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iMore iPhone iPad Forums Apps Accessories Reviews How-To Podcasts Free wallpapers: iPhone & iPad Guides: iOS, iCloud, Siri, photography, jailbreak Free: iPhone apps & games, iPad apps & games Shop Online Cases Chargers Screen protectors Headsets & More Free shipping on orders over $50 What if Google had never made Android: how would iOS 6 be different today, and who would be Apple's biggest competitor? By Georgia, Saturday, Aug 18, 2012 a 1:28 am 28 
The title really does say it all -- if Google had never gone ahead with Android and, instead, if they'd maintained their close relationship with Apple, what would iOS 6 be like today? Would Google Maps still be there, and would it be as good as Google Maps on Android is? Would YouTube still be there, and be as good as YouTube on Android? What other services might have been integrated, GTalk instead of iMessage? Google sync instead of iCloud? Would the iPhone 5 ship with NFC-powered Google Wallet? Would the iPad mini come with 20 GB of free space on Google Drive? How far and how deeply could the Apple and Google love affair have gone?
And who would have taken Android's place as Apple's biggest competitor? Would webOS have gotten on Verizon sooner and enjoyed all the marketing that went instead to Droid? Would BlackBerry have kept more of its user base and gained more of the not-Apple share? Would Samsung have gone all-in on Windows Phone and be neck-in-neck with Nokia for the top spot? Would Facebook or Amazon have already rushed in to fill the void?
Put your imaginations to work and give me your best guess -- where would our iPhones and iPads, and the rest of the mobile industry be today if Google had never left Apple?
Georgia
Senior Editor at iMore, psychotherapist, 2x Canadian Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion, co-host of iPhone & iPad Live and ZEN and TECH.
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18 82 More of: Featured, iMore AsksMore of: Imore Asks, Apple Vs Google, What If ? PreviouslyForums: Classic games to play, Ditching email signatures, 10" or 7" iPad which would you rather have? Next up ?Martian watch lets you control your iPhone with voice commands and Siri There are 28 comments. Add yours.
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SockRolid says: Aug 18, 2012 at 4:37 am - 2 days ago Without Android, iOS would have vastly bigger handset market share and slightly larger pad market share (due to Android's near total lack of iPad competitors.) And, ironically, Google would be making a lot more money too.
Google makes more money from iOS than they do from Android. Even now. Just imagine how much they would be making if they hadn't dumped Android onto the market...
Replyum look at the facts you idiot... You really think apple would let google make more money by using ios ? Est tardus... Ignorance is bliss though so I guess that's why you live in your own little world
ReplyWow. Who's the idiot?? Might want to look up your facts lovechild.
ReplyHey ... ilovechildlabor.... DUDE... so you love lil kids abuse .... LOL ... why don't U just crawl back into U'r green plastic garbage bin... enjoy the sweet-waste there... I'm sure Sergay & Lary lets U do: whatever U'r deviation or desire is... I promise I will newer go there, as I don't eat SHIT...
ReplyWhat if Google had never made Android... Googlevil did never made Android... Georgia ... they bought it ... it was a Windows rip-off originally... that's why they can't make money from licensing it... like Mr.Soft does (YES ... from ANDROID !!!)
ReplyNot sure why you are calling him an idiot when he is pretty much spot on with his comment.
ReplyWhy would you be so harsh and randomly jump and call someone an idiot for something they wrote. Perhaps you should seek counseling. It seems as though you have anger issues. This a tech website not a place to go and rip people apart. So many people on these websites love to get so tough and verbal over little things. It's easy through a computer when your not in someone's face. I never comment on these things but I guess your the straw that broke the camels back. Get people skills dude.
ReplyThere has been some speculation that Google makes more from iOS users than Android users; for now, let's grant it as true, because ultimately it is irrelevant to Google's motivations here. Google acquired Android not as a profit center itself, but to defend its service and ad revenue streams against being shut off by somebody else controlling the device chokepoint as users shifted more from the web to mobile. In iOS6, this is exactly what is happened, so it seems Google was wise here.
