Android was designed for a keyboard phone — then iPhone forced a complete redesign

Android Inc. was founded in 2003 by Andy Rubin, who had previously built the Danger Sidekick, a popular keyboard phone. Google acquired the start-up in 2005 for at least $50 million. The Android team spent two years developing a smartphone OS designed for physical keyboard phones like BlackBerry. The prototype, codenamed 'Sooner,' had a small non-touch display, a QWERTY keyboard, and a D-pad for navigation. It was scheduled to ship in late 2007.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Andy Rubin was driving to a CES meeting when he saw the keynote — he reportedly stopped his car to watch the entire presentation. He told a colleague, 'Holy crap, I guess we're not going to ship that phone.' Google engineer Chris DeSalvo said, 'As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer I thought, we're going to have to start over. What we had suddenly looked so nineties.'

The Android team scrapped two years of work and refocused entirely on a touchscreen phone. The new device, codenamed 'Dream' (released as the HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1), launched in October 2008 with a touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard. The keyboard was kept as a backup — the entire OS was redesigned to be touch-first. Project manager Erick Tseng said, 'A bar had been set, and whatever we decided to launch, we wanted to make sure that it cleared the bar.'

The forced pivot to touchscreens is widely credited as the decision that made Android the dominant mobile OS. Today, Android runs on over 85% of smartphones worldwide. The Sooner prototype was never released — it was obsolete before it shipped. The keyboard-first design that Google spent two years building would have failed in a post-iPhone world.