first true smarthphone (this Christmas :) ).
> In ten to fifteen years' time, we will look back and regard Android as the technology that enabled even the poorest people in this world to have access to the web (and thus, knowledge), just like we regard Nokia as the company that put the mobile phone in every corner of the globe.
...and just like we regard Microsoft as the company that put computers into every home.
I doubt the diversity and quality of those phones would have been possible without Android.
What I find lacking in all of this Android chest-bumping is the recognition of what made it possible for so many smart phones to be priced reasonably: the decreasing price of flash storage. If we're going to point to anything as the cause for smart phone ubiquity, shouldn't we consider what Apple has done to drive down the price of flash?
You mean, besides this (from the G+ post conversation): "Historians are, however, going to make note of how the open source Android platform (or its later forks and clones) played a role in facilitating everything from low-cost solar-powered devices in the remotest villages in India and Africa, to a hundred million tablets computers in the classroom each revolutionizing education for children all across Asia and the Middle East, to putting an Internet-connected smartphone in the hands of every man, woman, and child in America, even those from the perpetually overlooked majority that simply can't afford a shiny brand-new iPhone or Galaxy Nexus every Christmas."
This is already happening. Now. And it is happening because Android has successfully commoditized the mobile OS. I'm seeing it happen where I grew up. Where people cannot afford iPhones and Galaxy Nexuses. But they can now afford an Android smartphone.
From the G+ post, again: " That there's now an eminently capable open source mobile operating system, one that is free to use and free to fork, means that the knowledge advantage can be better and more evenly distributed across the planet than ever before."
Anyone, anywhere can build and distribute their own Android-based device. They are already doing this. Isn't that one of the cornerstones of an open source project?
>> " Are customers less beholden to telecoms for their devices? Have prices dropped or competition increased? What percent of Android device owners have compiled their own kernel? Have read the Android source?"
Do you ask this of Apache, Asterisk etc?
You say elsewhere that "The cost of a Windows license was never a material factor in the cost of a computer.". For you perhaps, but it definitely was a factor in my part of the world.
Because it takes significant financial effort to push forward a complete smartphone OS with a set of basic apps.
Do you know OpenMoko (http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page)? They were (are?) working on the same goal as Android, just more open and less subsidized. For years they struggled to create an OS which would allow dialing a phone number without invoking a terminal emulator.
What about Moblin/Maemo/Meego? Another Open Source attempt at Smartphones that failed due to inconsistent/missing support from its main financial contributors (Nokia and Intel).
Of course the whole thing is about standing on the shoulders of giants, and all these projects profited immensely from the availability of the Linux kernel, GCC and other large OSS projects. However, all these projects do exist for a long time already, and as the other examples should indicate, it is all but easy to create a SmartPhone experience from them.
With all that said, I do not it like very much either that Android is so closely-coupled to Google. However, they made the breakthrough now and it does not look like there is any "real" OSS competitor left.
That is precisely why it is so significant that Android is also open source.
The bestseller "Android" tablet of this year is probably the Kindle Fire, that is completely divorced of Google. There have been consistent rumors that Amazon will step in with a few more tablet variants and a phone in the coming year. Facebook - Google's direct rival - was rumoured to be trying out an "Android" phone of their own.
All this is possible only because Android is open source.
It is fine to wish that Android is less loosely coupled from Google. Personally I think this is the only pragmatic choice. Android is not pure software, it is tightly integrated with hardware. Linux's achilles' heel for a long old time was device drivers. Android has mostly sidestepped this issue due to Google "owning" the project and working with the hardware vendors.
It would be nice to allow community input (commits, patches etc) into Android, but that I can understand why they don't right now. The thing is, anyone can create a more open fork that does this - and it wouldn't matter due to lack of hardware support.
The next best thing is to work downstream of the hardware, which is what Cyanogenmod and other teams have done. And they have been mighty successful at it too. When you see community teams boot Android on iPhones, Playbooks, Kindle Fires and so on, you are witnessing the benefit of having a free open source mobile OS.
