Google scrapped Android and restarted after the iPhone was introduced

When Steve Jobs unveiled the device at Macworld in January 2007, Google had been working on Android for two years, and it had more than 40 engineers assigned to the project. The Atlantic reports that all of them worked “worked sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks for fifteen months—some for more than two years—writing and testing code” to prepare Android for its release by the end of the year.

But everything they had done suddenly looked old and irrelevant by the time Jobs’s keynote was over.

“As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately,” said Google’s Chris DeSalvo in an interview with The Atlantic. “But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

Read more at Cult of Android.