15 years of Android memories – When did you get your first Android phone?

Motorola Droid running 1.6 Donut.

Mine was the T-Mobile G1. Slide out keyboard and track ball. I remember being underwhelmed by Android at the time so I switched to the Nokia N900 for a while which comparitively was more mature than android and iOS at the time.

T-Mobile G1

Nexus One was my first Android phone. I miss the trackball every day... so handy for moving the cursor through text. And it doubled as a notification LED! So sweet. Plus the removable battery, shit was awesome. I still have it in a box somewhere. I'm on a Pixel 7 now.

HTC Evo 3D. My step brother had the Evo 4g and I was infatuated with it, plus by the time I was going to upgrade my iPhone 3G was dying.

I stayed with Android as my primary phone until like 2015 when I just kinda stopped caring about flashing roms and just wanted a phone that works. I still keep an Android phone with me.

The first Android phone in our family was my mother's Samsung Galaxy Ace. And naturally, I've used that phone more than she did. As a kid I considered that swipe keyboard as mankind's greatest achievement. I would send lengthy SMS to friends and family because typing was suddenly so easy.

iirc i used my dad's HTC Magic when i was younger, then i used HTC Wildfire S for some time.

My first was the HTC Dream (G1) followed by the Motorola Droid - still miss their form factor before everything became the black slab.

I bought the iPhone 1, 2, 3 and then got tired of Apple wanting to ruin my Jailbreak so I got a Motorola Milestone, I think it was the second Android phone to ever exist.

Never looked back.

Now I want more: a Linux phone. Will try eOS and Graphene in the meantime.

It was the htc’s from early 2010. Then I got the first galaxy phone and oh boy was that a gem for its time.

2010, got the MyTouch 4G. Was running Foryo 2.2, but I ended up putting CyanogenMod on it.

My first was a Galaxy S1 back in 2010 which I rooted and flashed with custom ROMs almost immediately. I remember applying the various generations of Voodoo lag fixes because Samsung used cheap shitty flash storage and a slow proprietary file system. Once the Nexus S came out the dev scene took off because they had almost the same hardware. I had it running up to Android 4.2 or so before it was relegated to sitting in a drawer for good. Unfortunately I don't know where it is now, if I still had it I'd try to boot it up and see if it still works.

Nexus One in June 2010...still have it

My dad had the T-Mobile G1; if I recall, first ever commercial available Android phone!

That was handed down to me after a couple years. It has as much chill factor as it did nerd factor. People laughed and were amazed at the same time. I loved it, lol

My first wasn't even an actual android! I had an HTC touch pro running Haret that would reboot the phone into Android. Was so great despite the quirks and bugs since... well Windows Mobile has plenty of that going on anyway.

HTC Evo 4G, and I was living in an area with WiMax at the time too. It felt so futuristic coming from a Blackberry.

HTC Droid Incredible. Having the free time to try out custom ROMs and firmware was so fun back in the day. Not much time for that anymore.

HTC Droid Incredible in July 2010. That phone was a slow piece of shit and I loved it.

When apple started the enshittification of iPhones. Their launch of maps and trying to force Google out with a worse experience for users, just to increase profit was the push.

Now google is enshittifyijg everything, I'm looking at degoogling.

Samsung Galaxy S

Droid Bionic. First LTE phone I could get on Verizon iirc? Had to get the expanded battery which made it pretty thicc.

My first phone was the 2011 Galaxy Ace with more RAM than usable storage.

Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 in 2013.

Had so much fun rooting and flashing ROMs on the 4.

Paranoid Android, Xposed modules, PIE controls, all that stuff.

It was an HTC Desire that I picked up in 2011 or 2012. I really liked the little "scroll button", it was like an optical trackball.

I had a flip phone up until 2012 and then got an iPhone 5, then switched to Android in 2016 with the Samsung Galaxy S7. I really liked my iPhone 5 but have stuck with Android since then.

I got my first taste of Android in 2008 though when my brother bought the T-Mobile G1!

Samsung Moment. I remember choosing it for the physical keyboard.

My first ever Android phone is a rooted Samsung Galaxy Young, it has less than (i think) 200 MB internal storage, so I always need to delete apps at that time.

