I don’t understand how Android is the dominant phone platform.

[Mark086]

Rim tried using QNX for a while, it's similarities to Unix are deceiving.

A good platform is synergistic, any one individual component doesn't have to be earth shattering for each to benefit.

IPhone had first mover advantage, in spite of starting behind the line, they got the choice of the goal, and everyone else had to reorient to that goal.

Touch is not a minor point, a capable browser is not a minor point, but placed on a poor platform they might not have been enough, the combined platform is an important aspect, and trying to split hairs is largely foolish in this case.

 

[YoHo]

Rim tried using QNX for a while, it's similarities to Unix are deceiving.

A good platform is synergistic, any one individual component doesn't have to be earth shattering for each to benefit.

IPhone had first mover advantage, in spite of starting behind the line, they got the choice of the goal, and everyone else had to reorient to that goal.

Touch is not a minor point, a capable browser is not a minor point, but placed on a poor platform they might not have been enough, the combined platform is an important aspect, and trying to split hairs is largely foolish in this case.

QNX is a RTOS version of *nix. But not what I was referring to.

Look I agree with your points. I 100% agree that Touch is not a minor point. I would in fact argue that it was the MOST important point.

But What I responded to was a claim that "Safari" was transformative. And I call Shenanigans. Safari was largely along for the ride on this.

This is kind of the classic annoying battlefront Apple claim. Every single thing they do is some great and amazing thing.

Well, no, sometimes they just have mundane stuff surrounded by transformation. Maybe safari is just adequate to the task, but the ecosystem around it was transformative.

That's my point.

 

[cogwheel]

the Contract with AT&T was transformational in a business sense.

It wasn't transformative for the market. Once AT&T's exclusive contract ran out, they almost instantly became just another carrier that works with iPhone. Apple's maintaining of control for things like software updates was very important for Apple, though not exactly what I'd call transformative. It certainly wasn't transformative for the market for control, since Android still struggles with carrier and handset manufacturer meddling to a degree, and Windows Phone (before it died) wasn't as free of carrier meddling as iPhone, either.

And I'd argue that Blackberrywas the iPhone of the previous smartphone market. Not the market share leader, but definitely the mindshare leader. So I'd make the comparison to them.

I think that's being too kind to Blackberry. Android and iPhone started taking Blackberry apart as soon as they became established in the market (1-2 years after launch), and that was very shortly after Blackberry finally kicked Windows Mobile out of the top spot in the early (pre-capacitive-touchscreen) smartphone market. Blackberry never got to push the market around the way Apple does, and neither iPhone nor Android really followed what Blackberry did that was different.

iPhone and Android are more of a follow-on to Windows Mobile than Blackberry.

 

[xcrunner529]

Most browsers would crash or not load half the sites out there and only worked with very limited mobile versions (remember Mobi?). Blackberry did better than others but it still was scrolling mostly text like using a console based browser. The iPhone changed that where it could load almost every website without issue and (as mentioned) the auto sizing made it much more useable. Maybe try looking up some YouTube reviews of browsers before 2007 then the Jobs demo.

 

[analogika]

Safari on iPhone was literally the first usable mobile web browser.

IIRC, WAP was a catastrophe that made a handful of business-essential sites text-only, but only if they were specifically coded to.

Now, we actually got full websites that, apart from Flash and mouseover states, worked and looked perfectly normal.

 

[Chris FOM]

Yeah. Safari on iOS was absolutely revelatory compared to what was out there at the time. Everyone else was using some variation on WAP bowsers with Safari on iOS being the first real HTML browser on a phone. There was simply nothing else like it. Ignoring what’s under the hood driving the OS, iPhone 1.0 pre-App Store had two user-facing elements that were transformative to a degree you can still see it today: the multitouch interface and mobile Safari.

