&gt; And you still need to solve the driver problem...<p>Um. If we&#x27;re talking about 2005, we&#x27;re talking about Android.<p>If we&#x27;re talking about Android, we&#x27;re talking about brand-spanking new hardware on a brand-spanking new phone.<p>This means that the audio driver didn&#x27;t exist, which means that it was being written from scratch. This makes the &quot;driver problem&quot; a non-issue.<p>&gt;  Remember we&#x27;re talking Linux in the 2005-era (~2.6.10-ish), not Linux today. ... ALSA was still mostly broken at the time. Most stuff still wanted OSS.<p>I never tried to do any &quot;pro audio&quot;, [0] but that&#x27;s not how I remember it. ALSA worked just fine. Anything that wanted OSS worked well enough with ALSA&#x27;s OSS-compat API. I can&#x27;t remember if the software mixer was around or not at the time, but I <i>remember</i> that when it did arrive, it eliminated that problem with single-stream sound cards.<p>[0] But -as I remember it- most folks doing pro audio used specialized, <i>standalone</i> hardware for it back then.