Android, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Android comes up
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 18:30 David Rosenthal This is the era of all the great, great products coming out of Google that we've talked about, you know, Maps and Gmail and Docs and all the wonderful things that Chrome and Android are going to come later.
- ▶ 1:44:36 Ben Gilbert So there's this amazing moment right after Google rolls out speech recognition, their latest use case for neural nets, just on Nexus phones, because again, they don't have the infrastructure to support it on all Android phones.
- ▶ 1:44:53 Ben Gilbert And figures out if people use this for, I don't know, call it three minutes a day, and we roll it out to all billion Android phones, we're gonna need twice the number of data centers that we currently have across all of Google just to…
- ▶ 3:40:46 David Rosenthal Everything that we talked about in part two, the alphabet episode, all of the other products within Google, Gmail, Maps, Docs, Chrome, Android,
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:12 David Rosenthal Well, I thought because of the, you know, war between Android and...
- ▶ 1:22 Ben Gilbert Of course, YouTube, then Android, and their own web browser with Chrome.
- ▶ 54:31 David Rosenthal So, as we were researching Google's expansion here from Just Search into being a real platform company here in the 2000 with Gmail, Chrome, Android, Workspace, everything we're gonna get to later in the episode, the complexity just…
- ▶ 2:11:58 David Rosenthal Google's Android that we're going to talk about in a sec is becoming huge.
- ▶ 2:23:18 Ben Gilbert Over three billion active Android devices now.
- ▶ 2:24:49 Ben Gilbert But before we tell the, before the Android story, now is a great time to thank one of our favorite companies, Vercel.
- ▶ 2:26:59 David Rosenthal Android.
- ▶ 2:29:19 Ben Gilbert I mean, he, of course, is instrumental in the Android story later.
- ▶ 2:29:28 David Rosenthal Hiroshi led Android and Chrome at Google for many, many years and would be the authority on this.
- ▶ 2:30:20 David Rosenthal Microsoft does end up acquiring the company, but not until 2008, which is the same year that Android launches.
- ▶ 2:30:29 David Rosenthal In 2003, and started a new company, Android.
- ▶ 2:30:41 David Rosenthal Yes, in its earliest, earliest days, the first version of Android, the company,
- ▶ 2:31:34 David Rosenthal So, Andy pivots the company and has the delivery vector shift from cameras to smartphones.
- ▶ 2:33:41 David Rosenthal Enter Andy and Android.
- ▶ 2:34:52 David Rosenthal Andy's now two years into the company with Android.
- ▶ 2:35:27 David Rosenthal So July, 2005, Google buys Android for fifty million dollars, five, zero million dollars per Android.
- ▶ 2:35:50 Ben Gilbert The correct way to think about Android is that Google built it in-house with a little kick in the pants from this startup kind of got far enough along with the idea that forced them to do it now.
- ▶ 2:36:10 David Rosenthal Why did they buy Android right away?
- ▶ 2:37:45 David Rosenthal Buying Android kickstarts things, and like,
- ▶ 2:38:01 Ben Gilbert If they don't buy Android and they don't get started basically in the month that they did, this market belongs to Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:38:35 David Rosenthal So, now, back to Android and why Android was especially so attractive.
- ▶ 2:38:43 David Rosenthal It's just that as Android the startup, OEMs and carriers are like, giving it to me for free, like, that makes you less attractive to me.
- ▶ 2:39:06 David Rosenthal They start work on Android as part of Google here in summer of 2005.
- ▶ 2:39:12 David Rosenthal And the plan initially is that they're going to be two versions of Android.
- ▶ 2:40:10 Ben Gilbert And Android hasn't been announced yet, right?
- ▶ 2:40:13 David Rosenthal Nobody knows about Android.
- ▶ 2:40:21 David Rosenthal Now, I believe Eric had disclosed to Steve about the Sooner project, because obviously it was public that Google had acquired Android, and I believe that Steve Jobs knew that Google was working on, like, a Blackberry-style phone, but he…
- ▶ 2:43:25 David Rosenthal The Android team, of course, is watching this.
- ▶ 2:43:59 David Rosenthal Once Steve Jobs finds out about what the Android team and Google is now doing, he goes ballistic.
- ▶ 2:45:02 Ben Gilbert So in Walter Isaacson's book, Steve Jobs says, I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product.
