That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.

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edent 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Symbian and LiMo were both available at the time. It is hard to say they were good alternatives though. Windows 7 - even with the weight of Microsoft behind it - wasn't able to attract enough hardware manufacturers.

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SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Windows Phone was pretty nice, too bad Microsoft didn't follow their DOS and Windows strategy of getting it preinstalled on every consumer PC sold. There was really only the Nokia Lumia line that I recall, but everyone I knew who had one loved it.

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dpark 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Windows Phone 7 didn’t ship until 2 years after Android. 2 more years later Windows Phone 8 was released and it was a legitimate option but just too late.

Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.

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SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I guess Apple set too high a bar and MS was caught flatfooted (again) and was too far behind.

	▲	dpark 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t have visibility into what happened with the Windows Phone team, but Android from what I understand saw immediately that they needed to follow Apple’s lead and pivoted (originally they were building something closer to a BlackBerry). The Windows Phone team either didn’t believe they need to pivot initially or they just took too long to do so. Windows Phone is a case study of missed opportunity.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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pmlnr 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maemo.

	▲	michaelmior 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I remember using a Maemo device circa 2009. I recall overall really liking the OS.

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LTL_FTC 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

WebOS was pretty cool (Palm). But I’m not sure if Palm would have licensed it. Lg ended up with it.

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thomasahle 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also Bada

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cyberax 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There were several credible competitors: WebOS, Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo, Palm OS 6, and of course Windows Mobile. But they required cooperating with a single vendor and/or a lot of work to adapt.

Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.

Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.