37 Competition
Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
—Steve Jobs (iPhone announcement, January 9, 2007)
The iPhone was announced in January of 2007 and released in June, six months later. The device relied on a touchscreen1 for user interaction, and affected both consumers and the industry overall, changing what the world considered to be a smartphone and what Android needed to do to compete in the evolving smartphone marketplace.
There was a quote from an engineer on the Android team at that time that has appeared in various places since: “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”2
This quote implies that the iPhone caused Android to change ...
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