Deja vu - Apple has pretensions that everyone (and especially its biggest rivals) are stealing from them, while simultaneously copying successful features from countless other products.
The non-recognition of this fact of course is the biggest threat for Apple and non-recognition of pretensions of owning 'innovation' a threat. Because selling pretentiousness is the business model.
Google scrapped that and then turned around and copied the iPhone. And they copied everything about the iPhone. The resolution was the same. There were the same number of icons per row. Applications placed icons in the same place. You pinched to zoom on both devices. You switched between screens by swiping on both systems. Both systems had an app store (a previously unheard of way to deliver applications).
This isn't Mac vs. Windows or Xerox vs. Mac. This was way above that in the theft department.
Palm was making touchscreen smartphones for years before iOS came on the scene. My Windows Mobile smartphone in 2006 had the same resolution as the iPhone. Windows Mobile 6 was released before the first iPhone and had a very similar look and feel. Devices running it had a big, bright display that covered nearly the entire front of the phone, with large icons that launched apps.
Microsoft was showing off their Surface product (with 1:1 user interactions, pinch to zoom, and swiping around) before iPhone's release. The concept behind it was pretty prevalent in science fiction, most prominently the movie Minority Report.
Laying out apps in rows of icons has existed since some of the first UIs have been created. You don't have to look further than any Blackberry to see exactly where Apple got the idea from for doing it on a mobile device.
The Danger Hiptop (commonly known as the T-Mobile Sidekick) had a complete app store that they called the Download Catalog. You wrote apps using their Java ME SDK, and the only way to get them onto the device was by distributing through this central repository. Apps would have to be curated and tested. Sound familiar? And this was back as early as 2002. Not to mention the plethora of Linux package repos. The concept of a centralized distribution store existed long before iOS.
iOS was completely built on the work and ideas that already existed in the industry. Android was no different, only it happened to come out after iOS. So it incorporated those ideas as well. That's practically the definition of innovation. Trying to white-knight and make out Apple to be some saint of a company that didn't do the exact same (and completely justified) thing as Google is just naive. Google didn't "steal" from Apple any more than they did from Palm or HTC or Microsoft. Or any more than Apple "stole" from Palm or HTC or Microsoft.
Can you name an Apple like app store before the iPhone? The closest you can come is Nokia and Symbian and that was a download an executable type thing.
An app store as we understand it today where you click a buy button and the app installs on your computer was an Apple innovation
Fits the bill, minus the polish. And that's really where Apple's genius is, polishing the hell out of a concept in order to make it desirable. Just don't pretend it's an original concept.
* Danger Hiptop, though that's been mentioned in other places.
* My Verizon featurephone had a "Verizon Wireless Store" where you could purchase little apps and games.
* Linux package managers have been doing this for literally years, just not on mobile devices and without GUIs.
I appreciate that Apple's done good work but they built on the shoulders of everyone that came before them.
You call that the original prototype, but even that article says "The original demo video showed a handset that was closer to an iPhone (although with keyboard) than a Blackberry,complete with touch screen interface,".
That seems kind of at odds with what you're saying. It makes this seem more like a proof of concept, released after videos of touch-based phones, that Android could work under multiple forms.
I couldn't find a link but it was later shown this prototype pre-dated the iPhone-like video. If I recall correctly this prototype was actually from the pre-Google acquisition days.
I just thought the point would be obvious since it makes no sense for Android to be more iPhone like, then go to this, then go back to being iPhone like.
Ahhhh, appreciated. I made an assumption as to why, but yeah, that makes more sense. That sentence just threw me off.
But your core point is probably right; they probably did see the iphone and say "well shit. Call up the team." I don't think it should be illegal, but you're likely correct on what actually happened. And yeah, it's funny people are so averse to saying that.
(And I recently realized I'm a big Google fan. ... Is there a name for us? I need to get to know my people!)
The major difference from the prototype is that Android now is touch oriented. Swiping is a gesture - the Opera browser had one for ages. Its logical. App stores aren't unheard of before. Linux distributions had their equivalents for ages (that included proprietary application next to open-source ones)
Why should Google screw up their platform so that they wouldn't look like Apple?
It wasn't just touch. The icons were placed differently. The resolution was different. The screen size was different. The touch interface was different (you can't just say touch because Windows Phones had touch way before the iPhone but it wasn't anywhere near the same thing).
As for screwing up their platform I'm not saying they should of. The patent system is screwed up and I'm glad Android stole from the iPhone because it means there's actual competition.
But there's a difference between saying "Yeah, Google stole from the iPhone but its the fault of a bad patent system" and denying Google stole from Apple at all.
Is it not possible that someone, deciding to make a touch phone at about the same time would look at:
What is a good physical size for the screen.
What is the kind of resolution we can get on a LCD of that size?
How many icons can we fit on that screen, which can be easily manipulated by users (there aren't that many options, as you can't fit that many icons on the screen).