You probably would argue that Apple never would have done this had Google not released Android, but you can never be sure, not to the level a multibillion dollar business requires. In the 90s, Power Computing never thought Apple would try to revoke their license (eventually buying all assets of the company outright), but they did, almost immediately after Jobs returned. In the 2000s, IBM and Motorola never thought Apple would never abandon the PowerPC architecture right up until the point Apple did. Apple had good reasons for turning their back on those partners, and that is the entire point -- good reasons can and do crush partners.
Apple's motivations were not Power's motivations, were not IBM's motivations, and are not Google's motivations. When interests diverge, Apple is going to do what is best for Apple, as they should. The business who, without leverage, depends on another business always having perfectly aligned interests eventually gets kicked in the teeth, in the case of Power Computing, fatally.
Android positioned Google to avoid that fate, and, from that standpoint, Mountain View has to consider it a success, despite the current pain of evictions from iOS.
ReplyNow this assessment is spot on.
ReplyiOS 6 will be pretty much the same perhaps still have Google Maps and Youtube. Palm/WebOS would be alive. Nokia would be more successful and perhaps still rock Meego Symbian or whatever they call it. RIM would still be a hot mess. Perhaps Windows Phones 7 would be more show cased on three headed monster of Samsung, HTC and Moto.
ReplyI doubt iOS6 would be what it is today. The things that Google put into Android have been strong influences to the direction of iOS for the last 3 versions.
ReplyApple would be even more dominant. It's really hard to say about Palm. Carriers without the iphone were dying for a slab substitute. Palm refused that route going with their crap plastic qwerty kb Pre. Android makers (HTC, Moto & Samsung) eventually filled the void, first on Sprint with the Hero and then with Droid on Verizon. Palm had no chance and yet for some reason kept trying to make a go with revisions of their qwerty plastic disaster.
With no android to speak of? It's possible the carriers would have influenced Palm to give them a slab. Google would also have probably supported them better. Licensing webOS becomes a consideration (but this is palm..and nobrainers were often puzzles for them). Rain down on carriers with webOS devices of all sizes and all of a sudden, it's android all over.
ReplyThe title should read "What if Google had never STOLEN Android..."
Please make this correction.
ReplyPretty sure Google legally purchased Android.
But this is understandable coming from you since clearly you are an idiot.
ReplyUmm... Google legally acquired the origins of Android... so I don't know know what you are talking about.
ReplyI think without Android iOS would be similar but it would have taken a lot more time to gain the new features it got in newer releases.
As for the primary competitor... I guess Windows Phone?
ReplyIf Android never existed, the iPhone would suffer. Without Android, it is possible ios6 would still have Google Maps (though the same issues over control and air supply would still exist), but iOS would have had a 4 year period with no credible competition, and that would have been far worse.
A riding-high Apple got complacent once, and it nearly killed them. The disappearance of Android would not have made Palm, RIM, Nokia, or Microsoft any less mistake prone since 2007 - they would have still floundered, so, without Android, Apple would have faced effectively zero outside competitive pressure for half a decade.
For all the conventional wisdom that Apple learned that lesson, and that Jobs would never allow it to happen *again*, it is human nature to relax when not under pressure for that length of time. Android has been the sole external point applying pressure upon Apple to stay hungry, which has been a net boon for ios development over the last few years, and, more importantly, has ensured complacency has had no option to take root in Apple's culture.
ReplyVery well put. And very cohesively written comment.
Competition makes companies to constantly push what is possible. Blackberry failed in this aspect, and they let complacency take root. BB had virtually no competition especially on enterprise until iOS and Android came along. They got to fat and forgot what it means to run
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DARK_BLU says: Aug 19, 2012 at 12:43 pm - 20 hours ago On September 12h, we'll find out whether Apple has become "complacent" or not. Rumors are one thing. Released products in Apple's case, are often another.
