The G1, or what happens when you give a phone OS away for free
On January 9, 2007, somewhere in Mountain View, the engineers building Google’s not-yet-announced mobile operating system watched Steve Jobs hold up a phone. Their own prototype, up to that moment, had a physical keyboard, no touchscreen, and bore a strong resemblance to a BlackBerry. Within days, they were redesigning from scratch.
The operating system they were building was Android — and its name had an older origin than the smartphone wars. Andy Rubin had been called “Android” by colleagues at Apple in 1989 because of his obsession with robots. He carried that nickname out of Apple, through a series of startups, and into Android Inc., which he co-founded in October 2003 in Palo Alto with Chris White, Rich Miner, and Nick Sears. Their first idea was an OS for digital cameras — better software for the devices people actually carried around. The pivot to phones came in April 2004, when Sears pointed out that Symbian and Windows Mobile had left a gap large enough to drive through.
Google acquired Android Inc. in July 2005 for approximately $50 million. The company had eight employees, no product, and no revenue. Larry Page believed mobile phones would become the primary computing device, and he feared that Nokia, BlackBerry, and the carriers could collectively lock Google out of the mobile internet — threatening the search and advertising business that paid for everything else. The $50 million, in retrospect, looks like the cheapest insurance policy ever written.
The G1 that finally launched on October 22, 2008, on T-Mobile, was a compromise born of haste. It had a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen (the iPhone’s influence, plain as daylight) and a sliding five-row QWERTY keyboard beneath it — a hedge against the fact that Android 1.0 shipped without a virtual keyboard at all. A clickable optical trackball sat below the screen because touchscreens in 2008 weren’t reliable enough to navigate every interface element. At $179 with a two-year contract, it was cheaper than the iPhone 3G. At 192 megabytes of RAM, it was also considerably more modest.
What the G1 lacked in elegance it made up in openness. Android was free. Any manufacturer could take it, modify it, and ship it on any hardware. That was the entire bet, made explicit on November 5, 2007 — eleven months before the G1 launched — when Google and thirty-three partners announced the Open Handset Alliance and declared Android “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.” Samsung was in the room. Motorola was in the room. HTC was in the room. The implication was obvious: the iPhone might own the premium tier, but Android would be everywhere else.
The phone itself sold more than a million units in its first six months on T-Mobile — respectable, though still dwarfed by the iPhone’s numbers. The device stopped receiving software updates at Android 1.6 “Donut” in 2009 and was discontinued in 2010. By then it was already beside the point.
The coalition that signed the OHA announcement had fractured into competitors, each building their own Android phones and fighting each other for the middle of the market. By 2022, Android-based devices held 72 percent of the global smartphone market across hundreds of manufacturers. Apple’s iOS held 28 percent. Google’s David Lawee, VP of Corporate Development, had called the $50 million Android acquisition the company’s “best deal ever” as early as 2010 — when the ecosystem it had seeded was barely two years old.
The iPhone told the world what a smartphone should feel like. The G1 told the world who got to build one.
Sources
- HTC Dream — Wikipedia — launch specs, date, pricing, carrier, and software history.
- Android (operating system) — Wikipedia — founding of Android Inc., Google acquisition, and the iPhone-triggered redesign.
- Open Handset Alliance press release, November 5, 2007 — original OHA founding announcement, member list, and mission statement.
- Android Authority — First Android Phone retrospective — sales figures, market share data, and critical reception.