Androids

31 The Wild West

Android felt very much like the Wild West.

—Evan Millar

Android also developed its own engineering culture, from a combination of its isolation from the rest of Google plus the fundamentally different products it was working on compared to the rest of the company. Evan Millar observed: “Android felt very much like the Wild West back then. There weren’t very many rules. There weren’t very many tools. There weren’t really a lot of best practices or style guides or anything telling you the right way to do things. But the cool thing about it was that it meant you could kind of do whatever you wanted to do and try whatever you wanted to try. It was a very open-to-innovation, open-to-trying-things sort of culture that I really ...