 

[Ecmaster76]

Webkit was a thing well before iPhone

Some of us had resistive touch screen phones that didn't suck back in the day
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Browser_for_SymbianWorked fine with the bungee guitar pick thingy


iPhone just had an interface optimized for capacitive touchscreens. Most web sites at the time sucked for that which is one reason why the pushed apps so hard

 

[xcrunner529]

Webkit was a thing well before iPhone

Some of us had resistive touch screen phones that didn't suck back in the day
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Browser_for_SymbianWorked fine with the bungee guitar pick thingy


iPhone just had an interface optimized for capacitive touchscreens. Most web sites at the time sucked for that which is one reason why the pushed apps so hard

That’s not correct. Your own link mentioned it came from Apple’s Safari. WebKit was Apple’s own creation, a fork of KDE’s KHTML (used in Konquerer).

 

[Ecmaster76]

That’s not correct. Your own link mentioned it came from Apple’s Safari. WebKit was Apple’s own creation, a fork of KDE’s KHTML (used in Konquerer).

Safari itself also came out years before iPhone. Nokia had Webkit on phones before Apple

 

[YoHo]

Exactly.

 

[Louis XVI]

Yeah. Safari on iOS was absolutely revelatory compared to what was out there at the time. Everyone else was using some variation on WAP bowsers with Safari on iOS being the first real HTML browser on a phone. There was simply nothing else like it. Ignoring what’s under the hood driving the OS, iPhone 1.0 pre-App Store had two user-facing elements that were transformative to a degree you can still see it today: the multitouch interface and mobile Safari.

I agree that multi-touch and Safari were revelatory and miles beyond anything that came before the iPhone.

I’d add one more feature to the mix that blew me away and changed my life for the better: visual voicemail. Having all of my voice mails on screen in a list that I could listen to in any order, rather than having to use an audio menu and go through them sequentially, was absolutely fantastic. We take it for granted now, but in 2008 (when I got my first iPhone), it was a game changer.

 

[YoHo]

OK, yeah, I'll agree with Visual Voice Mail. And it took a while for that to become an android Standard thing. The very idea that I would have to call back to find out who left a voice mail is so antiquated to me now.

 

[analogika]

Safari itself also came out years before iPhone. Nokia had Webkit on phones before Apple

Huh. I guess.

https://mobile-review.com/review/nokia-webbrowser-en.shtml

 

[m0nckywrench]

If Dewalt had 80% Market Share, Nobody would call it a Skilsaw since that brand of circular saw might not even exist anymore.

Calling that style saw a Skilsaw was established long before the modern era of power tools back in the 1920s. Skil exists but that's not why the term persisted among users who never owned one and are new to DIY. It was a generic term forty years ago. Likewise "visegrip" became a generic term for that very old style of locking pliers whose patents expired long ago. Lovely worm drive saws though. Every handyhuman should experience a 77.

 

[YoHo]

That post is so long ago that I don't remember making it.

Also, SKilsaws are a better value than Dewalt.

 

[Shavano]

Safari on iPhone was literally the first usable mobile web browser.

IIRC, WAP was a catastrophe that made a handful of business-essential sites text-only, but only if they were specifically coded to.

Now, we actually got full websites that, apart from Flash and mouseover states, worked and looked perfectly normal.

Objectively there were a lot of things that came together about the same time that enabled iPhones to be designed. It wasn't any one thing that made them successful, it was all the things together;

• SOC's powerful enough to run an OS that didn't seem too laggy and apps that were reasonably snappy, with an embedded GPU
• 3rd generation wireless standards fast enough to do more than voice and text on mobile data networks
• big advances in touch screens (sensitive, precise, bright, and high resolution)
• yeah, software

When iPhones came on the market, they weren't revolutionary in any single way, and they didn't bring anything TO the market that wasn't already there. But they had ALL OF IT TOGETHER. That's what made them stand out.

Was Safari part of it? I don't know. To me it was just a port of the already existing, already good desktop Safari. But we weren't used to seeing good performance on mobile browsers because the phones on the market didn't have the hardware to be good; good browsers require good graphics.

Apple did a great job on the software side though. There's no question. Again not anything that hadn't really been done before, but on a mobile instead of a desktop.

THAT was transformative.

