That might be, and before the iPhone reveal, the vision was supposedly to target Nokia-style button phones.

The difference could be that the technical foundation was more sound, and also, Google is institutionally capable of large refactorings in a way that I think few other companies are.

People forget this, and it’s solved now, but it took Android several years and quite a few iterations of the rendering layer to get smooth scrolling working to the level of the iPhone 1. Look up “Project Butter” if you’re interested.

Smooth scrolling is hard, but important for touch to feel perfectly right. I’m convinced that this is one of the places where it mattered that touch screens were an afterthought in the original architecture.

I remember them publicly demoing the BlackBerry clone from this article https://www.pcworld.com/article/464050/original_android_prot...