Communications of the ACM
How Android Conquered the Mobile World in Just Three Years
It's easy to forget that not so long ago, no one was sure if Android would ever be relevant.
After all, the Android explosion has really only erupted over the past year, roughly two years after Android made its debut in the fall of 2007. Since January alone, Android has doubled its total market share in the mobile operating system market, and devices based on Android accounted for a whopping 44% of smartphones purchased in the third quarter of 2010, according to research firm ChangeWave. Research firm Gartner has projected that by the end of the year sales of Android devices will exceed those based on the BlackBerry OS and the iPhone OS, meaning that Android will trail only Symbian as the world's most-used mobile operating system.
But for the first two years of its existence, Android had a tough time making major waves. The first device to be based on Android, T-Mobile's HTC G1, made its debut in the fall of 2008 and was mostly overshadowed by more high-profile smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm. Morgan Slain, the CEO of mobile applications developer SplashData, says that this lack of initial success led a lot of application developers to hesitate before investing too many resources in developing for the platform, despite the fact that it was free and open source.
From Network World
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