 

[YoHo]

Just want to +1 that post. iPhone hit at the right time when all the pieces came together.

 

[Shavano]

And the HTC Dream (the first Android phone) was released just 15 months later. Android had been in development for years already but they apparently only added touchscreen support (which was critical) after they saw iPhones. Apple's insight that everything is easier to use if you use a touchscreen and you don't really need a keyboard if you have that shaped the market. Typing and dialing aren't really improved by having a touchscreen but they're good enough, and the whole front side of the device as a display is really needed, with phones being as small as they were back then.

 

[Exordium01]

Just want to +1 that post. iPhone hit at the right time when all the pieces came together.

That’s not quite right though. If the iPhone wasn’t released, Android would have been a Windows Mobile knock-off and it wouldn’t have disrupted the feature phone market the way the iPhone and the resulting fast-following Android did. Google might have gotten there on their own, but I think everything that has happened since then has shown that divisions within Google might be ok with small-scale projects, but Google lacks creativity as an institution.

That still doesn’t answer my original question… Why weren’t other software companies primed to react quickly and take the bulk of the smartphone market? Apple was never going to win the market with their business model. My contention as the OP was that Google is a shitty partner, both for consumers and for OEMs.

Also, the HTC Dream really beat the Motorola Droid to the market? I guess I misremembered history.

 

[Mark086]

Because MBAs will never take the risk.

 

[YoHo]

The HTC Dream wasn't on an important carrier. Moto Droid was.

The Answer to the question is that Microsoft probably would have. They would likely have pivoted eventually and They had more resources than Palm or RIM.

Having said that, if Palm still gets purchased by HP...thus giving it resources, we might have had many more years of Churn and Apple might actually have gained additional marketshare in the US. Or Nokia might have made headway.

But Microsoft, Palm and RIM all had existing markets and so would have had more significant resistance to switching without Android swooping in.

 

[md5crypto]

Everyone forgets that Microsoft was first to large phones with the HTC Titan in late 2010.

 

[Exordium01]

Everyone forgets that Microsoft was first to large phones with the HTC Titan in late 2010.

Large phone isn’t a relative metric. Windows Mobile was an abject failure.

 

[YoHo]

WE could get pedantic and say that Windows Mobile was not an abject failure, but clearly windows phone in all its forms was.

Windows Mobile was successful pre-iPhone. And WinMobile/CE drove a lot of ancillary things for MS.

So I'm not sure Abject is valid even without being pedantic.

 

[ev9_tarantula]

And the HTC Dream (the first Android phone) was released just 15 months later. Android had been in development for years already but they apparently only added touchscreen support (which was critical) after they saw iPhones. Apple's insight that everything is easier to use if you use a touchscreen and you don't really need a keyboard if you have that shaped the market. Typing and dialing aren't really improved by having a touchscreen but they're good enough, and the whole front side of the device as a display is really needed, with phones being as small as they were back then.

That's not correct. Android was multi-modal almost from the point Google bought the company. Before the iPhone was announced there were two HTC co-developed designs in development, Sooner (which was Blackberry like) and Dream (the phone with a capacitive touchscreen, 3G, GPS). The names are a big clue. Dianne Hackborn has spelt this out multiple times, but the myth that Google started afresh after seeing the iPhone persists; they didn't, Dream was on their roadmap from day one.

Even if there was no iPhone, there is a good chance that Sooner would have been dropped, since while it was a good idea to get Android out quickly from a hardware perspective, the software schedule was much longer. I don’t recall the exact dates, but I believe the decision to drop Sooner was well before the iPhone announcement…

https://www.osnews.com/story/25916/...rototype-killed-by-the-iphone/#comment-517243

When the iPhone was announced, it was clear that Sooner was no longer interesting, so it was scrapped and Dream accelerated. Android's support for a touch-based UI was already in progress before the iPhone was announced, and would have happened regardless. (5/19)

View: https://twitter.com/hackbod/status/1586851587300896769

 

[Shavano]

That’s not quite right though. If the iPhone wasn’t released, Android would have been a Windows Mobile knock-off and it wouldn’t have disrupted the feature phone market the way the iPhone and the resulting fast-following Android did. Google might have gotten there on their own, but I think everything that has happened since then has shown that divisions within Google might be ok with small-scale projects, but Google lacks creativity as an institution.

