Five years ago on November 5, 2007, Google had announced Android to a meeting of telecom device manufacturers including Sony, Intel, Samsung and LG that made up the Open Handset Alliance. The aim was to produce a platform capable of competing with iPhone’s developer ecosystem. Today, it has not only achieved that goal, but also captured the market by making it run on almost 75 percent of the smartphones, according to a report by IDC. The strategy of making it open source and releasing it for free has definitely been the reason behind why it has so quickly caught the market by fire. Manufacturers have had an opportunity to differentiate their products by showing off their own customized UI on each of their devices, besides making the underlying platform compatible to each other. Had this not been the case, Android would have been just another unsuccessful open source project with tens of different incompatible versions. Another factor has been the major advances that it regularly made into improving its
software, despite concerns of fragmentation and security. The first few versions, although a little less popular, formed the crux behind the boom in the smartphone industry. Eventually Gingerbread went on to be the most successful Android version yet, which still exists on a majority of the devices; with Ice Cream Sandwich however, Google has overhauled the platform and unified it for both smartphone and tablet devices. Now, that the tablets and other hybrid devices have been making inroads into Apple’s market share, this seems to be a good decision. An interesting trend, we are not sure if it is good or bad, is the fact that all manufacturers other than Samsung, like HTC, Motorola, Sony have been quite unsuccessful in making a major profit while marketing their devices on Android. The result being that the market has been largely polarized by Apple and Samsung devices. Hopefully, the next year turns out to be positive for the platform, which is likely to face some stiff competition from Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8.
