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Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship.

I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.

Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.

No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.

I'll vouch for it, I think you may have escaped what it became: I'm a couple generations after you, joined Google/Wear in 2016 and accepted defrag onto Android SysUI in 2018. Much lower level, topped out at L5, but saw a ton because I was the key contributor on two large x-fnl x-org projects in those 5 years, one with Assistant[1], one with Material/Hardware.[2]

Both were significantly more dysfunctional than any environment I've seen in my life, and fundamentally, it was due to those issues.

Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it. This drove a lot of nasty unprofessional behavior and attitudes towards any partnerships with orgs outside of Android.

As far as lacking focus on solving user problems...man I can't figure out how to say it and still feel good about myself, i.e. illustrate this without sounding hyperbolic _and_ without having to share direct quotes tied to specific products. TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus." This was fairly explicitly shared in public once at an informal IO talk, and it's somewhat surprising to me how little blowback there was externally. The justification is, as always, it's OEMs fault. OEMs just asked about what Cupertino just released, just in time for the yearly planning cycle.

[1] https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...

[2] https://www.androidpolice.com/google-material-you-interview-...

"Pople at the bottom would be starved for work, while people in the middle were _way_ overworked because they were chasing L+1 and holding on to too much while not understanding any of it"

Sounds like every org I worked in at Google, though it got worse as time went on. I started there end of 2011, and left end of 2021. This kind of bullshit is endemic to the tech culture at Google, but was the worst inside smaller sites or in teams with "sexy" products.

And might have been arguably worse when they had explicit "up or out" policies around L4s.

> TL;DR the roadmap was "let's burn ourselves out doing an 60% copy of what Apple did last year and call that focus."

This doesn't resonate. I've been a loyal Android user since Gingerbread (2010), and maybe for the first couple of years it was catching up to Apple, but i would say since pretty much KitKat, it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features. (And arguably putting them out with more stability and polish).

Throughout the main feature that Android was behind on and had to "copy" was performance. iPhones used to (and still) blow even top-tier Android phones away on basic things like scroll smoothness.

I think he may be referring to Android Wear. While I agree with you, Android is rock solid and great to use on most phones in the last few years, Android Wear is anything but. It's buggy, unstable and a long long way behind the Apple platform.

I love my Android phone, but, having had way too many Android Wear devices, it's complete crap.

I really want it to be good.

I'd say y'all are thinking macroscopically of Android as a whole, whereas I'm thinking about my corner of 100-200 on launcher / system UI. There's very explicit examples I can think of, but now that I think of it...it might impossible to tell from the outside because you can't really tell what's The Cool Project from year to year

From the outside, my perspective has been that Android was a free for all in the beginning and had to tighten down permissions later for battery drain problems while iPhone was too locked down initially and had to figure out how to make their devices actually useful for third party apps.

It is just an impression I remember so may not be completely accurate but android made huge progress from a user's perspective in my opinion in terms of battery management (new phones having huge batteries I guess but 5Ah battery means nothing if Android kept wasting it unnecessarily.

I remember at some point there was a funny example something like if you forget your android tablet at home on wifi when you go on a three day trip, you should not come back to see a dead battery on your tablet. It was funny but also got the point across I think. I appreciate that.

For example, on this phone I am typing on, I have set it so by default battery saving kicks in as soon as I drop down to 75%. Then I turn it off manually if I need to do something important (rare).

One thing that bothered me about Android as a user was by default there was no feature for me to say don't allow this app to do anything on boot or in the background without my permission. Don't allow this app to connect to anything on the Internet or don't allow this app to connect to any network at all unless I say it is ok to do so. Any ideas why?

> it's Apple that's been accused of just copying Android features.

I think you might be in a bit of an Android bubble. Android is plenty "accused" of copying Apple features as well. Really, both copy plenty of ideas from each other.

I had moved on from Android by 2013, so I definitely don't have much insight into what it's become over the past decade. In the earlier years it was very much about working hard to build the platform, products, and ecosystem. The team was pretty small and generally isolated from the rest of the company, which was both good (we got to focus on doing our thing and not get distracted) and bad (integrating with Google properties, services, etc was often rather painful).

Part of the reason I left the team was Clockwork (before it became Wear) turning into "just cram Android on to a watch", which was very much not an approach I was excited about and things getting more political and "too big to fail", combined with burnout and needing a change of scenery.

Flutter is a really amazing project, independently of its roots within Google. If the author has spent nine years working on it, then it's understandable why he'd stay at Google even if he didn't like the taste of the Kool-Aid. And it seems he's still working on Flutter now, so clearly it's a passion project for him. Do you blame him for chugging that Kool-Aid as long as he could?

Seems like most of the people who want to join google these days, "why do you want to join google", "for the tc and prestige"

Doesn't seem like the worst plan in the world.

