There Was a Time When Android Struggled Even Inside Google

Ten years ago, when Android was just starting out, its biggest enemy was not Apple but its own colleagues at Google.

It is hard to imagine what the world would look like if Android had never existed. When you bought a phone, your choices might have been the iPhone, Nokia and Microsoft.

This year marks ten years since Google bought the Android team. A small company founded by Andy Rubin caught the eye of Google's two founders and joined the search giant to lead its mobile business.

Three days ago, Rich Miner, who built Android with Rubin and is now a partner at Google Ventures, wrote on Twitter: "It's been ten years since Google acquired Android. Happy anniversary to all of Android's founding team!"

Android now runs on billions of devices. Let's look back at how it started ten years ago.

Before Google, Samsung asked Android: "Are you drunk?"

Steve Jobs founded Apple at 21. Rubin's early career was far more conventional.

In the 1980s, after graduating in computer science, Rubin started out as a robotics engineer at Zeiss. In 1989 he joined John Sculley's Apple. The following year his division was spun off as a separate company, General Magic, to develop an operating system for phones. The company went public in 1995, but it was too far ahead of its time, carrier support never caught up, and it soon faded away.

Rubin then joined another company, Artemis Research, which made internet TV products. Microsoft later bought it, and after a short stint at Microsoft, Rubin decided to leave.

In 2000, at 37, Rubin became an entrepreneur. Danger was his first company. He and his two co-founders had an idea both simple and grand: put a tiny computer in everyone's hands. Danger's product was the Sidekick, an internet-connected smartphone. With its full keyboard it looked very strange, and to use it you flipped the screen up and spun it 180 degrees. It never sold in large numbers, but it won fans in a few niche groups, especially teenagers, rappers and Silicon Valley engineers.

Sidekick

As the company grew, Danger's investors wanted a new manager. In 2003 Rubin left the CEO job disappointed, and that same year he founded Android Inc.

Rubin loved robots, and the name Android proves it. The word first appeared in L'Ève future (Tomorrow's Eve), a science-fiction novel published in 1886 by the French writer Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, who used it for a machine that looked human. After leaving the Android team in 2013, Rubin devoted himself to robotics research at Google X.

In 2005, Rubin brought an Android prototype to Google and met co-founder Larry Page. Standing at a whiteboard, Rubin talked at length about why he believed in the mobile market. If Android could win over carriers and handset makers, he said, they would no longer need to spend money building their own software. Consumers would then rush to buy these more capable phones, developers would follow the demand and build apps for the platform, and a self-reinforcing software ecosystem would be born.

Page had already made up his mind. "We had foresight. We knew this was what we should be doing," he said in a later interview. A few weeks later, Google bought Android for US$50 million plus stock incentives.

Before turning to Google, Rubin had also pitched the handset maker Samsung. Samsung's reaction was the opposite of Google's, and it may be the decision Samsung most regrets in its history: it turned Android down.

"You have only six people working for you. You must be drunk," one Samsung executive said after hearing Rubin's plan to change the phone industry. That was just two weeks before Google announced it was buying Android.

Three days after the news broke, Samsung called Rubin: "We'd like to meet right away to discuss that very, very interesting proposal you gave us in Seoul the other day."

The first Android phone was killed by the iPhone

The first Android phone was called Sooner, and Google kept the project highly secret. It looked much like a BlackBerry: a 320 x 240 non-touch screen and a candybar body with a full keyboard.

Sooner

Sooner was an internet-connected smartphone. Besides a browser, it could run apps such as search, maps and YouTube. More important, Sooner's apps could run on any smartphone, laptop or desktop, and it could run several programs at once.

This was the earliest app marketplace. The original iPhone had to sync with iTunes regularly and could run only one app at a time, and Apple thought of building an app store only after the iPhone was out.

Even so, the iPhone, unveiled in January 2007, caught Rubin, the head of the Android project, off guard. With a single touchscreen, Jobs had completely changed how people use phones, and the on-screen keyboard let each program have its own controls. "I guess we're not going to ship that phone," Rubin said of Sooner. Next to the iPhone, Sooner was simply ugly: no touchscreen, just a full keyboard like a BlackBerry.

A few weeks later, the Android team changed course entirely and replanned the project. A touchscreen phone code-named Dream entered early development. It had a touchscreen and did everything the iPhone could do.