I guess rooting a phone is more straight-forward back then, just one "update" zip file, and then it's done.

When I worked at one of the US's major wireless carriers as a manager, I snagged an HTC phone when it was one of the first Android phones. It was small but very cool. I'd been using an iPhone 3G at the time and as soon as I played around with the Android, I knew I had to have it, and never looked back! That was 2009 I think.

First Android phone was a Motorola Moto G4. Solid phone, great budget buy at the time. Replaced it with a refurbished Galaxy S9 in 202, which is actually still serving me to this day. My S9 is showing its age now, but I'm refusing to buy a phone that does not have a headphone jack, so I'm going to run it into the ground.

First Android device was actually a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet (16GB storage, 1GB of RAM). Ended up running Jellybean, and finally KitKat, off of a microSD card to keep it going. Actually still have it, but flashed to Android 7. Gapps doesn't install, but I'm impressed it was able to run as well as it did.

I remember writing a Tetris game for Android but this was in 2007 before we could actually get an Android phone so we only used an emulator and it was really really slow, like 0.5 fps.

I think I had a Galaxy S1 as well and it was fine. Probably got a few more Galaxies before switching to iPhone. Still use a Pixel frequently for work though.

Got a Galaxy Core Prime SM-G360H in 2014 before Samsung started clamping down on bootloader unlocking. It was my first Android smartphone. Was really small and comfy to hold. Specs were terrible though. Used it until 6.0 or 7 on custom ROMs. Dropped it onto the floor one day. Broke the display. RIP.

LG Optimus Chat. Android 2.3. The worst phone I still have.

Its best feature was the flip out keyboard, but it stopped working after a bit. Its processor was so slow it couldn't play Angry Birds. And by the end it was plagued by phantom inputs.

Every other day it decodes it's not a phone. But a web browser, or a music player. While I am in the middle of a text.

Sony Xperia x10 mini in 2010

Best android phone I've ever had

I got a Samsung S2 in 2013 I guess. Was from my employer, where I could choose between that phone and an iPhone, which would cost me extra (and I had to return the iPhone when leaving, withiut reinbursment). I rooted the S2 pretty soon after I got it to be able to install Titanium Backup.

I wish I had the phone still, but just before I left the charge port failed and I got a battered one from an ex colleague. On peaving I could buy it, which I would have done with the original, but not the write-off I got.

Samsung Galaxy S2 was my first proper smartphone. I knew a dude who had one and I was blown away by how cool it was compared to my dumb phone. So I went and bought one for myself. Absolutely loved it.

Typing this on my S21 Ultra. Crazy how far smartphones have come in this past 10-12 years.

My 1st android device would be 2nd hand xperia x10, i remembered installing cyanogenmod 7 on it and learning about rooting through it

I wasn't an android person in the beginning but I always dabbled with it. I daily drived a windows phone until it got stolen in 2017, then I was hoping arround several dying phones that my family had, an s3 mini, an LG v3, an s4 mini. Then in 2019 I got a galaxy a30s and fell in love with one ui, now I'm using an infinix note 12 g96

HTC G1, but before that I put Android on my HTC Tilt2 which was a Windows CE phone so not really Android but you could side load it. This was early 2008.

HTC Desire, can't remember the year but I do rember it was a damn good phone.

I imported (to Sweden) a G1 from Germany in 2008. A bunch of experimentation on that and my next Android phone the HTC Desire Z in 2010 eventually helped me land a job as an Android developer.

15 years later I'm kind of sad about where it's all headed. Surveillance and user lock in...

Got a Galaxy S3 at a sweet discount when the S4 first released, so it was probably around April 2013. I used that phone for quite a while, eventually rooting it, installing Cyanogen Mod, corrupting the filesystem, going back to TouchWiz, and finally ending on Lineage OS 14. By then though, I had moved on to using an LG G5.

HTC Desire, 2011, running Android Eclair, 2.1. I loved that phone.

Motorola ATRIX 4G (2011) from work. The one with the laptop dock, although we didn't actually give out the laptop docks at work.

My favorite phones were the HTC M8 and M9. Great phones, felt very premium. We also had some HTC One X+ devices but there was a very particular issue with that specific phone in that AT&T SIM cards were just slightly not thick enough so there would be intermittent disconnection issues, generally solved by placing a piece of Scotch tape on the back of the SIM and cutting to fit. They also had a terrible tendency to overheat due to the Tegra 3 chip.

