Android Inc. was a small mobile-software startup founded in 2003. Its best-known founder was Andy Rubin, who had earlier co-founded Danger, the company behind the Sidekick smartphone. The company set out to build a smarter, more capable software platform for mobile devices at a time when phones ran a fragmented mix of proprietary operating systems and carriers tightly controlled what software could run.
The company operated quietly and had only a handful of employees. In 2005, Google acquired Android Inc. in a deal that attracted little attention at the time, and Rubin and his team continued their work inside Google. For roughly two years the project stayed out of public view, even as speculation about a Google phone (the rumored “Gphone”) grew.
Google first publicly acknowledged the lineage of the work in November 2007. In an official Google blog post titled “Where’s my Gphone?,” written by Andy Rubin in his role leading Google’s mobile platform efforts, Google explained that it had been working on the project and announced the Open Handset Alliance and the Android platform the same week. That announcement, made by the alliance on November 5, 2007, presented Android as “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices,” the public face of the work that had begun at Android Inc.
The significance of Android Inc. lies almost entirely in what it became. The startup itself was tiny and short-lived as an independent company, but the team and technology Google acquired turned into Android, which would grow into the most widely used operating system in the world. Few acquisitions in technology history have produced a return on the scale of the modest deal that brought Android Inc. into Google.