Androids

What Hacker News says

1. ge96Apr 2023
   Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System (Chet Haase)

   Also enjoying Dealers of Lightning about Xerox Parc

   thread
2. pavlovNov 2022
   I can recommend the book “Androids” for an in-depth look at the origins of Android and the team that built it:

   https://www.amazon.com/Androids-Built-Android-Operating-Syst...

   The definition of a phone OS was very different in 2005 when Google acquired Android Inc.

   It was a tight platform originally, but so was Windows NT, and look at Windows today… That’s just the nature of success in the open OS space when you’re serving lots of hardware vendors.

   Show morethread
3. pinewurstJul 2022
   There's a new book, "Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System" by Chet Haase, which may be helpful.
   thread
4. OlognDec 2021
   I have not had time to read a lot of books, one (475 page) book I read is "Androids" by Chet Haase. Haase was on the Android team and interviewed most of the programmers who wrote the initial Android versions. I program Android and find it fascinating. It gives you an idea of how such a successful project from somewhat recent times comes together. Android was originally going to be an operating system for cameras written in Javascript.

   It covers a big team, and jumps from chapter to chapter on how the Java virtual machine was written, to how the SD card code was written, to how notifications were implemented. Thus it does not have the compelling narrative drive of something like Masters of Doom, which is another good book which follows a much smaller group from id software. But Androids is a very informative book on how something like Android is put together.

   Also, some books of this type are for the lay person and are breezy and talk about personalities and not much about technical matters. A lay person could probably read this, but it does dive into technical decisions, which I appreciated. For example, I knew Android has a process called zygote which handles the initialization of each Android application, but this book explains why such a process exists, which illuminates things for me beyond me simply knowing that it does exist.

   Also interesting is how the teams from Danger, Palmsource, and WebTV came in with various ideas of how a device should be built, which all culminated in Android.

   If you are interested in great prose or a narrative drive, read another book. If you are interested in how the folks from Danger (and Palmsource, and WebTV) had great success at their second swing at bat, in creating a technology that has become ubiquitous worldwide in the past decade with three billion active Android devices - it is an interesting read.

   Show morethread
5. fg137Aug 2026
   In "Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System" by Chet Haase (a book you shouldn't waste time on), it is very clear that making Android open source (i.e. AOSP) was almost by accident. Google was pretty confident that Android could be just as successful if it were a more closed ecosystem.

   And it seems to be that Google is increasingly regretting that decision and closing things down bit by bit, from Play store policy, all the Play services BS, to how they ship security patches, and now all the developer verification. Google discovers that it's easier to make money if they just control everything.

   Show morethread
6. OlognJun 2025
   The book Androids by Chet Haase talks about how the early Android team had a lot of ex-Palm people on it.
   thread