Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft is still using Android, just like the majority of smartphone users. Following the death of Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, Bill Gates confessed back in 2017 that he was now using an Android phone with “lots of Microsoft software” on it, and the former CEO of Microsoft has elaborated a bit on his Android usage in a recent interview with CNBC and NYT journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin (via Android Authority).
If the interview was mainly about Bill Gates’ new book about climate change, the tech industry legend couldn’t avoid a question about its mobile operating system of choice. “I actually use an Android phone. Because I want to keep track of everything, I’ll often play around with iPhones, but the one I carry around happens to be Android,” Gates replied.
The interview with Sorkin was actually done on Clubhouse, a popular audio-based social app that currently remains only available on iOS. So yes, Gates obviously needed an iPhone or iPad to participate in the interview, but he later shared more about why Android remains his favorite mobile OS.
“Some of the Android manufacturers pre-install Microsoft software in a way that makes it easy for me. They’re more flexible about how the software connects up with the operating system. So that’s what I ended up getting used to. You know, a lot of my friends have iPhone, so there’s no purity,” Gates said.
Two years ago, the Microsoft co-founder admitted that he wished Microsoft was the company that came up with Android. The software giant definitely had a lot of success in the smartphone market during the Windows Mobile days, but that didn’t last very long. We all know too well how things started to go south after Steve Ballmer literally laughed at the price of Apple’s first iPhone, and the rest is history.
