When Android first appeared I had an inkling that it would be a hit. I didn’t enjoy the early incarnations of the software – the G1 was like a Sidekick on steroids – but generally I expected Android devices to blanket the world for one simple reason: it was free and carriers no longer had to worry about Java stacks and wonky, homebrew OSes. Instead they could sell phones that worked, approximately, like every other Android phone in the world. It was Google’s gift to an industry that was facing competition from all angles.