The Android software platform lets smartphone builders everywhere create devices for every niche. If Apple's iPhone is the gold standard against which all other phones must be measured, it's also a one-size-fits-all strategy with just a handful of models on the market at any given time.

As a direct result of Android's open architecture, the platform is sweeping world markets. According to the latest IDC report, 87.6 percent of the 344.7 million smartphones that shipped in the second quarter of 2016 were equipped with Android software. Another 11.7 percent came with Apple's iOS, leaving less than 1 percent of the pie to share among Windows Phone and other challengers.

So how did Android become such a success? Let's have a look in the rear-view mirror.

How Android provides a platform for everything

Android started out as an advanced platform for digital cameras with network connections. When Android, Inc. founders Andy Rubin and Matias Duarte realized that the camera market was too small to carry a whole new business structure, the company ported its software over to the more promising smartphone sector.

"The exact same platform, the exact same operating system we built for cameras, that became Android for cellphones," Rubin later told PC World.

This was the fall of 2004. One year later, Google bought Android, Inc. for an undisclosed sum—likely about $50 million.

From its inception, Android was never intended to drive massive profits. It was designed to promote sales of digital cameras and related services, so the software was wrapped around the free Linux-libre kernel and tagged with the open source Apache 2.0 license right from the start. That attitude stayed in place as Android, Inc. moved over to phones, and again when Google took over.

"We wanted as many cellphones to use Android as possible," said Rubin. "So instead of charging $99 or $59 or $69 to use Android, we gave it away for free, because we knew the industry was price sensitive."

With profit motivations out of the way, it was easy to take the next logical step and provide the open source community with a properly maintained developer hub for Android. And so the Android Open Source Project was born. That announcement arrived in October 2008, right alongside the first commercially available Android handsets.

Less than 30 months later, an army of Androids had settled into enough niches to reach a 33.3-percent global market share. As the worldwide leader in smartphone software, Android held on to its open source philosophy at heart, though Google later broke away some key pieces of the Android puzzle under a proprietary license. These days, you can modify and build almost all of Android from freely available code, but the remaining Google-specific bits are almost compulsory in order to provide a high-quality user experience. These non-open software tools include Gmail, Google Maps, and the entire Google Play package. That includes the Play Store, where most Android users get their apps from. More on this in a bit.

Opening up the source code to all comers brings many benefits to the platform, as well as to Google itself: