Android Was Supposed To Be a Camera OS

Andy Rubin, the now-departed former boss of Google’s Android division, has revealed that the OS was initially developed to power digital cameras, before the slump in snapper sales encouraged his team to turn it into a mobile phone system.

“The exact same platform, the exact same operating system we built for cameras, that became Android for cellphones,” Rubin told attendees at an economic forum in Tokyo. “We decided digital cameras wasn’t actually a big enough market. I was worried about Microsoft and I was worried about Symbian, I wasn’t worried about iPhone yet.”

Rubin showed off a presentation he put together in 2004, which showed a digital camera connecting to a computer and uploading images to a central server known as the… Android Datacenter. Once he’d switched it to a mobile OS, Android and Rubin’s team were acquired by Google in 2005.

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