A decade of Google - The most notable events from the past 10 years - Android

Ah, Google. Everyone’s favorite and least-favorite company has had quite the decade, more than earning its spot at the table of the tech elite. It was already among the top 20 largest companies in 2009, owing to years of success from YouTube, Chrome, and others, but in 2019 Google (via its parent company, Alphabet) finds itself among the top 5 largest companies by market cap.

It’s been a remarkable decade for tech as a whole, but Google stands out because of just how widespread its influence is. Google has touched (and more often than not, retreated from) countless segments of the tech community as it grew over the years. At this point, it’s been caught with its hand in the cookie jar so many times that it’s a wonder it has any hands left.

Despite these failures, Google is doing better than ever as we prepare to move into 2020. To celebrate a decade of successes and failures, we decided to look back at some of the most notable events, product launches, failures, and more from the Mountain View company.

2010: Not so humble beginnings

The beginning of our timeline here is hardly the beginning for Google, which at this point has been around for well over a decade. After a hotly anticipated IPO in 2004, the company went on to launch (or purchase) Google Maps, Android, YouTube, Chrome, and other services that cemented its place as a leader in the tech industry.

Read also: Google Chrome: Its history and rise to market domination

Google didn’t rest on its laurels, however, and launched the Nexus One smartphone in partnership with HTC in 2010. It ran on Android 2.1 Eclair, but was later upgraded to Gingerbread. It didn’t do nearly as well as the Nexus S launched later in the year, however. The Nexus S was developed with Samsung and although it was still somewhat flawed it set the stage for later Google devices.

2010 also saw the beginning of another event that would follow Google throughout the decade: the lawsuit with Oracle. It’s centered around the use of open-source code and APIs, and the results could have huge implications for the tech industry as a whole. Google has since had two rulings in its favor, but the most recent ruling reversed those two decisions. The battle still rages on today, but the Supreme Court should make a final decision sometime in 2020.

2011: New services, old CEO

2011 kicked off with a major executive shuffle with Eric Schmidt stepping down after 10 years as CEO of Google. Larry Page returned to his role at the head of the company, marking a shift in strategy that attempted to stay close to Google’s startup roots instead of becoming another monolith like Microsoft.

Fans of Chromebooks will remember 2011 as the year Chrome OS launched. The lightweight, open-source software powers millions of devices in schools around the world today, and Google remains committed to the platform with the recent release of premium Chromebooks like the Pixelbook Go.

Read also: 8 years on from the first Chromebooks: Google was right about them

Knowing full well that the future of its business relied on healthy internet access, Google launched its gigabit-internet service Google Fiber in Kansas City in mid-2011. It later rolled out to eight other regions before further expansion was put on hold. It was a bold move that dared other telecoms companies to up their high-speed internet offerings, which was at best a limited success.

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In an attempt to capitalize on the massive success of Facebook, Google also launched its own ill-fated social media platform: Google Plus. The service built on previous experiments like Google Wave and Google Buzz, but ultimately shut its doors for good in 2019.

One more major service was launched in 2011: Google Wallet (later rolled into Google Pay). It would be years before it would become anything close to the convenient one-tap payment system Google Pay is today, but the groundwork was started well before Apple Pay made the concept palatable to the masses.

On the hardware side, Google purchased Motorola Mobility for more than $12 billion, although it never really took full advantage of the purchase. Google later sold Motorola to Lenovo for less than $3 billion. Still, Android’s growth was phenomenal in 2011, and it officially became the largest mobile OS in the US.

2012: Google Glass falls from the sky

The biggest spectacle of 2012 was the release of Google Glass at a launch event that included a live skydiving stunt and Sergey Brin giving one of his last public appearances for the company. Google Glass was hailed as the future of tech, but it was quickly banned from many businesses over security and privacy concerns. It was later rebranded as enterprise tech in 2017.

On a more positive note, this was also the year the Nexus 7 tablet was announced, offering a cheap way to join the Nexus family. It was the first device to feature Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which brought a number of performance improvements thanks to Project Butter.

Read also: Seven years after the Nexus 7, what happened to Android tablets?

2012 was also the year that Google consolidated its mobile cloud services and digital marketplaces into the Google Play Store. Google’s app marketplace still lags behind Apple’s App Store, but both grew into huge sources of revenue for the competing companies.