Yeah I recently left a startup that I worked at for 6 years to join Google. At the startup I was overworked+underpaid, generally found it impossible to eat more than 2 meals a day (and difficult to eat more than one), usually worked on Saturdays (and always on Black Friday), rarely made time to visit family, and always lived on tenterhooks thinking about the next RFP we had to win. I did care about the mission of the startup but I am significantly happier now that I'm eating 3 healthy+free meals per day, working out, walking my dog during long breaks, using great build tools and learning new things while still generally having enough focus time to meet the expectations of my role. Google doesn't seem that bad to me as I sit here on Thanksgiving weekend, between hangouts with my extended family, with enough compensation to treat them all to great food.

The build tools are not great. Well, maybe the tools are fine, but the build times are killing me. Going from 5ms builds at home to 5 minute builds at work is brutal. 98% of my day is just waiting for builds, tests, CL approvals, experiment results, launch approvals and lunch lines.

I meant more that when I started the job and only had to type one command to run a giant application locally, that tooling blew my mind. No config files, env vars, not even any apt-get or cloning 50 different repos. Just boq run

Yeah it is definitely a lot of waiting. I try to work around that by having a lot of small CLs going at once. But even when I do have to wait it really only helps make this job more of a breath of fresh air, as it builds natural breaks into the work.

I just joined because I've always wanted to, and when I had the opportunity to check that box I did. I had no delusions about what being a cog in the machine entails or where the fealty of a public corporation lies.

Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.

The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.

Surely they could do something better for humanity, such as selling heroin to middle schoolers.

This podcast reinforces what you're saying about Android, from the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was acquired by Google:

https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/

Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early Android team.

Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective.

Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them working 16h days and sleeping in hotels next to the office to save time, while having their marriages ruined according to some of them.

The early Android vs iPhone development war was basically a Hail Mary gold rush from both companies trying to capture as much marketshare as quickly as possible.

The whole "throw everything in the trash and start over" thing is massively overstated. The iPhone announcement absolutely impacted things, not entirely all bad -- there was interest from OEMs before that, but it went through the roof after -- and it did mean we moved from the plan to ship a blackberry-style device first followed by a touchscreen device to skipping right to touch for initial launch, recognizing that the landscape had absolutely changed.

Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway before iPhone was announced.

Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience.

>Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience

That fear was kind of overblown. In those days of Steve Balmer, Microsoft was far less focused and organized, too high on its success with Windows and Office, for such a slow, large and bloated ship to react quickly and precisely enough on this.

Just look at what they did with Zune before that. It was not a bad product at all, but it was too little too late for consumers to give up on Apple and jump ship to Microsoft.

They did react here as well, but just like before, by the time they had a desirable and competitive mobile OS, Apple and Google had already reached critical mass adoption that no matter how good Microsoft's offering was, they wouldn't have been able to recoup the lead lost to Apple and Google both with consumer and developer adoption.

Your description of msft sounds like current google with generative AI.

There’s always room for a runner-up. What you really don’t want to be in is 3rd place.

Microsoft staying on top with Windows Mobile would have been a good thing for developers and consumers for one gigantic reason: Windows Mobile devices were open. No app stores, no Google or Apple bleeding away 30% of your revenue to line their own pockets, no byzantine approval process, just load your executable onto the device and go.

Windows mobile is not windows phone though and iirc from my brief time trying it out it was a mess even in 2008. My understanding was Android and open handset alliance came into being to tackle the fragmentation in the market. Clearly that's not true if the Android team saw Windows Mobile as it's biggest competitor...

I don't think Windows Phone would have ever happened if the iPhone never existed. Looks like Microsoft was just happy making money with Visual Studio licenses so I don't know if Visual Studio community edition would even have happened without outside pressure.

> Windows Mobile runs the .NET Compact Framework, which will support development in C# and VB.NET. You can also develop for Windows Mobile using MFC/Win32 APIs in C++ or Embedded Visual Basic. At the end of the day it's a stripped-down Win32-based OS, so there are other options, but these are probably the most popular.

> Depending on your experience, it will probably be easier to get Visual Studio 2008 and develop in a .NET language, the development experience is pretty nice and there is a built-in emulator in Visual Studio, so you don't need to have a device plugged in unless you are working with device-attached or embedded hardware.

> Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (the free versions) do not support Mobile development, you would need to run a trial version or purchase a license.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1702070

Indeed, I also find the critique of the Android team amusing (except for the implied overtime).

It's still one of the few Google products that is even vaguely competent. And I still prefer iOS.

> to stop the iPhone completely running away with it, although that effort has now been effectively squandered

Nowadays a Samsung is a pretty good iPhone, and 70+% of the world runs on Android, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide - only North America has iOS on top.

I think it's not good we're down to a duopoly, unfortunately Windows Phone didn't survive. It did some things better than iOS and Android.

Android also runs all kinds of devices way outside of the mobile space. It turns out a relatively open touch screen OS can drive toasters, washing machines and handheld TVs pretty well.

He spent the last 9 years in competition with Android so it's not surprising that he has some biases about it