It seems to me many of these kinds of things fit into into a set of "only one real option", once you've decided (and this might be the 'big copied thing') to have a phone which is just a touch screen + a single button (or 3 on android)).
Not really. The metaphor is completely different. There are no desktop icons. You side scrolled through things (see the arrows on the left and right side). On that note navigation was done through the multidirectional button in the center where as the current candybar types are done through touch.
You make a factually-correct point but I think it's worth taking a step back and asking ourselves what do we want to happen and why?
Do we want to say that if a company A does something that's similar to company B's work, we shouldn't allow that to happen. Ever. I think breaks down pretty badly if you consider the case of, say, generic AIDS drugs. These "copied" drugs are saving lives and that to me is way more important than any IP-infringement issues.
In the Apple vs Google case, it seems like this copying has been a good thing - we now have a lot of really great smartphones trying to out-compete each other. So it's not clear to me that if this copying was banned, this would've been good for human society as a whole.
OTOH, if you consider something like Intel copying the RISC microarchitectures of the 90s and essentially driving the likes of Compaq, DEC and MIPS out of business, allowing those ideas to copied was almost definitely bad for consumers.
The point is that there isn't a clear-cut right-or-wrong answer on this one. It seems like whether copying is a good thing depends more on who is copying who, and how much money each of the participants have, than on exactly what is copied.
if you consider something like Intel copying the RISC microarchitectures of the 90s and essentially driving the likes of Compaq, DEC and MIPS out of business, allowing those ideas to copied was almost definitely bad for consumers.
I don't understand how you can argue this was bad for consumers when it made fast CPUs so much cheaper. Okay, it stuck us with the x86 architecture, which wasn't so great for programmers, you could argue. But how was this a problem for consumers?
I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.
One reason it was bad was because all these other guys died.
If you remember back to 2000 or so, Intel had killed all their competitors, bought Alpha and then threw it way were trying two rather briandead architectures in the P4 and the Itanium. They were able to get away with it because essentially they had no competition. AMD saved us from this with the Greyhound and x86-64 and there's no guarantee that Intel would've done anything similar if not for them.
I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.
The reason you have that kind of performance increase over the last 30 years or so is because of CMOS scaling and let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this is driven by Intel. CMOS scaling was predicted by IBM's Bob Dennard back in the 70s and all we've done since then is pretty much just follow his roadmap.
It's not like computers weren't getting cheaper and faster before Intel became the dominant monopoly.
I don't disagree. I'm GLAD Google stole from Apple. My only issue is with those who deny that's what happened. That's disrespectful to the innovation represented by the iPhone.
The problem is the term "stole", IMO. No one says "Apple stole the smartphone idea from Palm" or "Apple stole the idea of the MP3 player from Creative". It's just taken as a given that the current technology landscape influences what comes after it.
If you develop a useful UI paradigm or technology, I may make use of it if it is fitting.
The time when "stole" seems appropriate is if Google stole the design from a non-public version of the iPhone. Which maybe did happen (via Schmidt), but that's generally not what people are referring to when they use the term.
I think the rate of change of the underlying technology plays a role here.
If you make a new cooking device that's somehow easier, it seems like a patent is a reasonable protection of your innovation. Cooking has been around for a long time, so if you come up with something clever that saves a few minutes, then that must be novel.
However, with technology changing so fast, it seems to change the equation. When good touchscreens came out that would fit nicely on a phone, there was really no "standard" way of using them in that context. So, almost by definition, the first few things that people implement are both new and obvious.
It's not that such things aren't somewhat innovative. But it seems like it's going too far to grant long-term patent protection for such things.
Maybe we need a 3-year version of a patent that can cover fast-changing areas like this? I feel pretty confident that someone would have invented a good UI independently of the iPhone (whether similar to the iphone or not) within about 3 years of the availability of the underlying technology.
One needn't look further than Windows Phone 7, with Metro, as an example of how to do an original smartphone and tablet UI. Google could have ripped the guts out of the underlying interface assumptions that Apple made and did something completely different, but they didn't.
I'd personally prefer a competitive landscape where players do what Harris's team did at Microsoft or what Palm did with WebOS, which is to make it their own. Tiles instead of icons. Cards for switching and closing apps instead of iOS's in and out. Big players who copy are bad for innovation, not good for it.
Let's even accept your implicit contention, which is that Apple is the origin of features used by Android (and ignore all the points to the contrary given by others in this thread). What about Android's millions of satisfied users, who I suppose were, shall we say, taken away from Apple's rightful clutch? To you, do they not constitute prima facie evidence of a competitive landscape that's extremely healthy, forcing Apple to innovate again whilst having given consumers greater choice and cheaper access to paradigmatic phone design?
The non-recognition of this fact of course is the biggest threat for Apple and non-recognition of pretensions of owning 'innovation' a threat. Because selling pretentiousness is the business model.