Here’s an interesting tidbit: Samsung could have been the owner of Android, and the mobile infrastructure as we know it today may not have existed. Rewind back to 2005. The ‘smartphones’ of the time wasn’t even comparable to what we view as a smartphone today. Carriers had a large amount of control over their phones software, and almost every phone was running on some different kind of operating system with very little correlation between them. Anyone who wanted to write an app for a phone would have to do so for every different phone, which would typically cause them to write it in over one hundred different variations.
This is where Andy Rubin comes in. He is an engineer who was working on a new software structure for digital camera, but then adapted it to phones. Back in 2003, he started the Android project, which was a starting idea that was not backed by any sort of major company. He and his small team soon realized that they needed money to keep this idea afloat. What they did was go to a major company, but it wasn’t Google. In case you did not guess it by reading the article title and the first sentence, it was Samsung who they went to first. Rubin recounted his first meeting with Samsung’s executives by saying “You and what army are going to go and create this? You have six people. Are you high?’ is basically what they said. They laughed me out of the boardroom. This happened two weeks before Google acquired us.” Considering that there were actually eight people on the team for Android, it shows that they really did not care for the company at all.
Back to 2005. Google CEO Larry Page agrees to meet with Rubin and loves the idea. Google had been looking for an innovation to bring to the mobile industry, and they were afraid that another company, such as Microsoft with their massive resources, would beat them to it. Page offered to purchase Android for $50 million and some various perks, and the whole original Android team was absorbed into Mountain View at Google HQ, and thus beganthe story of Android, and how it was not taken by Samsung but rather the innovative Google. How do you think things would be different if Samsung had bought the OS? Let us know that and any other thoughts you may have in the comments!