Disclaimer: This article was written in late 2012 amid a patent lawsuit Apple filed against Google over their Android OS. The suit was later settled in 2014, but comments from then CEO Steve Jobs calling Android a “stolen product” incited Android fans to lash out on the internet. This article was a response to some of the misinformation and wild speculation being distributed at the time.

Lately I’ve been avoiding Google+ due to the angry hordes of clueless Android fanboys raging against what they see as evil Apple suing the world. I’ve had enough, so I’m going to set the record straight.

Development of what was to become the iPhone began in 2004, when Apple started to gather a team of 1000 employees to work on the highly confidential “Project Purple”. A year later Google bought Android Inc.

After 3 years of development, the iPhone was announced at WWDC in Jan 2007. It went on sale 5 months later in June. Android’s first beta software was released 3 months after that (September ’07) and Android 1.0 appeared for the first time on an HTC phone a year later.

Another interesting fact is that Google didn’t come up with Android on their own, but bought the company that invented it.

Apple brought the iPhone from concept to market in less than 3 years. It took Google 3 years to take a product that existed to market and they only did the software. Apple did the whole thing, hardware and software, from scratch, in-house.