Android may be the Linux variant that has succeeded in the mobile world, but that doesn't mean Android variants can't exist.
Mozilla is still working on Boot to Gecko, which borrows from Android for some of the hardware interface: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
Needless to say, only possible because it is open source.
However, the first thing many people try to do on their Fire, and something well-integrated into CM's installation process is the addition of Google apps, especially Android Market. And here we have a strong dependency on Google which even Amazon can not break with its own distribution channel (google for "install android market on kindle fire" for evidence).
Yes, absolutely.
I really agree with the post though. One day enough people with time on their hands will be able to adapt Android to all sorts of cheap hardware which might scale greatly for the developing world.
A nitpick, of course, but the soreness doesn't help the rest of the argument, which is a good argument to make.
Sorry the "post by Marco" wasn't relevant enough when it was sitting right next to this link, said "marco.com" and had hundreds of comments.
Dasil003, you're really going to call me a douche when you were even commenting in that thread? Sorry, I'm not going to resort to calling you a name.
tl;dr Dont waste your time on this article.
It's legitimate to say that Android will be the driving force for commoditizing smartphones, however. iOS will not be that force, and I think that's fine. That has never been Apple's goal, and it shows. It's like saying Mercedes won't drive commoditization of the latest feature in their car (e.g., HUDs or auto-parallel-parking). No, that'll be a smaller company. Mercedes is in charge of being up front putting it in to begin with for the people willing to pay more to get it. Once it's become cheaper, Ford can then integrate it in their upper lines, and then their mid-levels, and then it becomes a standard feature for pretty much all cars.
Similarly, Apple basically rewrote the book on smartphone UIs. There is very little you can say to truly countermand that. They may not be the 100% originators of all of the ideas, but the iPhone was the first phone of its kind. Android followed along, and started out expensive, then got cheaper, and now they're moving towards ultra-cheap smartphones running Android. Same evolution. The products have different purposes and different targets, that's all.
The only reason I bring this up is that I really don't often see flamewars between Mercedes drivers and Ford drivers. I suppose this might be because car companies differentiate tiers by brand, while in the case of Android, there are both high-end and low-end Android phones that are marketed under the exact same name, and these will obviously provide a different experience.
I'm not sure about that, cheaper iPhones have been available with every new release, last year european operators already offered 0€ iPhones with 2 years contracts, and the 3GS has gotten one more year lease on life being advertised as a $99 phone in the US.
edit: -1 without any discussion because I point out iphones are available "for free", which seriously sounds like commoditization? That's an interesting HN dynamic.
Or perhaps I should hedge and say I think Android will get there first, and probably much before. Who knows whether Apple will decide to go after that segment or not in the long run (though it's not exactly their style).
I don't think it's proper to reward narrow-minded partisanship with a shrug of the shoulders.
I think that applies more to Gruber and Siegler than anyone else, as their attacks on all things Google and Android have only become more vicious as Android's marketshare started taking off.
Simply and powerfully put. As third-world countries come online they are going to be starting and staying with the mobile web. You can already see this at work in a number of African countries where mobile payments have proliferated and matured at an astonishing rate. That is just an early signal of the tectonic shift occurring.
EDIT: I do this by using T-Mobile PAYG and buying their 6 month Internet booster for £20, twice a year. I've managed to convince all my regular contacts to use Kik Messenger instead of SMS, so I don't have to pay for SMS. I very rarely make phone calls, but I have VOIP with localphone.com when I have to.
I'm a localphone customer here as I am not in the UK. :/
The average Indian user is worth about 0.03c to a network, with no contracts or lockins, and people frequently switch network to network depending on deals.
In fact, in order to avoid fees, a new system has appeared. Calling, letting it ring once, and hanging up. It doesn't cost but it DOES ping the other person.
These call-backs are becoming so pervasive that businesses let people call-back and the business calls them back, at their own expensive, to offer whatever service. Some Indian apps are also incorporating the call-back system into their communication structure.
Don't think that just because we have dumb contracts and bills that the developing world will as well.
