I'm sure 100% of any revenue going to Apple and not shared with anyone had nothing to do with that.
A less generous take on that would be that he/Apple also wanted to push their app store. At the time Flash was popular for publishing apps and games on the web. Yes their decision helped move everyone away from Flash but it also meant they would be getting their 30% cut from iOS apps.
Edit: I stand corrected. "While originally developing iPhone prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)#iOS_SDK
The App Store didn't exist at that time.
Apple did it because they could, because when the iPhone came out it owned the smartphone market; any carrier that didn't play ball would be frozen out (as T-Mobile was initially - AT&T's exclusivity on the iPhone really helped their market share among high-end consumers). Google did not have that luxury.
When Apple/Steve Jobs went into negotiations with Verizon and AT&T (then known as Cingular), it didn’t have any leverage. In fact, Verizon wouldn’t sign the deal in part because of the control Steve Jobs wanted over the devices. AT&T agreed to get the exclusive.
BlackBerry was King when the iPhone launched and BlackBerry bent over backwards to do whatever the carrier wanted (the book Losing the Signal has great details on this).
Google could have depended on similar provisions with Verizon when the Droid launched in 2009 or with T-Mobile when the G1 launched in 2008. Both carriers wanted an iPhone killer.
But Google didn’t do that. It did force Verizon not to put Bing as the default search engine on some of Verizon’s Android phones (like the Droid series), despite an early 2009 agreement Verizon made to make Bing its default search engine — and it also negotiated to NOT force consumers to pay for Android apps using the carrier stores (something many carriers had required for previous non-Apple App Stores), once paid apps launched.
But it didn’t negotiate the update bit, even though the company had the leverage to do it.
I can only speculate the reasons why, but based on the number of books I’ve read, people I’ve talked to, and and other information, it strikes me that Google decided it was more advantageous to let any phone maker or carrier adopt its OS to gain marketshare, rather than worrying about device fragmentation or security update issues.
And that strategy worked beautifully and Android took over the world. The problem is getting carriers or device makers to update, especially when many have spent lots of time customizing Android as a way of differentiating themselves.
But it’s unfair to claim Google didn’t have the opportunity to make the deal Apple did. Google just didn’t want to do that and wasn’t willing to walk away from a partnership to have that level of control.
The big draw for Android for OEMs was that unlike Windows Mobile or Symbian, there was no licensing fee for the devices. HTC, which made the first Android phone, was a Windows Mobile device maker (fun fact, the XDA from XDA Developers, was an OG Windows Mobile forum — XDA was the name of an early series of Windows Mobile devices) — Samsung and LG and Motorola made Windows Mobile phones, Sony used Symbian and so on. Android was free and customizable, which made it enticing for OEMs and carriers to embrace. And unlike BlackBerry, carriers didn’t have to give a portion of the data charge (which was like $20 or $40 a month per BlackBerry device) to BlackBerry, they got to keep all the data fees to themselves.
Without the app store and the google ecosystem, android experience is poor at best.
Try this: On Google's Appstore, find a flashlight app that doesn't upload your contacts. Now on F-droid, try to find one that does. This is not an easy challenge!
Even if you have a completely “open” operating system on your phone, your communications is still going through a carrier that could be “operated by the NSA”.
I take your point but android is similar in some respects (Google probably has less interest in your privacy than Apple does).
Never again for a Samsung device, they churn through models absurdly quickly, delay updates for months, and shovel tons of crap on.
Exactly. There is a whole series of phones offering bloat-less Android, from a variety of manufacturers:
We ran into nonsense issues creating a cross platform development toolchain when HTC phones just didn't implement certain functions of the WebView. We were then stuck trying to create workarounds for no reason. Android could have been the best of both worlds but they just punted it and left their users holding the bag.
I think that is the plan with Fuchsia.
The core of the OS is small. The drivers can be separated out more easily, and with a (hopefully) stable driver API, they may not need to get updated ever (baring security bugs in the driver code itself).
