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On its first, Android was particularly rough around the edges. By default, he could not play video outside of YouTube. Android Market, the precursor of Google Play, only offered a handful of apps. There was not even a virtual keyboard. Andy Rubin and his team originally designed Android as a BlackBerry-like experience, before Apple's iPhone hit the touch screens, and keyboard focus lingered long after the G1 came. However, the basic formula was already there. Google designed Android as an open, Internet-centric operating system that would put its services in your pocket, and it was easy to see the potential when most phones of the 2008 era were locked and treated as a reflection after coup … some rivals rejected it at first.
Yet Google has managed to seize this potential. The adoption of Android has exploded thanks to fast software updates as well as to flagship products like the Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy S. It was already the operating system Most popular mobile at the end of 2010 and If the iPhone hit BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile from their respective roosts, it's Android that put them in the ground. It is telling that the companies behind these competing platforms had to either use Android or adopt it to stay relevant. They have been slow to recognize the shift to touch interfaces, integrated application stores and the mobile Internet, and they have paid a hefty price for this slow response.
Today, Android is the de facto software on virtually all smartphones that do not come from Apple, and it was present on more than 2 billion active devices from 2017. More importantly, it has grown well beyond the phones during the last decade. You can find Android on a myriad of tablets, smartwatches and TVs, not to mention unusual places like ovens and VR headsets. It's even present on PCs – thanks to Chrome OS, you can run Android apps on your laptop. Although Android has not been so successful outside handsets (for example, Apple still controls the smartwatch market), it is indeed ubiquitous.
There is an imminent question, though: what happens to Android in the next ten years? For the moment, it's more the same. Google may not update Android as quickly as it used to, but it still focuses on constant iteration and adoption across a wide range of device types. If there is a clear challenge on the horizon, that is Google itself. The company is working on long-term projects like Fuchsia that could eventually replace Android. In simple terms, Google has built an operating system designed to go down the road, and it is likely that it will have a healthy future.
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