Did Android copy iOS? We asked Google's product manager... - The Guardian

Has Android copied elements from Apple's iOS? It's not a matter that Google's senior managers for the Android operating system want to get involved in.

Hugo Barra, product management director for Android at Google, insisted in London on Tuesday that he hadn't heard the revelations that emerged last Friday from the Steve Jobs biography: that the late Apple chief executive "swore to destroy Android", and was so furious at what he saw as copying implemented in Android 2.1 on HTC phones released in January 2010 that he summoned Eric Schmidt to a meeting in March and said he wanted it stopped.

"He said that?" said Barra, sounding astonished. He said that he had been travelling and had not heard the stories.

When given detail about them – and asked whether he would say that any elements in the latest version of Android, such as the two-line preview of emails in the Gmail app (found in Apple's iPhone email program since 2007), or the "quick response" buttons at the bottom of the email app (almost identical in order and purpose to those in Apple's iPhone email program), or the provision of a shortcut to the camera from the phone's lock screen (first seen in Windows Phone 7 in October 2010 iOS 5 previews in June), or the extra features added to the Notifications bar in Android – were copying iOS, he responded: "I'm not going to get into this."

Barra declined to answer when asked Google had implemented a "feature freeze" on Ice Cream Sandwich, the new version of Android which will be implemented in phones due for delivery from next month. A "feature freeze" is the point at which no new features are added to code, so that it can be tested and refined: "That's an internal matter," he said.

Barra joined Google's Android effort in December 2010, and was key in the development of Ice Cream Sandwich, which is version 4.0 of Android. He said that a key aim was to improve the user experience of Android, and that work on figuring out what to do and how, if at all, to change it had included wide-scale testing with both existing users of Android and non-users to find out what they found difficult or wanted to see.

"A lot of the coding [of Ice Cream Sandwich] was concurrent with that of Honeycomb [which was released to manufacturers in February 2011]", Barra said. The "gold master" version of Ice Cream Sandwich was produced in time for the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus last week in Hong Kong.

Update: corrected first appearance of camera from lock screen. Thanks, James Tutt.