Android wasn’t designed for smartphones

Today android has been around for ages but did you know that android os was originally built for something other than smartphones today we're going to talk about the popular os that was originally developed for digital cameras this video was adapted from articles over on our site 

In 2004 co-founder of android Andy Rubin was trying to get funding for a new project he called android the idea was simple at the time digital camera storage was relatively small and still pretty expensive by today's standards Rubin wanted to solve this problem by building a platform for digital cameras that relied on cloud storage instead of physical storage this would give users the ability to view their uploaded photos and videos from any device instead of having to rely on on-device hardware but unfortunately back in 2004 interest from investors was pretty low and Rubin didn't end up getting his project funded but that didn't stop android Rubin and his team realized that the digital camera market was too small to get their project off the ground which led them to pivoting towards mobile handsets now in order to understand the significance or gravity of this pivot we have to look at the mobile competitors at the time palm os Symbian os and windows mobile were the tech giants in the early 2000s while underdogs like blackberry were just getting off the ground but what all of these os's had in common was that they were paid platform companies had to license in one form or another to gain access to use these mobile operating systems on its hardware Rubin and his team on the other hand wanted to make android free and open source their goal was to create a platform for selling services and products such as apps and games android had a lot going for it and 

Because it was free it was that much easier to pitch to phone manufacturers still android funding and a lot of it as it turned out the company was broke and Rubin even took out a personal loan from a friend to keep the project going fortunately in January of 2005 the android team met with google and in the second meeting later that year they even showed off a prototype of their mobile os apparently that was good enough for google and the tech giant purchased android for a small 50 million dollars now as for why google decided to buy android it's likely that google wanted to move beyond its main focus on the pc platform at the time and move into the mobile market now google also hired Rubin as their senior vice president of mobile and digital content and set a goal to capture nine percent of the market share in north america and Europe in the following five years now maybe somewhat unsurprisingly by 2010 android held 24 of the market share in north america which completely shattered google's initial goal so it makes sense that android was originally built for digital cameras at the time digital cameras were getting better and better each passing year but they had one flaw storage had Rubin pursued this original idea cameras might have been in a far different place today but it's even more interesting to think about what other operating systems would have taken over had android not developed back in the early 2000s 

Symbian os was growing fast and while windows mobile had been around for years they were slowly losing their market share blackberry on the other hand was growing incredibly fast as well and so long as android wasn't around they were the default os for business professionals but I think what made android so unique and so appealing was its open source model in fact the android open source project or Aesop is still around today and this made the barrier to entry for manufacturers incredibly small now manufacturers wouldn't necessarily need to license software from competitors like Microsoft and Symbian know now they could develop their own software on top of android which made android the default choice obviously now it's not that simple but back in the late 2000s manufacturers like htc and Samsung were quick to jump on board in fact the first smartphone running android was manufactured by htc in 2008 the t-mobile g1 or the htc dream as it was known in other countries now although that phone received less than ideal reviews from the media it was still a launching point for the os in fact shortly thereafter in 2009 the first Samsung galaxy phone ran android 1.5 or android cupcake which featured groundbreaking features such as the ability to rotate content when rotating the display the point is android was built for success in the mobile market had they continued with cameras they probably would not have been successful 

I mean just look at the numbers in 2007 smartphone sales rose from 122 million to 1.5 billion in 2019 digital camera sales on the other hand declined from around 100 million in 2007 to just 15 million in 2019. sure that could have changed that android been to default os for cameras but as we saw in 2012 Samsung galaxy camera android on a digital camera didn't really work out that well then again it's pretty interesting to think about what android would have looked like running on canon or Sony well that's going to wrap it up for this one!