Has Android had an effect on society? You bet, even if you can’t see it right in front of your face. The now ubiquitous mobile operating system, owned by Google, is the world’s most popular operating system, and is continuing on its path to steamroll the competition. Android runs on your Samsung tablet, your Xiomi phone, and even on your Raspberry Pi. Android can go everywhere – and it does just that.
Today we take a closer look at just how this has shaped our existence – and what it means for the future.
Android: Early beginnings
Android started its journey towards being the world’s leading mobile operating system from some very humble beginnings. Back in the day – 2004, to be precise – Android was pitched as an OS for digital cameras, which were pretty popular at the time (ha, remember that!).
A very swift pivot later, and they had a product on their hands to rival the operating system leaders in the space, Symbian and Windows Mobile. We all know how that story ends, with Symbian and Windows obliterated in the wake of Android and iOS.
Google cements itself as a mobile leader
In 2005, Google acquired Android in what has been previously been described as their “best deal ever.” What Google wants, Google gets, and acquiring the Android OS has been a huge part of their tech-space domination.
Android is now the world’s most popular OS, reaching more mobile customers than any other operating system to date. It’s difficult to see how any other mobile OS could potentially rival Android at this point in time. While Apple’s iOS is popular, due to Western consumption of Apple products, the price point of their products (as their OS is tethered to Apple hardware) is out of reach of much of the world’s population. This has made it more of a niche audience product.
This gives Google a stranglehold of the market, for the time being.
Domination in emerging markets
If we look at the world’s fastest growing emerging market, India, we can check out the market share for Android vs other operating systems for mobile. In India, Android accounts for almost 95% of the market. This is complete dominance.
It is a similar case in other emerging markets. Because Android is not locked to a particular hardware vendor – unlike Apple’s iOS – it means that smartphone manufacturers can put it on their phones easily.
Easy access to activities sometimes frowned upon such as playing mobile casino games for real money and watching porn online is usually more possible on Android than it is on iOS. Vendors like the high accessibility of Android for its customers.
Open sourcing early
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, open source software wasn’t really a large portion of the software out there, except for notables like Linux. Instead, companies preferred to keep software closed source and proprietary, which meant people weren’t able to inspect the codebase and had to pay for the product.
Companies eventually realized that open source was often better in many cases, as they could find bugs more quickly with a community effort, that features would evolve out of external developer and internal effort, and that the software would become better as a result of open sourcing the code.
Android is open source, and that decision was made early – which was also somewhat revolutionary of Google at the time. So, while there are other operating systems out there, many of them are based on Android source code anyway. These OSs just add additional layers to provide specific services that aren’t available in the regular version of Android.
Towards a more open eco-system
We love open source. Who doesn’t? The way that you can examine the code, taking a look at how functions work in greater detail, and even stepping through the code using breakpoints. With Android, you can take the complete operating system – or parts of it – rewrite it, or add to it, to build the perfect mobile OS for your purposes.
This really is the only way that we see that Android could possibly be usurped in the mobile space currently. Of course, there is always room to be surprised! Perhaps someone will enter the space with a whole new way of doing mobile.
Our mobile life
Technology is now completely entwined with all of our lives. People are constantly on their phones, that is, if they aren’t in front of their laptop at work! With Android at the wheel, this means that they provide the user experience that most of the world sees on their smartphones, and so they influence users without the user even knowing.
This shared experience with Android users is apparent when they are given an iOS device and the user struggles to make it work properly (and vice versa).
Because Google is in charge of Android, and many of our apps on mobile are also from Google – Chrome, Gmail, Google Docs, etc., this means that Google’s products can end up taking up a majority of your mobile experience. With this monopoly on mobile space, it makes Google even more powerful. A good thing? A bad thing? Just a thing? Who’s to say.