Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives. Fred Vogelstein

      When Rubin and the Android team were done dealing with the initial shock of how good the iPhone was, little drama surrounded what needed to be done.

      Rubin is at his core a start-up CEO—messianically convinced that his path is the best one regardless of whether people and circumstance agree with him. He was used to setbacks. The iPhone was good, but what he was doing was going to be different—and better. It would be technically superior to the iPhone and more widely distributed. Rubin believed that³⁹ all the software engineers at carriers and phone makers added 20 percent to the cost of a phone. With Android, they wouldn’t need that infrastructure and would be able to sell their phones for less. And the iPhone would help focus Google’s attention on the Android project. When the iPhone was announced, Rubin had about four dozen people. Two years later he’d have more than a hundred.

      In retrospect, having the iPhone beat the first Android phones to market was arguably a good thing, some at Google have told me. Apple spent tens of millions of dollars educating consumers about how to use these new devices with a touchscreen. By the time Android phones started to arrive two years later, the iPhone had become hugely popular. That meant that those carriers who didn’t have the iPhone—which was everyone but AT&T at the time—were looking for an alternative. This wasn’t a short-term problem. AT&T’s contract with Apple gave them exclusive rights in the United States for four years. “They [the carriers and manufacturers] saw the writing on the wall, and that definitively helped Android. It helped cause people to sit up and take notice and take Android seriously,” Eustace said.

      For Rubin and the Android team, the more complicated issue to emerge from the iPhone’s unveiling was their own company’s involvement in the iPhone’s project. Google, they learned, was Apple’s key partner in the venture. Indeed, Jobs had made the inclusion of Google software one of the iPhone’s selling points during his unveiling. He said the iPhone was⁴⁰ the “Internet in your pocket for the first time ever” and “You can’t think about the Internet without thinking about Google.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt had joined Jobs onstage during the unveiling to reinforce the depth of their partnership. “Steve, my congratulations to you. This product is going to be hot,” Schmidt said during three minutes of remarks.

      The Android team knew Schmidt was on the Apple board. What they didn’t know was how tight the companies had become. While they were developing Android, a handful of engineers in another building a few hundred yards away had become privy to the Apple operation, possessing some of the Apple employees’ knowledge of the iPhone project. Inside Apple, Jobs strictly controlled and siloed access to the various portions of the iPhone project, and Schmidt made efforts to avoid conflicts of interest issues with Android and iPhone because of his position on the Apple board. And yet, some members of the Google team working on apps for the iPhone had seen the iPhone’s software and hardware development. “Apple particularly wanted the Google Maps product,” said one of the engineers. “Steve, I think, personally liked it a lot and wanted to make sure it was integrated into the iPhone. So we knew the iPhone was coming.”

      Having two product teams seemingly in competition with each other wasn’t a new thing at Google. Many of Google’s best creations, such as Google News and Gmail, grew out of that philosophy. But the engineers at Android had also come to believe that maybe they were different. Cofounder Larry Page was their patron. They had privileges and perks that few other teams of their size at Google had. And they felt justified in having them. To them, it wasn’t just that Rubin had started Android or built the Sidekick, it was that he probably knew more about the mobile phone business than anyone else at Google, maybe all of Silicon Valley.

      Then forty-four, he’d been building cutting-edge mobile products in Silicon Valley since the early 1990s. It was his vocation and his avocation. People describe his home as something akin to Tony Stark’s basement laboratory in Iron Man—a space jammed with robotic arms, the latest computers and electronics, and prototypes of various projects. Like many electronics whizzes in Silicon Valley, he had Tony Stark’s respect for authority too.

      At Apple in the late 1980s⁴¹ he got in trouble for reprogramming the corporate phone system to make it seem as if CEO John Sculley were leaving his colleagues messages about stock grants, according to John Markoff’s 2007 profile in The New York Times. At General Magic, an Apple spin-off that wrote some of the first software for handheld computers, he and some colleagues built lofts above their cubicles so they could more efficiently work around the clock. After Microsoft bought his next employer, WebTV, in the mid-1990s, he outfitted a mobile robot with a web camera and microphone and sent it wandering around the company, without mentioning to anyone that it was connected to the Internet. The sights and sounds it recorded were beamed worldwide until Microsoft security, which was not amused, discovered the problem and turned it off. Danger, the company that made the Sidekick, got its name from what the robot in the 1960s TV show Lost in Space barked whenever it sensed, well, danger.

      This loyalty to Rubin made his team worry about Google’s potential conflict of interest. Why should they even continue working on Android? Apple was now clearly light-years ahead of them, and Google’s top management was clearly behind that effort. Trying to compete with both Apple and their own company with a project that then seemed so inferior seemed like a waste of time.

      “Frankly, the iPhone created a morale problem,” said one of the senior engineers. “Some of the engineers actually said, ‘Oh my God, we’re doomed. This is Apple. This is the Second Coming. What are we going to do now?’”

      Rubin and those on down had the additional frustration of watching Jobs, in their view, wrongly take credit for innovations that were not his or Apple’s. Jobs was an amazing innovator who had an unparalleled sense for when to release a product, how to design the hardware and