I've actually still got one of the original One X+ development devices - it's white and has a serial number and some sort of code etched on the front, and a big ol' NOT FOR SALE etched on the back. Holding it now, I miss how small phones were back in the day.

I think my first smartphone was the LG Thrill 4G. I remember the upgrade from 2.2 Froyo to Gingerbread 2.3 being a big deal at the time.

I feel like I had to have had one before this. This phone did not come out until I was out of school and I'm pretty sure I had a smartphone during. Looking at pictures of old phones, it may have been the LG Optimus, that one feels familiar.

Galaxy s2, after being on an iPhone 3gs, Apple made it increasingly more difficult to jailbreak at the time I did not want to get stuck in their ecosystem so I bailed and never looked back.

Droid 2, was a hand-me-down from a friend, had mostly used an iPod Touch before then.

Of course immediately rooted and rom'd because I knew about jailbreaking, thing was pretty nifty, especially for GBA emulation with the keyboard

I've got a Meizu M2 in 2015, replacing my Sony Ericsson Walkman W810 that served me well for 9 years ! The meizu was good too, until it wasn't... one day they pushed and update that rendered it completely unusable and they took 4 month to fix. By this time I had already replaced it. Otherwise very robust despit the plastic construction, it fail off a rollercoaster once and survived without damage! I still have the phone and use it occasionally as a backup, it still works but it's barely usable at this point because the obsolete software.

Galaxy Note.

I’d had the Nokia N900 previously and the huge screen size of a “phablet” sounded unique and cool.

2010. It was a motorola devour and it was basically a droid with different externals. I loved it. I owned the droid two and three after that. Miss slide out keyboards quite a lot actually.

Galaxy Ace in 2017. It could, very well, do absolutely nothing at that time ever since the Android Market and GMS for Gingerbread were shut off and all the apks I can sideload are discontinued and outdated versions, some of which absolutely not working.

Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V. This was in 2011 or 2012. It was a prepaid service and the phone was only $150. It was rooted so I could remove the Virgin Mobile software from the tiny 2Gb(?) storage.

It wasn't a phone but my first device was a €200 Chinese "tablet" running the latest and greatest android honeycomb.

I found it again a while ago, and my current phone has a bigger screen (6.2" v 5.5") but is less than half the size. But the barrel jack or mini usb for charging is something it definitely got right, especially considering the years of micro usb that came afterwards.

Motorola Moto e (1st gen), costed me around $75 in today's price. Ran android 4.4 initially later received an update for android 5 lollipop, came with Snapdragon 200.

Galaxy S

Motorola Milestone, sometime in early 2010. So-so battery life and would get hot real easy too. Loved how flexible Android was though.

My first android was HTC Evo 3D. Until then I had touch nokia symbian phone so it was quite a jump forward. Evo got off 60% of price within 6 month so I had to update. It was a hell of a deal. Lasted me for 4 years. Then I went for Somy Xperia Z1 compact.

i can't remember if i got the htc one or the nexus 4 or 5 first but i believe those were the first versions of android i used. i think i was doing ios up to ios 7 maybe??

July 2016, it was a Samsung Galaxy Ace.

I remained a blackberry user for too long. I had a number of them and I wasn't interested in the Apple phone. Then I had a terrible BB Storm which would freeze up all the time.

I called my telco frustrated by the POS. They gave me a $100 credit to go buy a pay and talk android phone (LG something) and wait for a month for the Samsung S2 to come out. Once it arrived I would be sent one. The pay and talk LG blew my blackberry out of the water as it was a full internet experience unlike the BB that was translating all internet experiences to reduce data used on networks that couldn't handle data to start out with.

The S2 was amazing compared to my BB's. I did miss the physical keyboard until I started using Swype. Then I couldn't go back.

I recall minutes being a big revenue generator for telcos, then it became data once the networks could handle it with the iPhone. Now it seems like they are giving away tons of data these days. What's driving revenue now for them I wonder?

I'm going to show my age here, but my first was a shiny new Google Nexus One. I still miss that phone.