We’re at Open Mobile Summit  2011 in London where Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, has just stated that he believes Apple created Android. Or at least the conditions for it to appear. Read on to find out more…

Stephen Elop spoke about the rise of Apple and how back in 2007 the success of the Apple iPhone created the conditions for Google Android to grow and flourish, seeing the emergence of the iPhone in 2007 as a high-water mark of what a smartphone could be but also the conditions to spawn Android.

The thinking behind this? Apple iPhone is a closed ecosystem with everything controlled by Apple. While this has proved successful it means developers have to play by Apple’s rules.

Therefore, it seems inevitable that a more open source solution would arise, more appeasing and appealing to all developers, hence the environment for a platform like Android to flourish.

What has this got to do with Nokia you may ask? Well, the smartphone world is changing and we're seeing disruptions across the board. We’ve got from a hardware versus hardware battlefield, as Elop put it, to one of ecosystems.

It has shifted from hardware to a battle of ecosystems, where everything from the hardware to the platform and the services delivered need to be equally balanced. So, the success of any ecosystem lies in the strength of its developer community, as well as the operators and providers.

With the launch of the first Nokia Windows Phones in the fourth quarter of this year we’ll start to see the rise of the third ecosystem as Nokia and Microsoft combine their core skills.