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Doesn't really matter; these operating systems are constantly stealing features from each other (iOS5 stole Android notifications from Android, while ICS stole the new folder creation stuff from iOS, and also stole Fizzy Lifting Drinks from WebOS and WP7).

This whole 'who copied who' shit is getting old, especially in the smartphone realm, and it really needs to be buried once and for all. Even if you could prove indefinitely which one copied more, it still doesn't matter, because people are going to use what they want to use regardless of where it was copied from.

Arguing over this stuff is like competing in the special olympics ...

Edited 2011-10-22 01:12 UTC

Well put.

Exactly. I'll copy this post from reddit which sums it up:

""He's spot on. There's plenty of ways a $150b+ company can make a mobile OS, see Windows Phone for example.
Google bought Android when it was a BlackBerry clone, and when iPhone debuted they turned it into an iOS clone, no one can seriously deny this"

The problem is not solely that Android was just an iPhone clone. It's that Apple and Google had a very close relationship before that so this was a pretty serious stab in the back. Hence the personal vendetta.
This is not about copying a little feature here and there. This is about turning around to go after a former partner's main strategy. Like as if Apple had gone and made a search engine.

Android is not fundamentally innovative. Of course there are good features (ie, notification system) but it's no major change in design. At least a platform like Windows Phone thought about the whole experience and tried to make something different.

Edited 2011-10-22 01:29 UTC

Innovation, in the end, really doesn't matter. As has been demonstrated by the numerous arguments over innovation both here and elsewhere on the internet very few people even agree on what is or is not innovative. Ultimately people choose the product that is most attractive to them according to their criteria. If you want to argue about phones argue about their features, performance, things that actually matter rather than a pretty pointless history lesson on who did something the first the most number of times ( if that's how one person chooses to define innovation).

> Cloud based apps,
Google has been developing cloud based apps for many years. What did people expect from Google? Not to use them?

> a tablet,
Did people expect Google to give up markets?

> and a unified OS
So Google has not diverse OS like Chrome and Android?

> Android was just an iPhone clone.

"Besides a mobile phone, the major applications were a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, and games. It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touchscreen to select phone numbers with a finger".

It was an invent from Apple? No.
http://www.retrocom.com/bellsouth_ibm_simon.htm
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF8&pr...

Yeah, a clone that can't even run apps made for iOS, or even have some compatibily at SDK level, not even the same language to develop for.

Something weird happened to the definition of "clone" word in the IT. Now, just sharing a vague physical shape make a product a "clone", an illegal copy of another one.

All this is not getting silly, it *IS*.
Since far too long.

Too many people seems trapped in a distortion field.



As 99.9999% of software code. Even iOS, MacOS X, Windows, Linux share a large portion of software design that were written decades ago.
Under iOS, there is an UNIX layer.
Same for MacOS X. Apple invent none of them.
But without them, no iDevice, zero.

What Android did is to put a fast quasi-java runtime and write an orthogonal framework that doesn't need to learn a language only used by one company products (Objective C). Suddently, all java coders could see a new opportunity, when they didn't with Apple ecosystem.
This kind of choice also matter.



You mean, not like the lack of multitasking in iOS until 3.0? Or system-wide copy&paste?
Sure, multitasking, aka the ability to NOT have to restart from scratch what you were doing before you accept to answer that call is not a major change in design for a smartphone operating system. It was so fun without multitasking, so true.

Yeah, right.
Sorry, but sporting an apple logo is not a major design change anymore. The same apply to huge margin.
And consumer started to see that since a year.
What did Apple innovate since?
Their latest innovation is whinning about stealers.
Indeed, that's a very big change, for a company that started to gain profit by copying Xerox WIMP design.



Which has yet miss success, mostly because smartphone users are now expecting user interface they already how to use and are fluent with, like before others users were hooked to Windows and less ready to try something different like... a Mac.

How ironic.

Apple innovate. They create a new design paradigm, so great that nobody can think to use a smartphone that won't be a touch device and behave similar to the new paradigm.

But they are hangry that their paradigm is copied!?
It's the price of success.

For some people, being successful and rich is never enough. They want to be the only one successful and rich?

Won't work. Never had, never will.

1st point: How about timing? Touch oriented Android was presented for the first time a very long time after iPhone was released. First device was released a year and 3 months after iPhone was released. almost 2 years after iPhone was announced. If Schmidt had any insider information, wouldn't Android be touch oriented from the start?

2nd point: Schmidt was CEO of a company that publicly bought Android in 2005, when he was asked by Steve to join Apple's board in 2006.

3rd point: There is such a thing called industrial espionage and trade secrets. If Schmidt committed industrial espionage, then the trial would have been quick. However, with all that fury no accusations were made. Only nutters online allege it.

4th point: Steve said that iPhone was developed in secret.

Android was founded in '02, and then it was acquired by Google in '04/'05. Apple started the development of the iPhone in '05.


So either Schmidt has time traveling abilities, or you have fallen into the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field.

The man was ill and was raving and delusional because of medication.

As noted earlier, Android pre-iPhone was a BlackBerry clone, not an iPhone clone. Google had inside information on what the iPhone would be like, and took this inside info to steer their Android effort in another direction so they could compete with the iPhone before others.

Lets be honest about something. When you sit on the board of a company, there are a lot of eyes on you. As Schmidt worked for Google, he would not, and was not, privy to any discussions that would have been a conflict of interest. To do so would have put Schmidt personally in the cross hairs of a multi billion dollar law suit. Lots of boards from lots of companies have members on other boards. While Schmidt probably knew Apple was working on a phone, he would not have had any first hand knowledge of the actual design.

EDIT: To suggest otherwise is laughable considering the secrecy of Apple about their products. Do you really think Steve Jobs would allow a competitor a preview of what they were building?

Edited 2011-10-22 03:24 UTC

They weren't a competitor at that time. As Jobs stated at All Things D with Walt Mossberg, " We didn't go out and build a search engine did we?" And if anyone thinks that people sitting on the BOD don't get to sees working prototypes of future products, you obviously are tards.

In case you're referring to that devboard picture that floats around on the web: devboards look like that, keyboard and all.

It's simply easier to debug these boxes with real keys instead of relying on a metric ton of software just to be able to enter "reboot".

I'm not saying that there wasn't such a deliberate move (no idea), but that picture is not a good proof.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU