It's not bollocks; we now have Google engineers on record that they had to substantially rethink Android in the wake of the iPhone announcement.

> Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

> On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.

> “Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-...

This is not one of those Apple vs Google fights; it's straight up well-sourced journalism.

The video he presents as evidence does exactly the opposite! That is the video we all point to when we say the whole interface was lifted from iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1FJHY...

That is the exact old skool interface that was so terrible.

That is Android pre-iPhone.

His only argument is 'well look later, there's some touch too'. But that's even more damning as the touch was so badly designed and clunky.

Watch the whole thing if you want. Notice the use of right-click menus. Notice the zoom had to use buttons. The program switcher is lifted from Vista and looks nothing like what actually happened, which was a iPhone copied home button.

What the video shows is that Android had an interface and it was nothing like the one that came out 6 months later which was wholesale lifted from the iPhone.

Windows Mobile showed you didn't have to do it anything like Apple did, so why did android look so much like the iOS?