I addressed that in the post you replied to.

That still doesn’t answer my original question… Why weren’t other software companies primed to react quickly and take the bulk of the smartphone market? Apple was never going to win the market with their business model. My contention as the OP was that Google is a shitty partner, both for consumers and for OEMs.

You mean why did Android follow up first and gain the not-Apple market, or why did Apple beat them to it? IMO because Apple was a hardware company that was also a hardware company. Or vice versa, if you will.
I'd say Google was a shitty partner, but they were effectively the ONLY partner to be had. They had something that would work and it was way better than the phone companies knew how to do for themselves. Once Android phones were on the market, the #1 and #2 positions were taken, so there really wasn't a lot of room for somebody to break in to the smart phone market after that. Apple had learned a hard lesson with the PowerMac's that made them not want to partner with hardware providers when they could own the whole product.
If RIM had made some different decisions, maybe they could have done it.
(but RIM only had the best engineers in Canada)

Also, the HTC Dream really beat the Motorola Droid to the market? I guess I misremembered history.

Most people do. Both the Dream and the Droid had slide out keyboards. That made them bulky and gave them failure modes the iPhone didn't have.

 

[analogika]

WE could get pedantic and say that Windows Mobile was not an abject failure, but clearly windows phone in all its forms was.

Windows Mobile was successful pre-iPhone. And WinMobile/CE drove a lot of ancillary things for MS.

So I'm not sure Abject is valid even without being pedantic.

For pre-iPhone size of the smartphone market, maybe. But that market was tiny, compared to what happened when iPhone redefined the smartphone and made it the default mobile device category.

Total number of smartphones shipped in 2006 was 64 million, out of a billion cellphones sold that year.

The overwhelming majority of those were not running Windows Mobile (Nokia and RIM, with their proprietary OS'en, alone made up 2/3 of the market, with Motorola — 90% Linux-based — and Palm tying up another 10%).

https://canalys-prod-public.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/static/press_release/2007/r2007024.pdf

 

[YoHo]

Motorola and Palm (along with Samsung and HTC) used Windows Mobile. So that list isn't helpful.


But my point was that Microsoft benefited from Windows Mobile development beyond just selling devices. And that benefit became less with the switch to Windows phone.

Windows Mobile was not an abject failure, because you can trace modern Microsoft successes back to it.

 

[Mark086]

Which modern Microsoft success are you tracing back to Windows Mobile?!

Their Surface for ARM?

Seems to be a lot of cherry picking to drive a narrative

 

[YoHo]

I'm not driving a narrative, I'm just familiar with how development works and have experience with devices that benefited from that development.
Lync/S4B/Teams was a big beneficiary of that Kernel for example.

 

[analogika]

Motorola and Palm (along with Samsung and HTC) used Windows Mobile. So that list isn't helpful.

Wait, the entire market of smartphones being 6.4% of the total cellphone market, Nokia and RIM making up 65% of that, another 6% of those 6.4 being Motorola, which as per link was 90% Linux — so we're looking at Windows Mobile having decidedly less than 30% of a miniscule market: how is that not helpful in gauging Windows Mobile success?

My words were "For pre-iPhone size of the smartphone market, maybe." I was agreeing with your assessment, kind of. Having maybe around 25%, tops, of the smartphone market is possibly not quite an "abject failure".

But on the other hand, that puts Windows Mobile at between 1,5%-2% of the total cellphone market, at its peak. 15-20 million devices out of a billion sold in 2006.

A resounding success, it certainly was not.

 

[Shavano]

After the convergence of enabling technologies, the big thing that made iPhones break out was a superior UI design. They were clearly superior in UI design to any previous smart phone. To my mind, they were surpassed in UI design and usability by Android phones thereafter, but that's up to personal taste. Obviously huge numbers of users prefer the iPhone UI.