- ▶ 2:46:03 Ben Gilbert And I think Android arrived at a lot of similar conclusions at the same time.
- ▶ 2:46:22 David Rosenthal And so, as a result, Android for several years doesn't have things like pinch to zoom or the sort of swipe operating system UI navigation gestures, and I'm pretty sure if you remember early Android phones for the first couple years, every…
- ▶ 2:46:49 Ben Gilbert When Android does launch, they have the market, which today is the Play Store.
- ▶ 2:46:57 Ben Gilbert Android had, when you swipe down, a notification center with all the notifications from each of your individual apps.
- ▶ 2:47:30 David Rosenthal Remember, Android launches in 2008.
- ▶ 2:48:00 David Rosenthal And then in September of 2008, a lot of things happened in September of 2008, Chrome, Android, Lehman Brothers, Google announces the T-Mobile G one phone, the G phone.
- ▶ 2:48:57 Ben Gilbert In fact, it may have even been like a Daily Booth for Android app.
- ▶ 2:52:45 David Rosenthal That is when Android won the market.
- ▶ 2:52:55 Ben Gilbert It's Android versus Droid, so very convenient.
- ▶ 2:52:59 Ben Gilbert If you were to go survey the American public in 2009, 10, 1112, maybe even 13, and say, do you know about Android, the mobile operating system?
- ▶ 2:53:18 David Rosenthal Do you know about Google and Android?
- ▶ 2:54:03 David Rosenthal We're gonna go all in on Android.
- ▶ 2:54:42 David Rosenthal It was the first Android device launched with Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation.
- ▶ 2:58:04 David Rosenthal The bigger thing, though, is that, like, Verizon going all in behind it, even though they would add the iPhone later, it creates sort of this seed of what the Android user base would become today, at least in America, because Verizon went…
- ▶ 2:59:10 Ben Gilbert I mean, it's Android, but it's the open source version of Android that they've customized.
- ▶ 2:59:54 David Rosenthal So this was not widely publicized at the time, as you can imagine, but, uh, Bill Gurley wrote a blog post where he had heard from friends that Google was paying carriers and OEMs to use Android, even though Android was free, and he wrote…
- ▶ 3:02:45 David Rosenthal I mean, all of these Android phones that are shipping, especially in the earlier years, what is the most prominent part of the UI on the touchscreen?
- ▶ 3:04:01 David Rosenthal Android, basically from end of 2009 onward, just washes over the world like a tidal wave.
- ▶ 3:04:10 David Rosenthal In holiday, 2009, when the droid comes out, total Android market share of the smartphone market is still in the, you know, the G one range, like five, six percent global market share.
- ▶ 3:04:30 David Rosenthal They announced that over 200,000 Android devices are shipping every day around the world.
- ▶ 3:04:37 David Rosenthal The next year, in 2011, Android's market share is 50%, and two years after that, by the end of 2013, it is 80% market share.
- ▶ 3:05:58 David Rosenthal As I said, by 20 13, Android global market share is 80%.
- ▶ 3:06:16 David Rosenthal No question, Android pushed iPhone to be better on many dimensions.
- ▶ 3:06:23 David Rosenthal Things like cheaper iPhones, bigger screens, better cameras, I mean, on and on and on and on of things that I don't think Apple would have done if Android hadn't been pushing them.
- ▶ 3:06:59 David Rosenthal So then the other quick thing to mention on Android history, there was one interesting moment and tension with Samsung in the early to mid-twenty-tens.
- ▶ 3:07:13 David Rosenthal Android is this incredibly flexible platform.
- ▶ 3:07:16 David Rosenthal What if we just take Android and copy the iPhone with Android?
- ▶ 3:08:18 Ben Gilbert So I've been trying to think about what is the business of Android.
- ▶ 3:08:23 Ben Gilbert Google having Android versus Google not having Android.
- ▶ 3:08:50 Ben Gilbert I used to think, oh, because it's Android, they don't have to pay money.
- ▶ 3:10:45 Ben Gilbert It's basically fourteen billion to the, the Android mobile carriers and OEMs, plus Firefox?
