Gundotra's comment to Bray was "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped -- by which point, by the commenter's account (and yours), Google's strategy had shifted, and they were using Android as a future product, not just a stalking horse. So, I'm not sure there's a contradiction here.
Correct, after iPhone was released, it became apparently to Google that it wasn't just the carriers which were a roadblock to Google's unfettered monetization of the mobile space, but also Apple. Google leadership had these ridiculous fantasies of strong-arming US wireless carriers into ultra cheap unlimited data plans, and/or buying the 700Mhz spectrum for their own country-wide coverage with no dead zones. Hence the spectrum bid. When Apple released iPhone, it was not only a better product than the internal developing Android devices, but Apple also struck an exclusivity deal w/ AT&T which set the price point for these new devices. Google not only had their leverage yoinked out from under them, but they also started to realize becoming a wireless ISP is harder than they thought, and had no choice but to release what they could. I'm guessing at the time T-mobile needed the business inject the most of the big 4, and made Google the best partnering offer.
I was at google at the time of the spectrum bidding (but not having anything to do with phones) and that was a different situation. Recall that there was some minimum amount of money in the spectrum bid to require that the wireless data use would follow net neutrality rules. I remember they discussed this at TGIF and google was bidding up until it went over that amount. It wasn't a secret, it was openly discussed at tgif.
> ... "the iPhone is really good" -- so that conversation had to have happened after the iPhone was announced, and perhaps after it shipped ...
Not necessarily. Steve Jobs was really pissed with Google after they launched Android because Android copied a lot of features from ios. And they could do so because Apple had given them early access to it to develop apps like YouTube (remember, the first iPhone / ios 1 came with the YouTube app bundled by default). Steve Jobs was also mentoring the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at that time, and they had unprecedented access to both him and presumably his company. That's why he believed that Android was the "stolen" property of Apple:
> According to Steven Levy's book, Jobs "concluded that he was a victim of deceit." He felt "he had been betrayed by the two young men he had been attempting to mentor. He felt the trust between the two companies had been violated […] Not only did he believe that Google had performed a bait and switch on him, replacing a non-competing phone with one that was very much in the iPhone mode, but he also felt that Google had stolen Apple's intellectual property."
(Interestingly, it was after Android that Steve Jobs very rightly claimed that Google's "don't be evil" mantra was plain bullshit).
Edit: Turns out I may have been wrong about the YouTube app part. While I do remember reading elsewhere that Apple did give Google access to early prototypes of ios and iPhone, this article claims that the YouTube app initially bundled with ios 1 to 6 was built by Apple themselves, and not Google - https://mashable.com/2017/06/30/iphone-youtube-app-story/ .
Whenever I hear stuff about Jobs being pissed about stuff being "stolen" from Apple, it's just so disappointing. Jobs was a master at stealing ideas from others. Not saying he didn't have any original ideas (he certainly did!), but they weren't all his.
And I think all this "it was my idea and you copied it!" is just kinda dumb anyway. I mean, imagine you're an Android UI/UX designer from before the iPhone came out. You're doing your thing, and it's looking a bit like WinCE and a bit like BB, and who knows what else. Then you get wind of the iPhone, and you see how completely different the UX is, and it hits you: "wow, this is amazing and so much better than what we're doing". So what are you going to do? Sit back? "Well, shucks, I didn't come up with this idea, it's all Apple's... I guess they win and Android will ship as-is." No, of course not, that's insane. You step back, throw out the ideas of yours that weren't good, and adopt the new ideas that are better.
And frankly I still think there's a lot to the main launcher / home screen paradigm that Android has better. I love that I have an alphabetized app drawer listing all my apps, and then I get to make various home screens with just the subset of apps there that I want. I never understood why all apps on the iPhone live on one of the main screens and have to be organized, manually; it just felt like more work than I wanted to do. Android might be heavily heavily influenced by the iPhone, but it's not like they just copied it screen for screen, interaction for interaction, and called it a day.
Android and IPhone both stole from various less popular phones/tablets that had better screens, icon based launchers, and app stores. Motorola had a few (not popular in the USA) and Nokia has the n770 (800 x 480). I went to OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) in summer and 2006 and begged the substantial number of Nokia folks to add a WAN chip to their Nokia 770.
The n770 had a better screen than the first iphone (800x480), actually ran apps (the first iphone was web only), and had an app store. In particular Maemo mapper was crazy better than anything apple offered for many years.
The 770 and N800/N810 were amazing, and obviously the N900 was a real powerhouse at the time, but they just didn't have the marketing panache of Apple for widespread adoption.
I remember following the development of the N950 and being thoroughly disappointed when Nokia killed it off and went all in on Windows Phone instead of sticking with Linux-based systems.
Android copied iOS design screen for screen, gesture for gesture, form factor, hardware and app design. It was not a 'well shucks' type move, it was 'copy everything and undercut them to get mobile market share at all costs'. They knew the lawsuits were inevitable. Samsung lost a 500M judgment and Google bought Motorola for 12.5 Billion to use their patent portfolio as leverage against Apple.
No it didn't. If it was copying iOS screen for screen then surely it'd have started with the home screen, which was entirely different. The Android home screen was much more desktop-like with draggable icons, home folders, wallpapers etc, long before iOS did these things.
The Android top bar was also totally different. The Android bar was a full UI widget you could drag down to reveal a sophisticated notifications system. iOS barely had a notifications system at all when it launched.
There were really quite a lot of differences. That's why Apple was reduced to arguing nonsense like "we own rounded rectangles" and "grids of icons are iOS IP".
This wasn't 'nonsense'... Google spent 12 billion on Motorola's mobile patent portfolio and Samsung lost half a billion in legal judgements. If they spent half that money innovating and improving mobile design instead of copying everything to the point of confusion from the popular market leader.. we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Apple sure had a lot of innovations, like rectangles with rounded corners. Skipping that ridiculous argument, of course apple had real innovation too, more than form factor. Reality is that other vendors and device makers were innovative. Apple could have had even more of the market if they had been just a little bit less controlling, in my opinion.
You are missing the point - sure, everyone copies great ideas from their competitors. What Steve Jobs was mad about was they copied the ideas without letting him know they were working on a competing product. This helped them deliver a competing product much, much sooner and did cause Apple some business loss.
So from that perspective, he is right to be pissed and they did "steal" Apple's "innovations".
If Google did not have the early access to the prototypes from Apple, an ios like Android wouldn't have come so soon after iPhone's success became apparent. Apparently, ios like Android was launched within a year of the first iPhone. If Google had no idea about ios, they wouldn't even have devoted so much resource to Android (which they had bought to put pressure on the carriers and use as a negotiating tactic). And if they had started developing Android after the iPhone, Android OS would have taken more time to develop and launch. And who knows, by that time, another mobile OS (blackberry or Windows) could have become the number 2 mobile OS.
