Android was not for smartphones

Today Android sits as the most dominant mobile operating system on the planet, but would you believe that the platform’s original concept was aimed at? Do you know what was it? It was not associated with mobile phones. Android’s original plan was revealed in a speech at the Japan New Economy Summit in Tokyo on Tuesday.

Andy Rubin admits Android was originally intended for cameras, not smartphones. The Android team’s original goal was to capture 9% of the market by 2010 with its smart camera OS. The team was looking to connect cameras, wired or wireless, to home computers and then sync photos to a cloud server, known as “Android Datacenter.” Digital Camera market growth started to slow down.

“We decided digital cameras wasn’t actually a big enough market.”

Rubin’s company saw an opportunity in the smartphone market. Android-based software components, including the Java core, remained the same, despite the fact that the application field was changed. The company had to recruit mobile experts who led the development to smart phone direction.

“The exact same platform, the exact same operating system we built for cameras, that became Android for cellphones,” Rubin said

Android developing company from the beginning wanted to seek to sell other services and products. Therefore, the company wanted to grow as large as possible. Rubin said the goal was always to get Android out to as many people as possible, hence the decision to offer the platform to OEMs free of charge.

The plan is ultimately better than the founders believed. Their “ambitious” goal was initially to achieve a nine percent market share in Europe and North America by 2010.

As a mobile operating system Android found great success: in 2012 Android controlled 60% to 72% (depending who’s statistics you believe) of the smart phone market. Android currently sees 1.5 million activations per day. There are currently 750 million Android devices in use and it is well on its way to 1 billion total.

Today Android is found on very many applications outside smartphones and tablets. Android has become a commonly used operating system for embedded applications, so nowadays it is found on TVs, set-top-boxes, refrigerators, espresso machines, gaming consoles and many other devices. And finally Android has come back to it’s roots: Last year, Samsung released the Galaxy smart camera that runs on Android. Nikon and Polaroid have also introduced similar Android powered mart camera devices.