 

[LordDaMan]

After the convergence of enabling technologies, the big thing that made iPhones break out was a superior UI design. They were clearly superior in UI design to any previous smart phone. To my mind, they were surpassed in UI design and usability by Android phones thereafter, but that's up to personal taste. Obviously huge numbers of users prefer the iPhone UI.

The superior Ui was a grid of icons and a dock. It wasn't exactly a revolutionary UI design, but it was something that worked far better for a simpler device like a smartphone of 2007. Windows Mobile acted too much like a PC and BlackberryOS was not really suited for a touchscreen device.

 

[Louis XVI]

The superior Ui was a grid of icons and a dock. It wasn't exactly a revolutionary UI design, but it was something that worked far better for a simpler device like a smartphone of 2007. Windows Mobile acted too much like a PC and BlackberryOS was not really suited for a touchscreen device.

The superior UI was a capacitive touch screen. And pinch to zoom. And a touchscreen keyboard, which enabled a for-its-time enormous screen. And apps designed around a functional and responsible touch screen, such as visual voicemail. And a single button to always return to the home screen. And…

Limiting the UI to “a grid of icons and a doc” is reductive to the point of absurdity.

 

[md5crypto]

The superior UI was a capacitive touch screen. And pinch to zoom. And a touchscreen keyboard, which enabled a for-its-time enormous screen. And apps designed around a functional and responsible touch screen, such as visual voicemail. And a single button to always return to the home screen. And…

Limiting the UI to “a grid of icons and a doc” is reductive to the point of absurdity.

Yes we get it, you're an iPhone fan.

 

[Louis XVI]

Yes we get it, you're an iPhone fan.

I appreciate your thoughtful and substantive response!

But yeah, I would say that the initial iPhone was the single coolest, most exciting new piece of consumer technology I’ve seen in my half century of life. It really did seem to come from the future, and it launched a paradigm that changed how billions of people live their lives. So I feel pretty justified in pushing back on comments that minimize the iPhone’s unique innovations and impact.

 

[analogika]

Yes we get it, you're an iPhone fan.

Reducing the “innovation” of iPhone to something that Windows Phone literally already had (as did Palm and the NEWTON back in the early 90s) — a grid of icons and a dock — is obviously trying a little too hard to minimise its actual importance. To the point of obliterating any actual content.

You really don’t have to be an “iPhone fan” to recognise the idiocy of that reduction.

I do get that it is rather difficult to imagine just how utterly astounding that initial iPhone presentation was to everybody (including industry honchos like the RIM management) at the time if you’ve grown up in an age where everybody has agreed on how things should be and the platform “wars” are fought mostly over stupid details and matters of preference.

The second that first demo was over, the industry was quite simply iPhone vs. Everything Obsolete, and it stayed that way for a while, even though those obsoleted interfaces still offered some technical functionality that might not have been available in the initial few iOS releases.

 

[md5crypto]

Yes I get it, let's just worship the iPhone.

 

[Chris FOM]

Tell you what, take a look at the comments from the initial iPhone announcement and get back to us. There are a handful of clear before/after moments across various markets, where there’s an obvious dividing line where one product upends things entirely and permanently. The iPhone is one of the starkest examples of this ever. Overnight the entire market was upended and within three years of its release the entire thing completely rewritten around the template and rules the iPhone laid down. A 2006 smartphone in 2010 looked far more dated than a 2002 phone in 2006, or a 2016 phone in 2020.

Hyperbole is always a possibility, but it truly is nearly impossible to overstate the importance and influence of the original iPhone. Even now 16 years later we’re still dancing to a variation of the song it single-handedly wrote.

 

[Shavano]

So say a song they single-handedly wrote IS overstating their impact. You're ignoring the convergence of enabling technologies I referred to upthread. IMO we'd have converged on something like post 2008 Android phones within a couple years even if Apple had done something different, or flubbed the iPhone design. They didn't though. They did a good job.