This is complete bollocks.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...

It's not bollocks; we now have Google engineers on record that they had to substantially rethink Android in the wake of the iPhone announcement.

> Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

> On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.

> “Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-...

This is not one of those Apple vs Google fights; it's straight up well-sourced journalism.

The video he presents as evidence does exactly the opposite! That is the video we all point to when we say the whole interface was lifted from iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1FJHY...

That is the exact old skool interface that was so terrible.

That is Android pre-iPhone.

His only argument is 'well look later, there's some touch too'. But that's even more damning as the touch was so badly designed and clunky.

Watch the whole thing if you want. Notice the use of right-click menus. Notice the zoom had to use buttons. The program switcher is lifted from Vista and looks nothing like what actually happened, which was a iPhone copied home button.

What the video shows is that Android had an interface and it was nothing like the one that came out 6 months later which was wholesale lifted from the iPhone.

Windows Mobile showed you didn't have to do it anything like Apple did, so why did android look so much like the iOS?

Yeah I remember also there was so much gnashing of teeth that it didn't HAVE A TACTILE KEYBOARD! It's just for show OMG! Japanese phones have had more gizmos^H^H^H^H^H^H features like FOREVER!!

Besides the interface, I thought it was interesting that it had a real unix based OS underneath, which would pay off in the future as phone processors became more powerful.

It's sortof funny looking back. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess.

It blew every other phone, but it wasn't that original over PDAs. I had a Windows 6.5 pda then, and I thought the iPhone was way cooler and well-designed. Of course it was inmensely superior to my PDA, but not so incredibly original. It didn't do anything at all I wasn't already doing with PDAs, it just did some of them (chiefly, web browsing) way better, most of them in a cooler way (pinch to zoom, animations), and even a few, slightly worse (browsing while listening to music).

Apple has this fame of original crazy geniouses that have invented X or Y. They have mostly taken other's ideas and perfected them. Perfected them a lot, admittedly; even may be taken them to a new level of awesomeness with a great vision of on which details it was better to improve.

I love apple products, don't take me wrong. They deserve a lot of credit for the iPod, the iPhone, iOS, the iPad...

I think it was extremely childish of Jobs to get so pissed.

Jobs was pissed for two reasons; one, Android copied a lot of things from Apple and two, the company that was doing the copying had their CEO (and a very technical CEO at that) on the Apple board of directors.

I'm not sure why people always ignore the second part of why Jobs was pissed. It was the Schmidt one-two sucker punch that really pissed him off.

> I think it was extremely childish of Jobs to get so pissed.

I've never thought of Jobs as being someone mature and reasonable anyway. He was already like that in his younger years whenever the competition heated up. He didn't change.

I agree 100% with you. It was very original and a very good product.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't have competition. Competition is a basic requirement for a functional economy.

Which is why the patient system is broken.

> Compared to all other phones it was 10 years ahead in vision. All other phones were suddenly ludicrously laid out, with stupid designs.

You are wrong because you are looking at the wrong category for a comparison. Look at PDAs. PDAs had everything that the iPhone could do, more or less. And this, YEARS before the iPhone came out. I know it, because I had PDAs very early on and I remember making fun of the people thinking that the iPhone was so revolutionary at work because I had been doing the same stuff with my PDA for 5 years. Of course, the iPhone had a better browser, was easier to use, was more cool looking, but nonetheless it had nothing NEW in functionality over the previous PDAs. Comparing with phones is therefore irrelevant, the iPhone was PDA-Phone, thus being called a Smart-Phone later on by the mainstream media.

You're confusing aesthetic design with functional originality. The original iphone was very well designed, but it stood on the shoulders of PDAs and was a natural next step. Just as an open-sourced OS like Android was the next step.

Exactly. Everything was already in the PDAs. Apple just changed things a bit and made it cooler, but they did not invent anything.