Android: A defensive bulwark for Google

Articles sometimes have a long gestation. One that I published this week had its roots in my disagreement with a three-year-old podcast.
In this 2016 episode of the Acquired podcast, David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert assessed Google’s 2005 acquisition of the startup behind the Android operating system for smartphones. Rosenthal and Gilbert had a sensible view that Android was a powerful defensive shield that prevented Apple Inc. from standing between many smartphone users and Google apps and services.
Google parent company Alphabet Inc. today pays billions of dollars each year to Apple to ensure that its web search service is front and center on Apple’s Safari browser for iPhones and other spots on Apple gadgets. The thinking goes that if Google didn’t have Android — and iPh-ones had far more than a 15 pe-rcent market share of world- wide smartphone sales — Goo-gle would have to hand over mu-ch larger piles of money to Apple.
I agree with that assessment of Android as a defensive bulwark for Google, and it’s a view I’ve heard before. But at the time, I also believed that assessment of Android’s strategic value was too myopic. If Android had never existed, or if Google weren’t the company behind it, I don’t think smartphones would have become the globally ubiquitous technology that we now know them to be.
I kept my disagreement to myself, but it was a germ of an idea that I finally laid out in an article this week in Bloomberg Businessweek about how Android was behind the global smartphone revolution and why we may never see a technology like it again.
If you were following technology seven or eight years ago, loads of ink was shed on legal battles between companies like Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. — among many others — over who owned essential technologies used in the emerging category of modern smartphones. Companies spe-nt billions of dollars to arm themselves with patents that might position them to withstand courtroom challenges.
Certainly no one in the tech industry or tech press ignored that transformation as it was happening, but the industry’s internecine smartphone skirmishes seem positively pointless now that we can see all that has happened. Soon, more than half the world’s population will own an internet-connected mobile device — a penetration that far exceeds Bill Gates’s wild mission to put a computer on every desk and in every home.
My question now is whether we are making similar mistakes again. Are the antitrust and regulatory fights over America’s technology superpowers overshadowing developments that will prove much more disruptive in a decade? Or will the technology cold war between the US and China look irrelevant with the benefit of hindsight?
It’s hard to know for sure in real time. But looking back at the smartphone boom was good reminder that inevitably, the day’s hottest headlines will be subsumed by the long arc of history.

—Bloomberg