<story><title>How Google bought Android</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/08/excerpt-the-history-of-android-as-written-by-a-longtime-android-developer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AshamedCaptain</author><text>Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember running gdb targetting a Handspring&amp;#x2F;Palm way before the ARM transition, late 90s or the like. In fact m68k gdb was the only option available if you couldn&amp;#x27;t pay the big compilers. Damn gdbpanel.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention that in 2005 Nokia already had the 770, which was basically a mobile desktop GNU&amp;#x2F;Linux device, with Gtk+, Gnome and everything. You could run gdb on the device itself.</text></item><item><author>jcun4128</author><text>Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so far ahead... excerpt:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.</text></item><item><author>kyaghmour</author><text>Yet another example of how what looks later as a slam dunk &amp;#x2F; sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process.&lt;p&gt;Also, not sure if it&amp;#x27;s covered elsewhere in the book, but it would&amp;#x27;ve been interesting to get to understand Google&amp;#x27;s motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jsjohnst</author><text>&amp;gt; Which is a ridiculous assertion&lt;p&gt;To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world. I always take claims of being first with a grain of salt for this reason.&lt;p&gt;That said, I completely agree. I definitely used remote debuggers and on-device debuggers on mobile before Android&amp;#x2F;iOS existed.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Google bought Android</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/08/excerpt-the-history-of-android-as-written-by-a-longtime-android-developer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AshamedCaptain</author><text>Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember running gdb targetting a Handspring&amp;#x2F;Palm way before the ARM transition, late 90s or the like. In fact m68k gdb was the only option available if you couldn&amp;#x27;t pay the big compilers. Damn gdbpanel.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention that in 2005 Nokia already had the 770, which was basically a mobile desktop GNU&amp;#x2F;Linux device, with Gtk+, Gnome and everything. You could run gdb on the device itself.</text></item><item><author>jcun4128</author><text>Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so far ahead... excerpt:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.</text></item><item><author>kyaghmour</author><text>Yet another example of how what looks later as a slam dunk &amp;#x2F; sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process.&lt;p&gt;Also, not sure if it&amp;#x27;s covered elsewhere in the book, but it would&amp;#x27;ve been interesting to get to understand Google&amp;#x27;s motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeffbee</author><text>Yeah that&amp;#x27;s completely ridiculous. BlackBerry in the x86&amp;#x2F;C and ARM&amp;#x2F;Java eras could be attached to a workstation and debugged with Visual C or the later RIM JDK, setting breakpoints and single-stepping on real hardware live and on the air. Was debugging on the BlackBerry 857 over serial port attached to PC in 1999.</text></comment>