2013: Chromecasts and moonshots

Continuing Page and Brin’s penchant for moonshots, Google announced the creation of Calico in 2013. The new company would be focused on fighting diseases caused by aging, although it has yet to produce any tangible drugs or treatments.

Another major novelty was the Chromecast, which is still a beloved product for many around the world today. At launch, it only supported a limited number of apps, but over the years it has expanded to just about every streaming service under the sun.

Popular RSS reader Google Reader was shut down in 2013, citing a weak user base. Alternatives never really caught on, which meant that easily manipulated Facebook-style feeds became the norm.

2014: More acquisitions and Andy Rubin’s exit

This year saw Google make a number of interesting purchases that expanded its tech reach. The first is Nest, which Google snapped up for a cool $3.2 billion. The second is DeepMind, which is focused on artificial intelligence and contributes to many Google products and services via algorithm and machine learning improvements. Other 2014 acquisitions include Boston Dynamics (later sold to Softbank) and Waze.

Google also launched Android Wear in 2014, which would later be renamed Wear OS in 2018. It’s seen a number of improvements over the years, but five years later it’s still hard to recommend to the average consumer.

Google's decision to hide the reason behind Rubin's exit remains controversial to this day.

The big event of 2014 was the exit of Andy Rubin, who had been an essential (pun intended) part of the Android team since it first started. At the time the split was reported to be amicable, but a 2018 exposé in the New York Times revealed that he was forced out over sexual misconduct claims. Google’s decision to hide this fact — and reward him a $90 million payout — remains a major point of controversy for the company years later, as we’ll see.

2015: A is for Alphabet, G is for Google

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Under Page and Brin’s leadership, Google had become a sprawling empire with tendrils in so many industries that investors felt they had no idea what they were buying. To help separate Google’s core business from moonshots like Calico and Google Glass, the company restructured itself under a parent company called Alphabet.

Google's core businesses were split from moonshots in the 2015 restructuring.

Google, Android, YouTube, and other core services would be grouped together, and all other companies would be run as separate subsidiaries of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google, with Page moving to CEO of Alphabet. For the end user, virtually nothing changed.

2015 also saw the launch of Google Fi, which is an affordable carrier plan that switches between networks to give customers the best coverage. As of 2019 it’s still running, although it’s still limited to subscribers in the United States.

The Nexus line joined the Google graveyard this year, with Google teaming up with Huawei and LG for the final devices in the lineup, the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X, respectively. It was the launch device for Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which is still somehow used by more than 10% of Android users worldwide.

2016: Google’s modern approach revealed

2016 was a big year for Google. With a renewed focus on core business under Sundar Pichai, it’s the year that many of the big elements of its current strategy came to fruition. The most significant developments surprisingly came in the hardware department, with the Made by Google team pushing out the Google Pixel and Pixel XL and Google Home — both armed with the smarts of Google Assistant.

The Google Pixel lineup replaced the Nexus line, but Google took a much more hands-on approach with its development (although they were still manufactured in collaboration with HTC). It had a sharp focus on camera performance, user experience, and integrating the latest Google magic, all of which could only be achieved by taking direct control of development.

Read also: Google hardware: Where Google leads and where it lags

One of those pieces of magic is Google Assistant, which debuted earlier in the year alongside the Google Home smart speaker. It built on its predecessor Google Now, and despite being released two years after Amazon’s Alexa and five years after Apple’s Siri, it’s now one of the leading voice assistants on the market.

To hone an even sharper focus on Google’s core business, 2016 was also the year that self-driving car company Waymo was spun off into a standalone company under Alphabet. It remains one of Alphabet’s more successful non-Google businesses to date, with an automated taxi service test launching in Phoenix, Arizona in 2017.

2017: The Pixel 2 and the start of major legal troubles

2017 was a relatively quiet year for Google after the major shake-ups of 2016. In an attempt to build on the (relative) success of the first Pixel phone, Google spent over $1 billion on HTC’s hardware division. In addition to the expertise (and intellectual property) included in the deal, it also gave Google a foothold in Asia for the first time in its history.

Read also: Google’s other hardware acquisitions: Where are they now

As for the devices, Google produced a premium Chromebook in the form of the first Pixelbook and two new smart speakers — the affordable Google Home Mini and the not-at-all-affordable Google Home Max. These would go on to become staples of the Made by