Before Android's official launch, the press had already caught wind of Google's phone plans. Google leaked the news on purpose, inviting The New York Times reporter John Markoff to write a long profile of Rubin, I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone, which ran the day before the launch.

On November 5, 2007, Google showed the world an operating system called Android. But no hardware appeared at the launch. Instead, Google announced a global alliance of 34 handset makers, software developers, carriers and chipmakers, which together with 84 hardware makers, software developers and carriers formed the Open Handset Alliance to develop and improve Android.

The so-called alliance was in fact very fragile, and most of its members had joined because Google paid them. HTC was a long-time Google partner, yet Google still paid it millions of dollars to build the first Android phone.

The rushed G1

Before working with Google, HTC had long been a close partner of Microsoft, making phones that ran Windows Phone. Google had to clear many hurdles to bring HTC into the alliance.

Two weeks after announcing Android, Google released a video of an iPhone-like prototype with a touchscreen and 3G. From the alliance's founding in 2007 to the phone's launch in November 2008, this phone, the G1, had just over ten months of development and refinement.

A traditional internet service can launch an unfinished version and keep fixing it, so the deadline pressure is lighter. Android could not do that: it had to hit the holiday sales peak before Christmas 2008.

While the G1 was in development, Rubin ran the team with an iron fist. He set hard deadlines for the project and even used a strict hierarchy to push employees to deliver.

But strict demands came with generous rewards. Rubin would pay for employees' round-trip flights to send them to the CES trade show in Las Vegas, and he would add a little from his own pocket to their year-end bonuses.

HTC G1

In the end, the G1 went on sale in time for the Christmas shopping season. It too had a slide-out keyboard, along with an iPhone-like touchscreen. But the Android 1.0 it ran had all kinds of problems. You could not, for example, type in portrait mode; that feature arrived only with Android 1.5.

Android's biggest enemy was other Google teams

At least at first.

The person who disliked Android most was Vic Gundotra, an executive Google had lured from Microsoft at great expense in 2007. Gundotra was in charge of exactly the thing Android threatened: Google's partnership with the iPhone.

Google and Apple were close partners then. While Google was building Android in-house, it was also working secretly with Apple to preinstall its search, maps and YouTube on the iPhone.

Gundotra believed Google's mobile future depended entirely on the iPhone, which looked good and was powerful enough to run Google's apps. While backing the iPhone, he froze out other phones, deciding to stop building apps for Windows Mobile and for Nokia phones.

For Rubin and his team, the iPhone was more than a competitor. Their situation was more complicated than that.

In 2007 the iPhone went on sale and brought Gundotra millions of users. Android, meanwhile, was still a year away from becoming a product. Gundotra questioned internally whether Android needed to exist at all; he saw it as a sour note that would damage the relationship with Apple.

Rubin put it bluntly: "If we still want Android to succeed, we have to stop giving the best stuff to Apple."

Until the HTC G1 came out, Rubin and his team got a cold shoulder from other Google teams too. Android was a secret project. Despite heavy investment, it had to be hidden away, which ran against the openness and sharing Google had always preached. At Google, to prevent work being done behind closed doors, any engineer could see the code for every product. Android was the exception.

For Google, secrecy was a last resort: if details of the project leaked, competitors could crush Google in no time. For that reason Rubin turned down several very senior industry figures who asked to see Android's source code.

Relations between other Google divisions and Android grew so tense that when the Android team asked the Gmail team for access, it was refused, and had to use the same interfaces as outside developers. The same thing happened with other teams such as Google Talk and Calendar.

You know the rest. The G1 sold below expectations, but later arrivals such as the Droid and the Galaxy brought Android to market in large numbers. In 2010 the Droid X even became the second best-selling phone in the US, behind only the iPhone 4.

Samsung, the company that once turned Rubin away, made its Android-powered Galaxy S series a worldwide hit. By 2012 Galaxy phones were outselling the iPhone, and Samsung remains the world's largest smartphone shipper today. Android itself went through rapid updates, its features steadily improving until it became what it is today.

Along the way, Android became one of Google's most important businesses, and Apple and Google went from close partners to direct rivals.

On October 29, 2014, Andy Rubin, then 51, left Google and founded an incubator that backs hardware startups. That year, more than 1 billion devices running Android were shipped.

Cover image from phandroid. Much of the information in this article comes from the book Dogfight, which we recommend.