Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by billjings 886 days ago
This is a really off base characterization of Android within Google.

Chet Haase wrote a book on those years, and while it is clear that Google gave them rocket fuel to meet their ambitions, their company culture was wildly different from the rest of Google. Shipping code on Android would not have passed muster for anyone at mainline Google; the process and standards were utterly alien from one another.

There is no way Android happens without the acquisition.

2 comments

Yeah, when I first looked at the shocking source code for bionic (Android's libc) to figure out why my code wasn't working I couldn't believe it was written by Google. It wasn't really. (Nor did they (initially) borrow from any of the high-quality open source libcs out there.)
A lot of teams at google had culture differences. And imho it was always more about andy's ego more than anything.