Chet Haase, one of the Android engineers, has published a book called “Androids”, giving an account of the early development of the mobile OS. A review is here https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/review-androids-is-a-developer-commentary-track-for-the-android-1-0-era/, and an excerpt is here https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/08/excerpt-the-history-of-android-as-written-by-a-longtime-android-developer/.

Before Android the company got acquired by Google, they were shopping themselves around to various groups of venture capitalists. From the beginning, the platform was going to be built on Open Source components like the Linux kernel. So how were they going to make money, if the main part of the platform was being given away for free? The initial answer was to offer paid-for services that would be resold by the carriers. This whole idea went away after the Google acquisition.

Interesting to review the state of play at the time Android Inc were pitching their new OS: Symbian had some support from different vendors, but surprisingly (to me, at least), it left the whole UI layer up to the device maker, with no attempt at standardization between vendors. How were you to write portable apps in that situation? No wonder it had limited uptake.

Sun were offering Java ME for mobile devices, but again, this was subject to differing, not-quite-compatible “profiles” for different devices, further complicating the headache of writing code to run across those devices. As I understand it, it also ran just a single Java VM on the device which had to be shared across all applications, which made it totally unsuited to a modern multitasking OS.

The Hiptop device from Danger, Inc also gets a mention. Not a few people considered it probably the best mobile device to come out up to that point.

Not mentioned in the above is that Microsoft acquired Danger. But because its platform was built on Java, which Microsoft had an allergy to, they wasted 18 months of product development time excising the Java dependency, totally losing the window of opportunity for releasing a new device. When the Kin finally came out, it probably held the world record for some product category for the shortest time on the market before being heavily discounted in clearance sales (about a month).

One key point is that, when Google acquired Android, they continued to let it run like an independent company, at least for the first few years. This allowed the innovation to continue to flourish ... at least for a while.