Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android wasn’t designed for smartphones”.
Today, android has been around for ages, but did you know that android os was originally built for something other than smartphones, i’m luke pock with android authority, and today we’re going to talk about the popular os that was originally developed for digital cameras. This video was adapted from articles over on our site. If you would like to learn more about android’s origins check out the links down below back in 2004, co-founder of android andy rubin was trying to get funding for a new project. He called android. The idea was simple: at the time: digital camera storage was relatively small and still pretty expensive by today’s standards. Reuben wanted to solve this problem by building a platform for digital cameras that relied on cloud storage instead of physical storage. This would give users the ability to view their uploaded photos and videos from any device instead of having to rely on on-device hardware, but unfortunately, back in 2004 interest from investors was pretty low and reuben didn’t end up getting his project funded, but that didn’t stop android Reuben and his team realized that the digital camera market was too small to get their project off the ground which led them to pivoting towards mobile handsets now.
In order to understand the significance or gravity of this pivot, we have to look at the mobile competitors at the time palm os, symbian, os and windows mobile were the tech giants in the early 2000s, while underdogs like blackberry, were just getting off the ground, but what All of these os’s had in common was that they were paid platform. Companies had to license in one form or another, to gain access to use these mobile operating systems on its hardware reuben and his team, on the other hand, wanted to make android free and open source. Their goal was to create a platform for selling services and products. Such as apps and games android had a lot going for it and because it was free, it was that much easier to pitch to phone manufacturers still android funding and a lot of it.
As it turned out. The company was broke and ruben even took out a personal loan from a friend to keep the project going. Fortunately, in january of 2005, the android team met with google and in the second meeting later that year, they even showed off a prototype of their mobile os. Apparently, that was good enough for google and the tech giant purchased android for a small 50 million dollars now. As for why google decided to buy android, it’s likely that google wanted to move beyond its main focus on the pc platform at the time and move into the mobile market. Now google also hired ruben as their senior vice president of mobile and digital content and set a goal to capture nine percent of the market share in north america and europe in the following five years now, maybe somewhat unsurprisingly, by 2010 android held 24 of the market. Share in north america, which completely shattered google’s initial goal, so it makes sense that android was originally built for digital cameras at the time. Digital cameras were getting better and better each passing year, but they had one flaw: storage had reuben pursued this original idea. Cameras might have been in a far different place today, but it’s even more interesting to think about what other operating systems would have taken over had android not developed back in the early 2000s symbian os was growing fast and while windows mobile had been around for years, They were slowly losing their market share. Blackberry, on the other hand, was growing incredibly fast as well, and so long as android wasn’t around.
They were the default os for business professionals, but i think what made android so unique and so appealing was its open source model. In fact, the android open source project or aesop is still around today, and this made the barrier to entry for manufacturers. Incredibly small. Now, manufacturers wouldn’t necessarily need to license software from competitors like microsoft and symbian know now they could develop their own software on top of android, which made android the default choice.
Obviously, now it’s not that simple, but back in the late 2000s manufacturers like htc and samsung, were quick to jump on board. In fact, the first smartphone running android was manufactured by htc in 2008, the t-mobile g1 or the htc dream, as it was known in other countries. Now, although that phone received less than ideal reviews from the media, it was still a launching point for the os. In fact, shortly thereafter, in 2009, the first samsung galaxy phone ran android 1.5 or android cupcake, which featured groundbreaking features such as the ability to rotate content. When rotating the display. The point is android was built for success in the mobile market.
Had they continued with cameras, they probably would not have been successful. I mean just look at the numbers. In 2007, smartphone sales rose from 122 million to 1.5 billion in 2019. Digital camera sales, on the other hand, declined from around 100 million in 2007 to just 15 million in 2019. sure that could have changed that android been to default os for cameras, but, as we saw in 2012, samsung galaxy camera android on a digital camera, didn’t really Work out that well, then again, it’s pretty interesting to think about what android would have looked like running on canon or sony. Well, that’s going to wrap it up for this one.
Let me know if you want to see more of these types of. Did you know videos also, let me know any tech related questions or comments and i’ll be sure to read them at the end of the next episode. That’S gon na, be it i’m luke park with android authority and i’ll catch you in the next article hari christian asks is 5g a thing to consider when purchasing a new phone at present i’d say it probably. Is i mean considering that the mobile market now is really pushing 5g? It’S just going to be better to buy 5g phone.
If you want to quote unquote future proof you in the future, so i think 5g is definitely worth it and probably something i would consider. If i’m buying a new phone, gabriel p asks, will you root your phone to customize the look or feel or even the performance of it i’d say? Probably not i mean back in the day. Yes, i totally would have done that, and i did do that, but phones are just so good and so powerful that you don’t really need to now sure if you really want to customize your device to the absolute max, you can root it. But for me it’s just something that i don’t really need to do.
I can customize my phone pretty much do whatever i want using like launchers and third-party solutions, as you saw on the last video. So to answer your question: no, i probably won’t alright, that’s gon na wrap. It up, see ya! You .