Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
While certainly Apple has innovated on things, you can't name anything which was not a gradual improvement but, as you say, a device that didn't exist yet.
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that.
Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch.
As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
The innovation and genuine new thing on the iPhone and the entire key to its success was the screen.
But you’re just seeing the screen 1 dimensionally yes capacitive screens existed but when I say the “iPhone screen” is why it was a success I mean the technology (capacitive) + the interaction design (momentum scroll and pinch to zoom) + heavy optimization (jerky scrolling was unacceptable, every interaction had to move exactly with the finger, even browser redrawing was decoupled from the scroll to enable this).
All these parts together in unison and to a high level of polish is what made that product magical and a success.
On the other hand the LG Prada devs and designers just had jerky scrolling and no one on the team said “this isn’t good enough”
There were a lot of naysayers at the time around doing away with a physical keyboard led by all the Blackberry speed thumb typists. The criticisms weren't even wrong per se but they ultimately didn't win out against the tradeoffs--which were certainly aided by the maligned but very necessary aggressive autocorrect.
The first iPhone kind of sucked compared to the blackberrys of the day. They didn't even have copy and paste. It took a few iterations before the potential was unlocked.
I had a Treo and didn't switch to an iPhone until the 3GS. A lot of people remember the iPhone (and iPod) as these overnight successes--and they really weren't although they sold well enough. It was around the third or fourth generation that both really hit their stride. (As I recall iTunes didn't even run on Windows at first and Macs were systems used mostly by media professionals.)
Jobs initially wanted people to build web apps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vq993Td6ys&t=37s and the app store only became available for the second generation iPhone (which was called the iPhone 3G). The next year, the 3GS added HSDPA support which made online browsing pretty smooth. Combined with apps, it was finally ready for massive success.
I don’t think you’re wrong, yes all the individual technologies in the iPhone already existed, but there’s a bigger picture. The fact is the iPhone revolutionised hand held mobile computing, so given that fact it’s up to us to figure out how they did it and why it worked.
The reason Apple’s success at product development is so hard is that it involves orchestrating many, many different technologies together to create a powerful set of capabilities accessed through a consistent seamless user experience. That’s not a simple thing to even describe or discuss, let alone understand. It’s why they take years to develop products, and are almost never first in a new category, such as smart watches as you say.
Having a capacitive touch screen wasn’t the iPhone’s innovation, touch screens date back to the 1940’s, it was the browser, UI, and business model that was innovative.
That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.
What was innovative about the browser that wasn't already available on Sony Ericsson phones with Opera Mini since 2005? The UI was a little different and polished but also not that new. I still don't get the hype. I had the original iPhone, found out it doesn't support apps and promptly went back to my Sony Ericsson.
Opera Mini at iPhone’s release couldn’t zoom in and out or show websites in a horizontal or vertical view etc. It also didn’t directly render websites requiring a server to provide a more limited version which caused a range of compatibility and latency issues etc.
Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
The sever didn’t provide the full sized images on large pictures, so you couldn’t zoom in the phone simply didn’t have that information.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Back in those days extremely smooth scrolling and pinch-to-zoom was something that turned mobile web browsing from annoying hurdle to a fairly pleasant experience.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
There’s a reason why the LG Prada is remembered by precisely no-one other than people on message boards who say ‘well aktchully the iPhone wasn’t the first touch screen phone’.
> Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has.
I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
What did Android pioneer? Android started life as a Blackberry clone, iOS appeared inspired by Newton, PalmOS, and ideas from FingerWorks and others. Android of course pivoted to copy the iPhone after it was announced. A lot of good ideas that later showed up in both were in Palm's WebOS first. Hard to see 80%.
With android they had to get buy in from phones makers and other powerful parties. To do this they had to give up quite a bit of power and control. They never owned the ecosystem in nearly the same way. It was always a compromise.
I think that was true years ago, but less so now. Google has clawed back a lot of the power and control they initially gave away in order to gain partners. Things like moving functionality into Google Play Services give them the ability to do things without making an agreement with partners, and tightening requirements for passing conformance testing means they get to dictate even more as to what being an "Android device" means.
Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them.
Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon.
So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
> Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning
What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
They've tried to make their own phones for a long time including buying Motorola in 2012. According to a friend who worked at both, Google simply didn't understand making hardware anywhere close to how Apple did.
You have it backwards. Except for the very first iphone, largely Apple steals from UX, technologies, and form from the Android ecosystem. Apple is great at polishing ideas, but not so great at launching new ones entirely. They do have a few, but not many. Most of their "advances" can be traced back to non-Apple ecosystems. Apple has a closed ecosystem that they control completely, which I why I (and many Android users) hate. They stand on the shoulders of open systems like Android and watch for innovation that has merit, pluck it out, polish, and deliver it as their own, then gain the bulk of the reward. I see them as largely parasitic. Hell, they even claim reliability claims for OS X while standing on the back of unix.
This is such a great point. Google has been coasting on android for years now, pixel has some cool phone features (call transcription, navigating phone trees) but those aren’t shared to the wider android market and virtually everything else comes down to, let’s make a better camera. The whole reason they created android was to prevent Microsoft from winning the mobile space.
Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
> just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake
I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."
There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
This is also such a great point. I've never considered Google's lazy attitude toward Android through the lens of why Android became a priority in the first place. That really does explain a lot.
And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.