Android Era

Android eraT

he Android era officially began on October 22nd, 2008, when the T-Mobile G1 launched in the United States. Initially, many features that we couldn't live without today were missing — an on-screen keyboard, multitouch capability, and paid apps, for instance — but the foundation was in place, and a few lasting trademarks of the platform debuted on those very first G1s to roll off the assembly line:

The pull-down notification window. Though these early phones clearly weren't without their flaws, it was almost universally acknowledged that Android nailed the notification system on day one — it would take iOS another three years before launching a design as effective at triaging messages and alerts coming from users' ever-growing collection of mobile apps. The secret was in the G1's unique status bar, which could be dragged downward to reveal every notification in a single list: text messages, voicemails, alarms, and so on. The fundamental concept lives on (in a refined form) even in version 4.0 today.

Home screen widgets. If you had to pick an enduring differentiator for Android as a phone platform — a differentiator it can still claim against iOS 5 and, to some extent, Windows Phone 7.5 — it'd be rich support for widgets on the home screen. Google had big plans for widgets from the very beginning, but there was one big hang-up at launch: developers couldn't create their own widgets.

Deep, rich Gmail integration. By the time the G1 was released, Gmail had long since supported POP and IMAP for integration with mobile email clients — but the problem is that neither one of those protocols are well-suited for supporting some of Gmail's more unique features like archival and labeling. Android 1.0 fixed that in a big way, shipping with by far the best mobile Gmail experience on the market.

The Android Market. It's hard to imagine a smartphone without a centralized app store now, but when Android first shipped, it did so at the very start of the mobile app revolution. Indeed, the Android Market on those first G1s bore little resemblance to the Android Market of today: it launched with just a handful of apps (as you'd expect of an entirely new ecosystem), and didn't have the rich, multifaceted curation that has been added over the last couple versions — instead, it just had a single row of handpicked selections at the top of the app's home screen. Perhaps more importantly, it lacked support for any sort of payment system, a problem that wouldn't get fixed until the following year.

Notably, Google developed Android 1.0's UI with help from The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish interaction design firm responsible for some truly amazing interface concepts over the years. If you look closely, you can see where TAT left its mark on the platform: the analog clock widget included in Android versions 1.0 through 2.2 read "Malmo" in small, light gray type near the bottom of the face, a tribute to TAT's hometown of Malmö, Sweden. The company would later go on to be acquired by RIM to focus solely on advancement of its BlackBerry and BBX platforms — so needless to say, Google's collaboration with TAT has come to an end.