Did Android help Google?
Android, Inc. was founded in 2003 by Andy Rubin and team. The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras. Though, when it was realized that the market for the devices was not large enough, the company diverted its efforts toward producing a smartphone operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Despite the past accomplishments of the founders and early employees, Android Inc. operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.
In July 2005, Google acquired Android Inc. for at least $50 million. Not much was known about Android Inc. at the time, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market with this move. At Google, the team led by Rubin developed a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel. Google marketed the platform to handset makers and carriers on the promise of providing a flexible, upgradable system. Google had lined up a series of hardware component and software partners and signaled to carriers that it was open to various degrees of cooperation on their part.
Speculation about Google’s intention to enter the mobile communications market continued to build through December 2006.[33] An earlier prototype codenamed “Sooner” had a closer resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen, and a physical, QWERTY keyboard, but was later re-engineered to support a touchscreen, to compete with other announced devices such as the 2006 LG Prada and 2007 Apple iPhone.
At Google I/O 2014, the company revealed that there were over one billion active monthly Android users, up from 538 million in June 2013. How many of them have the Play Store installed? How many of them can Google ship a software update to directly? Android is a platform, it has far too many variants to list.
Google bought Android, the company in 2006 — started by Andy Rubin.
Google bought Android in 2006. Android started out by cloning the then popular Blackberry. because Reason being they wanted control on mobile platforms, so that their services were not side tracked.
They quickly re-align strategy to copy iPhone instead by 2008. By 2012, they have spent more than 10 billion buying Motorola to have a patent portfolio and develop Android, still giving it away for free in *hope* of future profits.
Today, Android is great. But the two companies with a majority of the smartphone market are Apple and Samsung.
Samsung day-by-day threatens a move to another platform, or fork Android (like Kindle) with it’s own default apps, and a store for media and apps.
Apple on the other hand is still the platform where Google makes most of its money with advertising from the default search, in-game advertising, and dedicated native apps for most of its services.
So how did Android help Google?
