◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek August 12, 2019
19100%
500
1903 2018Landline Automobile Radio Household refrigerator Color TV CellphoneComputer
Internet
MicrowaveSmartphoneSocial
media
Tablet
1920 1940 1960 1980 2000Share of U.S. households using select technologies
open source mobile OS available for no direct cost
to phone carriers and manufacturers. In return,
Google was able to latch its lucrative online adver-
tising machine to most any phone running Android.
It’s tough to overstate how many of the key indus-
try decisions around this time were driven by fear.
Wireless carriers who’d long been able to dictate
phones’ looks and functions wanted their control
back from Apple. Manufacturers such as Motorola
initially had no compelling answer to Apple’s design
and worried they might be wiped out. (Many were
proved right.) Google itself was terrified that Apple,
Microsoft Corp., or another company would domi-
nate the young smartphone market and shut out its
search engine. Android seemed a neat solution to all
these problems, or at least a Xanax for the anxieties.
“Google truly opened the door,” says Ryan Reith, a
vice president for market researcher IDC.
With Android, any phone maker could churn out
an iPhone-like product and, if it wanted, customize it
before branding it as its own. Companies that made
video games, ringtones, and other phone software
no longer had to create a zillion versions tweaked for
a vast sea of mostly crummy proprietary operating
systems. Mobile carriers had something for which
customers would pay more, helping the compa-
nies recoup the billions of dollars they were pour-
ing into faster mobile internet networks capable of
handling skyrocketing traffic from websites.
The first Android devices entered the market
about 18 months after the iPhone, in late 2008.
They were clunky and didn’t catch on right away.
But the technology and devices got better, and the
beginning of a movement slowly took hold starting
in 2009. Cellphone pioneer Motorola and relative
newcomer HTC Corp. came out with fairly popular
Android phones. Samsung took it to another level.
The Galaxy was the first Android model from a
major cellphone manufacturer. Samsung was the
world’s second-biggest seller of mobile phones,
behind Nokia Corp., when the iPhone went on sale.
The Korean company was caught flat-footed by the
first round of iPhone mania, but dove in once it saw
Android starting to gain traction. Samsung began
to make a dizzying array of Android phones at
every conceivable price tier and with different fea-
tures. In its home country and elsewhere in Asia, it
aggressively pushed its larger-screen phones, and
they became global trendsetters. In the U.S., start-
ing in 2011, the company began to spend lavishly
on TV commercials that poked fun at iPhone own-
ers as mindlessly loyal to just-OK gadget upgrades.
Rivals sneered at Samsung for trying to spend
its way to relevance in the U.S., but it worked. Two
years after the company put its weight behind
Android, it edged past Apple to become the big-
gest global smartphone manufacturer, account-
ing for about 1 of every 5 sold. The following year,
the South Korean company grabbed close to one-
third of a booming smartphone market, according
to Counterpoint Research.
China came next. The government’s push for
economic growth quickly put fast mobile networks
in every corner of the country. Samsung was ini-
tially a powerhouse in China before the boom-
ing urban classes gravitated to Apple, but the
biggest winners were homegrown smartphone
companies such as Huawei Technologies Co. and
Xiaomi Corp., which created customized versions
of Android without Google apps. The U.S. compa-
ny’s web services have been officially inaccessible
in China since Google pulled back its operations in
the country in 2010.
The world’s most populous nation skipped a
whole generation of PC development and went
mad for smartphones. In 2005 less than 10% of
China’s population used the internet, according
to the United Nations. The figure in 2017, theThe world’s
most populous
nation skipped
a whole
generation
of PCs and
went mad for
smartphonesDATA: OUR WORLD IN DATA, HORACE DEDIU, COMIN AND HOBIJN (2004), U.S. CENSUS, CDC, EIA, PEW INTERNET, EDISON RESEARCH