Where there's money to made, a way will be found.
This, however, has been going on for half a decade and has absolutely nothing to do with smartphone and smartphone OSes.
If anything, smartphones and their terrible battery lives can only hamper that kind of efforts in places where access to electricity is unreliable and a common charging technology is handcrank-powered.
edit: ah, so going against the completely nonsensical (because absent) link implied by richardburton between smartphones and african mobile payments (let alone Android and the latter) yields graytexting. Thanks, I guess?
No, but more and more smartphones (hopefully with better battery life than the top of the line stuff we get in the west) will start being sold in Africa and from the looks of it they will be powered by Android.
That is the argument that was being made.
Could it be Blackberry is popular because of the free "ping" service? At least that is what seems to drive the mass adoption of them (and the peer pressure) among teenagers here in the Netherlands: the free unlimited "texting" with other Blackberry users.
* they said blackberry was smart - they had the most active presence and support locally out of the smartphone groups
* the pin service of course
* the dataplans are most sane on blackberries and for a while the network operators only offered a dataplan to blackberries
* They just plain think they are cool. Even in England among the urban youth and erm hip hop crowd blackberries are most dominant.
It certainly was a revelation amongst many of how much of a world there is out there and how much it can differ.
Apple is building a luxury device. Google is turning what was once luxury into a commodity.
It makes sense too. The difference in revenue streams boils down to, Apple makes cash from the upgrade train, Google makes cash when people use the web. Getting the web in everyones hands is a plus for google, but a huge plus for humankind. I'm glad that their interests so closely line up with the big picture in this situation.
Not specific to phones, I just love it when things get commoditized. It means that the next round of new and exciting things built upon it can finally gain some steam.
I would be excited to see that too. Can anyone point me towards such a device?
"What Nokia did for the mobile phone, Android is doing for the smartphone."
I don't see how, because Nokia is a hardware manufacturer who actually makes phones, and Android is just an operating system. It seems to me the hard part of getting to the $25 unlocked price point is the hardware, not the OS. Android is not even the only open-source phone operating system--how about Meego, created by (aptly) Nokia, and hosted by the nonprofit Linux Foundation?
Android is a cool product, but I have a hard time swallowing the self-congratulatory posturing. So far Android has not done a single thing for the 3rd world poor. As far as I can tell, so far all it has done is provided the skeleton for a bunch of proprietary implementations by first-world hardware manufacturers and mobile operators.
Don't care for Android vs. iPhone arguments but lets at least admit that iPhone was a significant catalyst that moved forward the smartphone movement initially at the least. Androids would probably still exist if Apple never put out the iPhone but the iPhone has certainly been one of the biggest influences on Android's development not to mention the entire mobile industry. In that regard I see the author's statement as pretty narrow. Its like saying Unix had no impact on computing because Microsoft had the lion's share.
The author of the article is arguing that more revolutionary than being the first (or even the best) at something is subsequently making that innovation accessible to as many people as possible. This is something both Unix and Windows have achieved, Android is trying to achieve, but I'm not sure Apple is even interested in.
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be the invention of the automobile vs. the assembly line. True, the automobile was a genuine innovation, but the assembly line put the automobile within reach of everyone.
With this view in mind, it's okay that Apple wants to focus on pushing the envelope in what its car can do. Likewise, it's okay that Google wants to focus on making those or similar innovations accessible to as many as possible.
Credit where credit is due. Steve showed us what was capable with a smartphone. iPhone would be remembered for that, just that.
What kind of credit do you want?
"IPhone is more important than air."
"If not for the IPhone, the world would stop spinning."
"IPhone has prevented 1,000,000 world wars since it was released."
Do you know of any mobile phone "more important than air", "making the world spin" or "preventing wars" through its intrinsic properties?
And it's really annoying.
While Android would definitely exist (it predates the iPhone's unveiling by years) it would be a very, very different beast. It might have moved towards its current state over time, but its first handsets would have been much more similar to the Blackberries of the time. In fact, this (recorded) origin still plagues the platform to this day, it's one of the sources of the structural issues leading to "insufficient" responsiveness.
