Inside Story of How Google & MS created the Surface Duo

The Surface exists because of a meeting last year between MS & Google. An inside story of that meeting and everything that came after

“Long before that meeting in Redmond, Panay and the Surface team decided the Surface Duo couldn’t be a Windows device. It needed Android. Anyone can fork and develop on Android, of course, but for this strange new thing to be great, it needed the Play Store, it needed Google Maps, it needed the millions of apps people expect on the device in their pocket. It also needed a huge amount of development to make apps run on side-by-side screens, both from Google and from app developers. The only way to get developers on board, Microsoft knew, would be to turn the dual-screen shape into a trend bigger than one Microsoft gizmo, so they wanted to give all their work to the broader Android ecosystem.”

“So Panay decided to reach out to Google, and see if the companies might be able to work on this device together. If not? No Duo. “If he’s like, ‘I don’t think I want to do this,’ we wouldn’t make the product,” Panay said. “It was either, we’re doing it together, or we’re not doing it.”

https://www.protocol.com/surface-duo-history