- ▶ 3:12:34 Ben Gilbert So even though the Play Store made seven billion in 2019, the important thing is that Android is
- ▶ 3:13:02 Ben Gilbert So I guess what I'm saying is obviously Android was a giant success, and the biggest reason, even though they save, I don't know, 10, fifteen billion a year from not having to pay it to Apple, and even though they generate
- ▶ 3:13:27 David Rosenthal They hadn't bought Android when they had, like, that window was closing fast.
- ▶ 3:13:50 Ben Gilbert And in 2013, it becomes Chrome and Android.
- ▶ 3:13:58 Ben Gilbert So today, there are more than three billion active Android devices.
- ▶ 3:14:07 David Rosenthal Over three billion active Android phones.
- ▶ 3:16:32 Ben Gilbert By the way, can we just pause and say, 2009, this is like right after Chrome, right after Android.
- ▶ 3:16:41 Ben Gilbert I mean, it, it's kind of crazy that Android is happening over in this other building, and there's this, like, fight with Apple, and that's the same time that they're doing Google Wave.
- ▶ 3:17:03 David Rosenthal It was so interesting doing the research for this episode because so many of the people we talked to, even people who were leaders of a lot of these products, because Google was so decentralized and so siloed, they were focused on their…
- ▶ 3:19:33 Ben Gilbert Android, Chrome, Search, YouTube, developer relations, trying to sort of will a Google platform into existence.
- ▶ 3:19:51 Ben Gilbert Android was its own fiefdom, totally off on its own island, fighting an existential battle.
- ▶ 3:19:57 Ben Gilbert Chrome is starting to do the same stuff as Android.
- ▶ 3:20:02 Ben Gilbert It's not clear what belongs in an Android camp versus a Chrome camp, and Sundar hasn't unified them yet.
- ▶ 3:21:47 Ben Gilbert The whole Chrome and Bing thing was defense against Microsoft, Android was defense against Apple and Microsoft, and Google Plus is now defense against Facebook.
- ▶ 3:23:20 David Rosenthal Like we said earlier, he had been leading Google's developer efforts in the pre-Android days.
- ▶ 3:29:13 David Rosenthal I was like, oh, well, Android's pretty good.
- ▶ 3:31:41 Ben Gilbert I think some things for Android users.
- ▶ 3:37:01 David Rosenthal And with Chrome and with Android, like the core great products, two of these core great products.
- ▶ 3:45:19 Ben Gilbert For example, in this episode, talking about Android, they massively counterpositioned against Microsoft.
- ▶ 3:46:41 Ben Gilbert Application developers on Android and users on Android.
- ▶ 3:50:24 Ben Gilbert So if they didn't have Android, how would you answer the question, is Google a platform company?
- ▶ 3:50:37 Ben Gilbert And even with Android, okay, great, they own the Target development platform.
- ▶ 3:51:23 Ben Gilbert Famously, I mean, that, that run in the 2010, aside from the big ones, from YouTube, from Android, from DoubleClick, from AdMob, there was also what became Google Groups, Spreadsheets, Docs, Blogger, they bought Applied Semantics with the…
- ▶ 3:54:56 David Rosenthal I just wanna underscore again, we said this in the Android chapter, but like, Android was the mother of all wins.
- ▶ 3:55:29 Ben Gilbert The only way it could have gone better is if instead of launching Android, they launched the iPhone, and they also got the iPhone profits rather than just some small dollars that protected their core business.
- ▶ 3:55:45 David Rosenthal And then my quintessence is, it is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one search that didn't even have a billion users yet, but search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail,…
- ▶ 3:57:16 Ben Gilbert Let's take that same definition.
- ▶ 3:57:45 Ben Gilbert Maps is advantaged by Android.
- ▶ 3:59:59 Ben Gilbert Android.
- ▶ 4:00:11 Ben Gilbert That's the reason that Android succeeded.
- ▶ 4:00:37 David Rosenthal And Android did the same thing with Linux.
- ▶ 4:00:51 Ben Gilbert I mean, not the reason why Android, unlike these other ones, there's a clear line between the, it's almost like the Google products that succeed wildly organically, except for Android, are ones where there's almost no product.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 1:12:02 Steve Ballmer That worked, Android slash Google.
- ▶ 1:12:50 Ben Gilbert The bogey was Android.
- ▶ 1:12:59 Ben Gilbert It seems like until Android took off, Microsoft actually did have an opening to become the second mobile.
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