*Edit for folks who are voting this down:
I am not making any kind of argument in favor of one platform or another. I am simply commenting on what was said in the parent comment.
The release dates are simple fact. Go to Wikipedia like I did and find it for yourself. Apple got to the market over a year before Google released its first product based on Android.
The first version of iOS was in development for a long time, as was the first version of Android, before the world ever really got to see them. Thus, saying that Android was in development years before iOS implies that iOS was some last minute project Apple threw together. It's simply not true in either case.
Both were under development for years before they were released. The idiots who think Android is just an iOS clone, forget this point.
Yes, both were in development for years before the world got to see anything. To the original point of my comment, though, Android didn't predate iOS by years as the parent comment says. That comment implies that iOS copied from Android, which I am refuting.
The word you've missed is "unveiling". He did not claim that Android came before iOS, but that it was under development for long before iOS was unveiled.
EDIT: The point that you're refuting was never made. He simply said that Android would still have existed, even if iOS hadn't. And to prove that point, he correctly stated that Android was under development for a long period of time before iOS was unveiled
http://news.cnet.com/i/ne/p/2008/android_prototype_550x385.j...
"While Android would definitely exist (it predates the iPhone's unveiling by years) it would be a very, very different beast."
The "controversy" is around the claim of Android existing before iOS. That claim wasn't even made though if you read that comment correctly and notice the word "unveiling"
Google bought Android (the company, whose sole purpose was to make the corresponding OS and sell itself) in 2005. Therefore Android existed long before the unveiling of iPhone in 2007.
> The release dates are simple fact.
Yes. I was not, however, talking about release date but about existence. This could have been clearer. The first public/commercial Android release followed iPhone by a year (and significant reworks, see... everything following the parenthesized section of my original comment).
> The first version of iOS was in development for a long time, as was the first version of Android, before the world ever really got to see them. Thus, saying that Android was in development years before iOS implies that iOS was some last minute project Apple threw together. It's simply not true in either case.
That is not even remotely close to what I stated. What I stated was that Android's existence predates iPhone's unveiling by years. At no point did I say (or even imply) anything about iOS's development period.
(Yes, I know that's what Steve Jobs believed.)
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...
Android would probably have gotten the high-quality browser with or without the iphone, but the touch interface wasn't likely to happen in isolation. The notion that the way to improve the UI of mobile devices was to make it much less precise is preposterous, and it took apple to show people the way.
So yes apple did have an impact, but from the context of what the article considers meaningful, it is indeed not a very big one.
Code reuse at Google is huge.
So what were their reasons for not choosing it?
Apologies if this has been asked and answered.
2. Inferno has nothing to do with Google, the only (remote) link is that Inferno is that Ken Thompson worked on its predecessor (Plan9). I'm not even sure Thompson worked on Inferno itself.
3. I've never seen any claim that Google uses Inferno anywhere.
So a better question would be: what makes you bring up Inferno in a place where it has no reason whatsoever to be?
s/Android/Dalvik
Google had a choice of which virtual machine to use on Android. They went with a modified Dalvik.
Could they have chosen Inferno?
If they looked at it and decided against it, what were the reasons?
The iPhone drastically redefined the smartphone market including the competitors that followed it. Hard for me to swallow that its effect on the world has been negligible.
Nope. It doesn't mean "reaches the most people". It means "has the most impact on the world". I think that Android will be the technology that allows people in poorer places of the world to have the internet - and thus, knowledge, and thus, power - in their pocket. That is going to change the world in a significant way.
Even something as simple as this: the internet may have information on the best way to treat sick cattle, or how to best treat certain crops. Heck, in more developed areas, it may cut the reaction time of aid services drastically.
(you already see this happening in Kenya, as linked in the article: http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/16/80-android-phone-sells-... ).
If you don't think Android is copying, take a look at pre-iPhone Android prototypes.
