Always wondered this... Lets say Alphabet never made the Linux fork "Android" and instead all you had was a fragmented mess of competing distros from Samsung LG, Motorola and the rest. Do you think the iPhone would look and function the same as they are today?
Alphabet (Google) didn't make Android, they bought it.
Android's open source nature has allowed OEMs to develop their own features which become rolled into the OS longer term. As a result, Android benefits from having a collection of ideas adding their own features. A number of these features came to iPhone later. The following features would likely either not have happened or happened at a slower clip
- Large displays. The demand for a large display was popularized by the Galaxy Note line of phones.
- Wireless Charging. Numerous Android manufacturers implemented conductive charging, increasing demand
- The use of an OLED display. Apple ships the best LCD displays, but OLED has been on Android for a long time and demand finally reached Apple.
- Edge to edge displays. Another Samsung development. Without Android manufacturers, it is hard to imagine Apple would rush to develop this kind of device
- Home button removal . See Edge to Edge display
From a strictly software standpoint, Android beat iPhone to a number of features which likely would have developed more slowly on iOS if Android didn't exist
- Multitasking
- Larger screen support - Apple perfected multitasking slowly, but the iOS 4 version of multitasking would probably have been tolerated a lot longer if Android didn't support true (also ridiculously battery draining) multitasking
- Over the air updates - Android has always supported OTA updates. It's unclear whether or not Apple would have moved to OTA updates if their competitors weren't already doing it.
All this goes without saying that Android has borrowed heavily for iOS. The black slab screen design was an iPhone creation. The iOS interface drove Android to develop Holo and then iOS 7 spurred Google's material design paradigm. iPhone is the reason the Pixel line exists, the reason Samsung devices aren't plastic, and the reason for most major standards getting adopted.
It's give and take. I, for one, don't feel like one OS has an advantage over the other as to which ripped off the other. We, the customer, benefit from both OS development.
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Maybe a better question is what would android look like if the iPhone never existed?
I can’t answer such a rhetorical question.
Android devices would have probably looked like Blackberry devices, at least at the beginning. Although, I would argue Palm was on the right track and iPhone was on the front end of a trend that was probably inevitable. iPhone just did so much right.