And Google's extensive compatibility requirements aside, webview is now directly updated from the store.
Android Q will extend this to most system components via apex.
None of this information was available to me at the time, and the 5.1.1 history I've only just learnt whilst composing this comment. I'd purchased the device under sharp time, budget, and information constraints whilst travelling. Budget and other limitations, as well as a market void of credible alternatives (Purism have my eye) have prevented replacement, though I loathe this device.
Google have considerable monopoly leverage, and yet have not used this to require obligations for (and permit forward use of) Android and related ecosystem services in the form of upgrade timeliness SLAs and minimum EoL requirements: this device was obsolete at time of sale, though I was completely unaware of this at the time. Instead Google have sought to perpetuate their own monopoly and interests:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-e...
It is also not capable of being re-ROMed, another fact of which I was unaware.
I'm beyond disgusted and will not and do not recommend Android to anyone.
Never again will I ever trust Android anymore if they can’t even get the basics right.
Microsoft actually waited really long until they combined normal end user Windows with NT which was it's own OS since early 90s but also had a lot of restrictions when it came to drivers, end user Apps, Games in particular.
Google bootstrapped it all at once, that's quite an effort. That said, some phones like those of OnePlus or FairPhone have really long support times.
Some of this is (or was) a fundamental design limitation of the Linux kernel. But there are other kernels.
I wonder if the FTC has ever pushed this particular angle?
From my perspective, Essential pushes a monthly security update for the PH-1 like clockwork. However, my carrier (Telus) delays it for some random (between ~0-90 days since the PH-1 launch, currently on ~70 days) amount of time. In that entire time, there's never once been an update that's been delayed for any actual changes from the stock update. In fact, if I don't want to wait for the update, I can just swap in any random non-Telus SIM, and the update is no longer blocked. The user experience is better with any carrier in the world other than the one I bought the phone from in the first place!
Trying to sell a (non-Apple) smartphone without Android in 2019 would be like trying to sell a PC without Windows. Your market share could be counted on one hand.
You forgot to mention this was fixed about 2 years ago when Google pushed mandatory changes in the way customisation are added to the firmware image.
It has helped the frequency and speed of updates a bit. Not a fan of carrier customisation.
This is a side effect of Android's initial approach to it's open nature. Android allows a manufacturer to modify its framework for their own use case. Then the manufacturer can allow a specific carrier to input their own system applications and firmware on to the devices well (your bloatware etc).
This can lead to multiple firmware variants for a specific device. It's not uncommon to see over 20 variants of a firmware for a specific Samsung device for example. This can be broken down by carrier, by region, by OS, etc.. for a number of different reasons.
This becomes a problem when Android needs to post an update. That update has to be pushed first to the Android framework, then to the manufacturer who decides if they are going to make modifications for the update, and if the manufacturer decides to make an update, they push it to the carrier who then has to make an update themselves.
This leads to a web with many broken ends, where a specific phone on one carrier may never see an OS upgrade after purchase, but on another carrier, the same phone might get them regularly.
Additionally some manufacturers take a greater degree of liberty in modifying the Android framework, making updates significantly more expensive to implement, so they don't.
The good news is Google over the past couple of years has been making a great effort under Project Trebel to simplify some of the APIs in the Android framework. What this is leading to is less friction when it comes to implementing core updates. Unfortunately not all manufacturers have opted in to adhering to the standards and Project Trebel yet.
This is all in stark contrast to iOS, which doesn't have the restriction of dealing with multiple manufacturers, and makes it harder for carriers to customize the device for their own business cases. This makes security and updates easier to push, but on the cost to the user of being an expensive single stream walled garden. Nothing against iOS in the statement, as a flagship device they're very nice. However, they don't have the adaptability that Android allows, making them prohibitive in some markets.
Sorry for any grammar issues, I'm on my phone (a regularly updated Pixel 3).