Really? I guess we can wait and see, or we can already start attributing accolades to Android that have not happened yet. I still see people bringing up Xerox Parc all the time with respect to the GUI, so maybe where UI inspiration comes from is relevant?
On a practical note, battery life matters in impoverished regions, best of luck with your "might last 24 hours, 36 if you're really lucky" Android handset.
Your second paragraph is warm and fuzzy nonsense, you should be ashamed of yourself for writing it.
Smartphones are designed for the needs of the developed world, the less developed world has it's requirements too, I doubt that internet enabled smart phones are high on the list.
And those alleged $80 handsets, how long exactly until they break and require servicing? Google "android failure rate", (less than e.g. iPhones, you can check), compare it those to conventional mobile phones.
However I do think smartphones are a logical and valuable extension of cell phones in developing countries, not in that they improve communication but in that they make "offline" information more readily available, things like medical knowledge applications are not really possible on a "dumbphone" (limited screen real estate and controls) but a smartphone can replace stacks of books, can be carried and can be kept "current" by updating its applications a few times a year.
I see value in that, lots of it.
Oh, and $80 handsets are not even close to fixing this, the majority of sub-saharan africa (in terms of population) lives below the UN's poverty threshold. Which is under $2/day.
I see these $80 handsets going to the "upper crust" of these societies more than to the poorest segments.
Wrong. Most of the third world has excellent cell phone service and they're using cell phones for far more stuff than we do. In Kenya, for instance, you can make small payments using your regular, non-smart cell phone.
> of course, little money, so there are few consumers to target ads at
They have advertising in the third world as well. I doubt that's because there's no money going around.
> On a practical note, battery life matters in impoverished regions, best of luck with your "might last 24 hours, 36 if you're really lucky" Android handset.
This needs to be solved, agreed. Chances are, however, that the phones that solve this problem will run some form of Android.
> This needs to be solved, agreed. Chances are, however, that the phones that solve this problem will run some form of Android.
It is worth noting that some Android phones are already doing impressive things on this front. See, for example, the Samsung Replenish (that can slowly charge from sunlight with an alternative battery cover): http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/10/samsung-replenish-review/
If Microsoft buys Android instead of Google and keeps it proprietary the third world still gets cheap linux-based smartphones.
If Apple doesn't release the iPhone real webkit browsers still make it into phones based on linux (and Opera Mobile's compressed web is probably superior for many third world data rates anyway). Maybe it takes a bit longer for touch ui to popularize but that's not indispensable to accessing the web knowledge base.
If Microsoft buys Android instead of Google
I don't think that would ever happen. MS had its own mobile OS way before Android existed, and it suffers somewhat from NIH syndrome.
What's not really cool is MG Siegler criticizing Android's open-ness by means of some weird roundabout mockery of a non-event. He's so extremely smug in his post criticizing Android about something that iOS is orders of magnitude worse at any way you slice it. If you like iOS you should be glad there is viable competition to keep Apple honest because competition is good for everyone. Without competition to Apple the future is a world where you do what Apple says you can do, and you pay out the ass for it. I love Apple stuff, but even I'm not fool enough to believe they have my best interests at heart now and forever more.
Android is what it is today because of Apple and the iPhone.
The OS of the phone is much irrelevant (Windows, linux, meego, webos etc. are "cheap and good enough" if you really have the demand of billion such devices. Having open source OS helps, but I'd say it's more about who can sell the network cheap enough to suit the smartphones.
Android is giving us the option to use an open source OS on arbitrary commoditized hardware without paying any license fees or asking anyone for permission. The Android OS can and has been ported to all manner of devices without any first-party support.
When the only other comparably advanced mobile OS is totally proprietary AND only available on proprietary hardware made by the OS manufacturer, the existence of Android is a massive leap forward for openness and choice.
iOS is great, I love it. But it will be forever locked to Apple's hardware, and you will only ever have access to that technology in the forms that make good business sense for Apple. That is not true of Android.
All those billion kids who did got Android or Blackberry instead of iPhone for Christmas are currently crying over Twitter about how they hate their parents...