Andy Rubin is the engineer and entrepreneur most associated with the creation of Android. Before Android, he co-founded Danger, the company behind the Sidekick, an early internet-connected smartphone popular in the mid-2000s. He then co-founded Android Inc. in 2003 to build a more open and capable software platform for mobile devices.
When Google acquired Android Inc. in 2005, Rubin joined Google and continued to lead the project. He became the public face of the platform when Google finally revealed its mobile ambitions. In November 2007 he authored the official Google blog post “Where’s my Gphone?,” which directly addressed the years of speculation about a Google phone and previewed the Open Handset Alliance announcement. That post, written from his position leading Google’s mobile platform work, was Google’s first firsthand explanation of what it had been building.
The same week, on November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance formally unveiled Android as “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.” Rubin’s vision, an open-source mobile operating system that manufacturers could freely adopt and that developers could build on without carrier gatekeeping, was the organizing idea behind that launch. Under his leadership the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, shipped in 2008.
Rubin continued to run Android’s engineering and product efforts at Google through its rise to become the most widely used operating system in the world, before later moving to other projects within and outside the company. His central legacy is the through-line from Danger to Android Inc. to Google: he carried a single idea about open mobile software across more than a decade and three organizations until it reshaped the entire industry.