Who Will Steal Android from Google?

Written on another plane to Jakarta, two months after Why I Left Google to Join Grab went viral. The framing is what lasts: Android is not really an OS, it's a channel — a thing Google built so eyeballs would land in Google's ads rather than someone else's, and channels can be stolen. Steve names three coordinated assaults. The developer stack: Android native is a poo sandwich — twenty-minute build cycles, sparse feature-interop matrices, devices that randomly break apps — so the world answered with cross-platform frameworks (React Native, Xamarin, Cordova, Flutter, Unity, Ionic, on and on); if one takes enough share, Android becomes plumbing under someone else's ecosystem. The app store: Amazon's competing store plus the corpse of Cyanogen, aimed at the Play Store's lock on distribution. The in-app marketplaces: Facebook and WeChat have grown into platforms inside their own apps, selling ads directly without a dime going to Google.

Once Steve names the channel idea he applies it everywhere — Chrome is a channel play for the Web, Xbox was a channel play against PlayStation, Echo is a channel play for the home, Google Maps is a channel play for local ads — and the essay ends on the line that has outlived the technical detail: "Once you start looking, you see channels everywhere." Read it alongside the Platforms Rant for Steve's structural thinking about the platform era. Specific predictions aged with mixed accuracy (Kotlin didn't save native Android; React Native didn't quite take the crown he projected); the channel framing has not aged at all.