None of the handset makers back then were in a position to come up with a workstation class OS, with desktop class application development frameworks and highly tuned power management and commercial level software development tool chains. They just didn’t have software groups anywhere close to able to deliver something like that. Their software was at best based on embedded variants of Linux with very bare bones dev environments and frameworks. They just didn’t have anything close to the required level and breadth of dev experience and capability.
Furthermore when the iPhone came out almost nobody in either the phone or the Tech industry in general appreciated what Apple had done and why it mattered. I must have read a handful of posts a month like yours back then trivialising the issue as just having to ‘come up with something’. Desktop OS systems like OSX and Windows at the time aren’t something you can just come up with. It’s this sort of thinking that doomed desktop Linux to the margins for decades, and without the Google Android team’s immediately realising what had happened and what they needed to do about it, handset Linux could very easily have ended up a footnote like desktop Linux. Nobody else in the industry seems to have had that insight back then.
What I think would have happened is Microsoft would have eventually got their act together and brought out a credible Windows Mobile and licensed it to the handset makers. Other than Google they are the only software company with the resources in talent and technical depth capable of it. Without Android to light a second fire under them it might have taken longer than it actually did, but they did do this in the actual timeline and without Android to compete with their strategy would have worked.
Furthermore when the iPhone came out almost nobody in either the phone or the Tech industry in general appreciated what Apple had done and why it mattered. I must have read a handful of posts a month like yours back then trivialising the issue as just having to ‘come up with something’. Desktop OS systems like OSX and Windows at the time aren’t something you can just come up with. It’s this sort of thinking that doomed desktop Linux to the margins for decades, and without the Google Android team’s immediately realising what had happened and what they needed to do about it, handset Linux could very easily have ended up a footnote like desktop Linux. Nobody else in the industry seems to have had that insight back then.
What I think would have happened is Microsoft would have eventually got their act together and brought out a credible Windows Mobile and licensed it to the handset makers. Other than Google they are the only software company with the resources in talent and technical depth capable of it. Without Android to light a second fire under them it might have taken longer than it actually did, but they did do this in the actual timeline and without Android to compete with their strategy would have worked.