Following up on our discussions about the technical foundation of Android, we must look at the human element. The culture of the early team was characterized by high autonomy, alignment, and a distinct lack of political bureaucracy.
Because the team was small (around 30-40 engineers in the pre-1.0 days), communication was simple. If you needed to fix an API or a graphics buffer, you walked over to the desk of the person who wrote it and figured it out in five minutes. There was a shared target: we needed to ship a viable alternative to the iPhone, or Google’s mobile strategy would be dead in the water.
This high-stakes environment forged deep trust. In my interviews for the book, a recurring theme was how much fun people had, despite the grueling hours. They felt like they were building the future, and they were right.