Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives. Fred Vogelstein

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      Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “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.’”

      For most of Silicon Valley—including most of Google—the iPhone’s unveiling was something to celebrate. Jobs had once again done the impossible. Four years before he’d talked an intransigent music industry into letting him put their catalog on iTunes for ninety-nine cents a song. Now he had convinced a wireless carrier to let him build a revolutionary smartphone. But for the Google Android team, the iPhone was a kick in the stomach. “What we had suddenly looked just so … nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

      DeSalvo wasn’t prone to panic. Like many veteran engineers in the Valley, laconic would be a good description of his personality. He’s an expert sailor who had just returned from taking his family on a three-week excursion in Indonesia. He’d been writing software for two decades, first for video-game developers, then for Apple, and by 2000 for a start-up called Danger. There were few software-development issues he hadn’t encountered. After joining Google and the Android team in Mountain View at the end of 2005 and spending a year writing thousands of lines of code out of a utility closet (he likes writing code in silence), he’d moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the week before to help the team integrate a recent acquisition. But as he watched Jobs’s presentation from a run-down office above a T-shirt shop there, he knew his boss, Andy Rubin, would be thinking the same thing he was. He and Rubin had worked together for most of the previous seven years, when DeSalvo had been an engineer at Danger, Rubin’s first start-up. Rubin was one of the most competitive people DeSalvo knew. Rubin was not about to release a product that suddenly looked so dated.

      Six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show, Rubin reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. He was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast. “Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”

      What the Android team had been working on, a phone code-named Sooner, sported software that was arguably more revolutionary than what had just been revealed in the iPhone. In addition to having a full Internet browser, and running all of Google’s great web applications, such as search, Maps, and YouTube, the software was designed not just to run on Sooner, but on any smartphone, tablet, or other portable device not yet conceived. It would never need to be tethered to a laptop or desktop. It would allow multiple applications to run at the same time, and it would easily connect to an online store of other applications that Google would seed and encourage. By contrast, the iPhone needed to connect to iTunes regularly, it wouldn’t run more than one application at a time, and in the beginning it had no plans to allow anything resembling an application store.

      However, the Sooner phone was ugly. It looked like a BlackBerry, with a traditional keyboard and a small screen that wasn’t touch-enabled. Rubin and his team, along with partners HTC and T-Mobile, believed consumers would care more about the great software it contained than its looks. This was conventional wisdom back then. Revolutionary phone designs rarely succeeded. The Nokia N-Gage, which in 2003 tried to combine a gaming system with a phone and email device, often gets mentioned here. RIM had become one of the dominant smartphone makers on the planet by making BlackBerry’s unadorned functionality one of its main selling points: you got a phone, an incredible keyboard, secure email, all in one indestructible package.

      The iPhone, in contrast, was not only cool looking, but it used those cool looks to create entirely new ways to interact with a phone—ways that Android engineers either hadn’t thought possible or had considered too risky. By using a virtual keyboard and replacing most real buttons with software-generated buttons on a big touchscreen, every application could now have its own unique set of controls. Play, Pause, and Stop buttons only appeared if you were listening to music or watching video. When you went to type a web address into the browser, the keyboard appeared, but it disappeared when you hit Enter. Without the physical keyboard taking up half the phone, the iPhone had a screen twice the size of virtually every other phone on the market. It all worked the same way whether the user held the phone in portrait or landscape mode. Apple had installed an accelerometer to use gravity to tell the phone how to orient the screen.

      A lot was wrong with the first iPhone too. Rubin and the Android team—along with many others—did not think users would take to typing on a screen without the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard. That is why the first Android phone—the T-Mobile G1 from HTC, nearly two years later—had a slide-out keyboard. But what was also undeniable to the Android team was that they had underestimated Jobs. At the very least, Jobs had come up with a new way of interacting with a device—with a finger instead of a stylus or dedicated buttons—and likely a lot more. “We knew that Apple was going to announce a phone. Everyone knew that. We just didn’t think it would be that good,” said Ethan Beard, one of Android’s early business development executives.

      Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives. A phone with a touchscreen, code-named Dream, that had been in the early stages of development, became the focus. Its launch was pushed out a year until fall 2008. Engineers started drilling into it all the things the iPhone didn’t do to differentiate their phone when launch day did occur. Erick Tseng, then Android’s project manager, remembers suddenly feeling the nervous excitement of a pending public performance. Tseng had joined Google the year before out of Stanford business school after Eric Schmidt, himself, sold him on the promise of Android. “I never got the feeling that we should scrap what we were doing—that the iPhone meant game over. But a bar had been set, and whatever we decided to launch, we wanted to make sure that it cleared the bar.”