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points by sebastiansm7 14 hours ago | 0 comments

Android, Maps and Chrome I use it almost daily for years. Dont know if are great at revenue, but are great products for me :)

[–] deathanatos 14 hours ago

To be fair, the parent is excluding acquisitions:

> not including acquisitions

Of which only Chrome is in-house created. I wouldn't think Chrome brings in a lot of revenue, and these days I'd argue FF is a much better product.

[–] scottLobster 13 hours ago

As a FF user, I've had to fall back to Edge/Chrome many times because some obscure hospital telehealth portal or bank website or whatever has issues.

I want FF to be successful, but unfortunately it's not really up to Mozilla

[–] edmundsauto 14 hours ago

I’m sure with Chrome, Google has smart people calculating the value of the data that they get from it. It doesn’t make money directly but it’s gotta be a huge money maker.

[–] mlmonkey 14 hours ago

Chrome logs every site you visit with the mothership, and that is very valuable data to Google. That allows them to spot, in realtime, trending sites for example. They see what the users are doing on the Internet in realtime and act accordingly.

[–] justinator 14 hours ago

I wouldn't call Chrome an acquisition, but it wasn't birthed at Google.

[–] motionlessveloc 10 hours ago

Huh? It was built entirely in-house at Google.

[–] justinator 7 hours ago

Chrome the browser? The browser based on Webkit née KHTML?

[–] motionlessveloc 5 hours ago

Literally every modern browser descends from Webkit. If anything Chrome diverged from it by switching to Blink in 2013.

[–] reaperducer 14 hours ago

He specified "developed."

Google didn't create Android or Maps. Android was made in 2003 by other people. Maps was Keyhole and something made in Australia.

I don't know enough about Chrome to say.

[–] vineyardmike 14 hours ago

It’s 2026, I would absolutely say Google “Developed” Google Maps and Android even if they did not “create” it originally. At what point can we attribute the success of these products to Google as a developer instead of Google the buyer.

Android had a market share of 0, with no released products when they bought it. The 80%+ market share today was all Google.

Google Maps was purchased (pre Google IPO), but the original (“Where2”) was a desktop application. Google completed rebuilt it alongside the acquisition of other data sources, and released the web page. Years later, they built a mobile app which became one of the biggest apps of all time. Should we not attribute that success to Google instead of the Australian startup building a desktop app?

[–] eloisant 14 hours ago

While Android is technically an acquisition, it was an unreleased prototype when they bought it.

It's safe to say Google brought Android to the level it is now.

[–] bbor 14 hours ago

  Android was made in 2003 by other people.

Look I'm Google's #1 hater but this is just goofy lol. There are multiple buildings full of Android developers, and have been for at least a decade; to say that it's not "made" by them is a huge stretch. Technically all of their products are just ripoffs of Sun & Xerox, right? Or Turing & Church, I suppose!

[–] phoghed 14 hours ago

Same with YouTube

[–] chimeracoder 14 hours ago

When YouTube was acquired by Google, it was already pretty similar in shape as a product to what it is now. The biggest differences are scale, the addition of advertising, and ancillary integration with other Google services. The first is a function of growth, the second is exactly what Google would be expected to do to monetize the service, and the third is another logical implication of "acquisition". (You could quibble and say they added vertical shorts and live video, but I don't think those are even fundamentally different from a product perspective from what YouTube was already doing in 2006, just fast-forwarded to adapt to the consumer technology we have today).

That's very different from Android, which was an unreleased prototype that had zero users and was dramatically different even from what ended up shipping as the first product, let alone what it is today. Android at acquisition would be unrecognizable from what the majority of people worldwide are typing on this very minute.

[–] phoghed 13 hours ago

Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.

[–] chimeracoder 13 hours ago

> Yes certainly if you discount the 20 years of development, the creator tools, the advertiser tools, monetizing creators, live streaming, completely rewriting the whole thing, etc. Google didn't develop YouTube much.

I never made that claim.

[–] phoghed 11 hours ago

Ah yes my mistake to respond to the spirit and reasonable implications of your comment rather than just the literal words contained in it.

[–] spwa4 13 hours ago

Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.

That's nothing?

[–] chimeracoder 13 hours ago

> Are you serious? Just the hardware build Google did for Youtube alone. They 1000x (not %, times) their backbone bandwidth and they're still increasing it. Youtube used to have 2 small datacenters where they were acquired. Now it's 20% or so of half of the total Google DCs.

> That's nothing?

Either you replied to the wrong comment or you didn't read the comment you're replying to.

[–] procone 14 hours ago

Android, Inc was 100% a Google acquisition from 2005. I thought this was a well known fact?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29...

[–] bbor 14 hours ago

I... yes, I know. But see the entirety of my comment above, I guess?

To clarify in good faith: what percentage of Android development do you think went on before 2005 in, let's say, mythical man months. 5%? 1%? Less?

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

Webkit, which was forked by Google.