To some degree yes... but to some degree you sound like you're claiming they did what they did in a vacuum.
iPhone launched 2007. Android was announced in 2007 and released in 2008. Palm had large-screen phones with apps and a browser in 2002[1]. A lot of things happen around people that isn't completely due to them being them. We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself.
> We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself.
I believe there's a logical fallacy that described this thinking. I definitely don't think the smartphone revolution was inevitable, at least not on the timetable it happened on because Jobs pushed it forward.
Yea, Palm had large-screen phones, and yet most people didn't care and still didn't have smartphones. That could have kept repeating for a long time more, with just Blackberry holding the market and just for "business phones," if Apple hadn't come in with its consumer gravitas.
It's easy to look in hindsight and think the future was inevitable, but it often wasn't.
There was a tipping point just before smartphones where J2ME apps were surging in popularity and feature phones were getting cheaper and better, where it was obvious that something was going to happen. My phone had google maps, ebooks, the web browser opera mini, and a very slow gameboy emulator running on it as J2ME apps in 2006.
J2ME phones were doing incredibly well outside the US from what I remember seeing - they're part of the reason Japan was seen as being so technologically advanced in the consumer realms.
And Android also runs Java. It being a full Java rather than the weird inconsistent nonsense that was J2ME is heavily due to significant compute improvements - in that sense, Android was merely ahead of the curve, and made some good architectural choices to make it perform well.
So yeah, I think the powerful personal phone revolution was inevitable. They might not look like iphones, but they would absolutely look better than Windows CE before they hit a billion users.
Plus, really. Look at Palm OS. Look at iPhones. There's not a huge UX conceptual leap there - it's much more in the premium hardware, and later in the unified app store, proving that the market for mid-high-price good devices existed (more expensive WinCE devices already had a small but consistent market. Pro/consumer-grade was inevitable). And I think there's room to argue that we'd be better off without the app store monopolies that resulted, so that could go either way (though I fully grant the massively superior user experience at the time).
Was the shift to full Java that important? I'm still baffled it wasn't a bigger deal. But the reality is that no one slapped on a new skin and recompiled their desktop java application and then ran in on Android
Even all these years later it's still basically impossible to make a Java application that runs on mobile and desktop (it's technically possible with Gluon but I've never seen it in the wild).
At best the shift allowed you to reuse libraries .. which is not a small win, but seems like a fraction of whats possible
I'm not deep in the Java mines so maybe I've missed some big picture issues around convergence - and why it wasn't even attempted. Would be curious to hear from the gurus :)
I don't know many of the dev details of J2ME personally, but I have encountered many blog posts and whatnot about how inconsistent development for it was. There were many runtimes, many different sets of available libraries, and many many unique bugs to work around - Java's "write once, run anywhere" at its absolute worst, basically.
So "full" Java brought both a significant wave of standardization, and gained access to an utterly HUGE set of libraries, tools, and developers that were mostly unavailable before.
So language-wise it's a somewhat small improvement as you are probably expecting. Android could have been another J2ME, and everything probably would've worked the same. But it greatly lowered the barriers to entry, which is basically a requirement for a large and active app ecosystem.
Thanks for the insight. Yeah, I can see how all these slightly off JVMs can really sour things. Esp. with regards to tooling and development ease. There was a whole era of these not-quite-JVM like things. Like JavaCard also comes to mind (I think it's still what runs on SIM cards).
I think it's understandable given how under-powered the devices were - but the end was sort of inevitable
I had a dell windows mobile device around that time. It had a tiny mechanical keyboard and a stylus. You could copy & paste, but the OS was so underpowered it couldn’t run multiple programs at the same time. You could install software by plugging it into a computer and running an installer that copied files via USB. Programs (and the OS) crashed all the time. It was the sort of device only a gadget fiend could love.
Android at the time was similarly awful. I remember talking to an android engineer at Google a few years later. I was asking him why android’s UI still sucked compared to iPhones. He said android was the only mobile operating system still standing which was invented before the iPhone. They had to essentially piece by piece reinvent the whole core OS to make it relevant after the iPhone came out. That was taking longer than they would like - because of course it was. But to their credit, they got there.
Google at the time was working in the same hardware ecosystem as Apple and they didn’t invent the iPhone. And that’s not criticism - the design of the iPhone is only obvious in hindsight. If Apple didn’t do it, who knows what our phones would look like today. Probably much worse.
The touch screen keyboard, swipe to unlock, rich fonts, full multitasking & app switching. This was all revolutionary at the time. Steve jobs was an arse. But he (and his team) pulled off a revolution with the iPhone. He deserves credit for that.
The opposite was true actually - the original iPhone couldn't run third-party applications at all.
What it did have was a much bigger and better touchscreen that didn't need a stylus. (Even that wasn't really a technical innovation per se - rather it was the willingness to charge over twice as much as previous phones that made it possible).
Yeah - capacitive touch tech was far from new, but it was still super expensive compared to resistive. Price made it largely not an option until around the time that Apple adopted it (which they were definitely ahead of the curve on, and they made fantastic use of it). It was pretty clear at the time that nobody was all that fond of styluses, but they were the sole pragmatic option available then.
That, and many people were glad to have plastic screens - iPhones shattering because you looked at them too enthusiastically was a source of many lols and many expensive repairs / re-purchases. The early iPhones still scratched nearly as easily (keys or sand were more than sufficient), but they were nowhere near as durable overall. Decent screen durability, screen protectors, and protective cases took years to arrive - the gorilla glass of the time was far, far more fragile than it is now.
To be precise, the original iPhone can run third-party apps, but couldn’t from the beginning. The AppStore was introduced with iPhone OS 2 a year after the launch.
Sure, a lot of similarly functional smartphones had existed, but that didn't matter because nobody used them. Steve Job's intuition about user experience was at least several years ahead of everyone else's. Improvements are generally incremental, but the iPhone nailed so much the first time: the app icons, pinch to zoom, using the accelerometer for portrait and landscape mode, adaptive screen brightness, and the use of the proximity sensor.
Arguably, Nokia is a good example of "money and connections won't save you if you persistently go astray".
I liked Nokias, I even programmed for Symbian OS, but boy, that was one convoluted system. The UI was pure hell, badly documented, error-prone and had to be tailored to every device out there (of which Nokia churned out a lot), unless you wanted to risk bad artifacts.
They also LOVED to introduce major compatibility breaks.
iPhone launched 2007. Android was announced in 2007 and released in 2008. Palm had large-screen phones with apps and a browser in 2002[1]. A lot of things happen around people that isn't completely due to them being them. We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself.
[1]: if not earlier. randomly skimming wikipedia finds e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices