Google got caught tweeting from an iPhone while promoting Pixel
theverge.com
theverge.com
I spent ages with various crappy Android emulators and phones making the best demos I could, I learnt heaps about optimising the Android webview and animation, and rendering and versioning differences, it took me weeks of hard work, but I finally made some killer demos.
We took them to present at Google at the office in the heart of London, the head of the EU ad division was there, everyone was excited about seeing what their new Android Ad SDK could do.
I told them I had live demos, to pull our your phones and go to this URL and you can try it!
Not one of them had an Android phone, every single one had an iPhone. There was 10 seconds of awkward silence that felt like 100 years, and then I burst out laughing when I realised none of them had an Android phone. They didn't see the funny side as much as I did
Deep into the Android years, Eric Schmidt got a lot of flack for proudly announcing that he loved his blackberry and you could pry his physical keyboard from his cold, dead hands.
What Google did do, over many years, was hand us free Android phones to just play with. Every christmas.
Why so? That's hilarious for everyone involved :D
It's not a cult. You don't gotta buy Google stuff.
Now if it was an apple employee...? More surprising but like, not worth an article.
This employee made a significant mistake.
It may not be that easy to undo; the Internet has a long memory.
Years later, people will still be having conversations like, "LOL, you're not thinking of buying a Pixel? Did you know Google themselves send tweets from an iPhone to promote that thing? Incredible, but true!"
What Google can do here is use their dominance in the search space to make it hard to search for this incident.
Or am I simply reading your comment too literally?
Here’s the tweet they have ”quoted”:
https://twitter.com/ianzelbo/status/1582886309277769730
Maybe this is the better link?
As I remember from my 7+ years there, more than 50% of engineers at Google use iPhones. An even larger percentage of non-SWE roles do too.
These numbers grew as “dogfooding” population makeup became politically fraught
As someone who doesn't know what's going on at Google, can you elaborate on that? I know what dogfooding is, but what does the rest mean?
The solution would’ve been simple: make more test devices, so that all the engineers, who actually file bug reports get one, and whoever else you want can get one to collect dust on their desk too. Didn’t happen.
Similar situation played out an android proper. In 2012 in 2013, almost all android engineers were carrying a dogfood device. By 2019, they were almost impossible to obtain, except ...
And were you also blocked from redeploying the testing units away from those who didn't care?
Nobody was that stupid, no
> And were you also blocked from redeploying the testing units away from those who didn't care?
That was not really done. Chasing down people one by one to recall units they were barely using would have taken more time than our one tired & overworked dogfooding program admin had.
I guess that is the natural outcome of treating hardware as an afterthought.