ReplyPalm once ruled the roost growing up from the PDA days, and their only real competition at the time was WinCE / WinMob, which sucked. And the Treo was a very decent handset.
I think that if there was no Android, that Palm's WebOS would be the one Apple competes against. Their biggest problem, which lead to their complete collapse, was that with the market saturated with iPhones and Androids, the carriers didn't push Palm hard enough to make the handsets people actually wanted. The WebOS is/was fantastic, it was simply hobbled by bad hardware design.
I played around with the Pre when it eventually got to Verizon and I thought its UI was very elegantly done, it was even more intuitive than iOS. It's just that the screen was too small, the hardware keyboard was too small AND recessed in such a way that it was hard for me to use the keys at the edges.
If WebOS came on a handset the size of the OG Droid or iPhone, with or without a sliding keyboard, I think it would have been a very good unit and the market share between Palm and Apple would be close.
ReplyNot exactly. The real issue for Palm seemed to be money. They didn't have enough of it to really do well by webOS or the Pre. They seemed to have cut corners on the first Pre they put on Sprint and other launch carriers because they didn't have enough money. That really hurt them and just caused a downward spiral of them not getting enough return to push the updates to webOS that were needed to bring it to a fully stable state.
ReplyNot so. Success begets success. Had Palm done well by Sprint, they could have gotten more money. Let's not blame Sprint anymore or the fact they launched a few carriers at first. Android did the same thing. Apple did the same thing. This was needed.
But let's focus on that Sprint launch being what it was. A failure. The launch started off great. The hype at the beginning was great. The product? Not so much. The hardware sucked. And webOS was too slow & buggy.
A premium slab form factor would have done wonders for people to accept webOS the way it was. This isn't hindsight. It was just as obvious then. Yet there was something about the Pre form factor that they should have continued with the idea as a niche phone to a main slab phone. The Pixi was all she wrote. I think I sold any stock I had when I heard about it.
You say money? Explain the Pixi. Explain the Veer when Palm DID get money via HP. The list goes on a mile long.
ReplyI didn't blame Sprint. If you had seen the issues, the QA issues, with the first Pre you'd understand what I was talking about.
We can only guess what HP let them use the money for but it seems HP only looked at phones as an after thought and was instead driving for tablet development.
ReplyIf Android had never been invented, I wouldn't hear as many friends bitch about how much they hate their Android phones. lol
ReplyYou'd still here them complaining about their feature phone, BB, WinMo because, let's face it, the only bad Android phones are the cheap ones that are put out there as low hanging fruit.
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Billybaldin says: Aug 19, 2012 at 4:02 am - 1 day ago Without Android IOS wouldn't have anything to follow. I spent 2 years with an iPhone 4. Its a great phone if you don't know what you're doing with a phone. Just turn it on and there it is. IOS 6 will finally have a few of the things Android has had for years. And not the good stuff.. It will finally get its own maps ( Which we all know will be crap to start out. I mean lets be honest. Nothing is ever great fresh off the line). It will finally get signatures on email. Etc etc.. Just as that is all coming out Android is continuing to move on to bigger and better things. Which of course Apple will follow the following year. Not bashing Apple. Its just the truth. Who knows. Even though I just switched back to a galaxy S3. When the new iPhone comes out it might be worth the cost to move back. But for now the iPhone is just following Android.
ReplyDARK_BLU says: Aug 19, 2012 at 12:16 pm - 21 hours ago If Google does in fact make more money from iOS than Android, then it's no wonder that Apple removed Google Maps from iOS, but Apple can't bar every Google service from iOS because that would be anti-competitive and the Gov would come down on them for that. It's in Google's best interest for iOS use to continue to grow and unfortunately, Apple can't bar everything Google from iOS. So in a strange way, that makes them partners. How ironic.
ReplyWhen you take google off the OS side of things, that's effectively removing them. Yes, Google can live in the app store but millions won't go there.
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