Before I started working at Google, I was working for an agency that was contracted by Google to use their new ad SDK's to come up with some fun, interactive ads.
I spent ages with various crappy Android emulators and phones making the best demos I could, I learnt heaps about optimising the Android webview and animation, and rendering and versioning differences, it took me weeks of hard work, but I finally made some killer demos.
We took them to present at Google at the office in the heart of London, the head of the EU ad division was there, everyone was excited about seeing what their new Android Ad SDK could do.
I told them I had live demos, to pull our your phones and go to this URL and you can try it!
Not one of them had an Android phone, every single one had an iPhone. There was 10 seconds of awkward silence that felt like 100 years, and then I burst out laughing when I realised none of them had an Android phone. They didn't see the funny side as much as I did
I was at amazon (in the app store) when the fire phone was released, leadership made a big deal of showing of that they were using the fire phone for the first week or so and then got really quiet and where back on their iPhones.
The hardware specs were significantly behind what was standard on Androids of the time. Fire phones had only a slight price differentiation ($0.99 on a 2 year contract versus $199 for a Samsung Galaxy with a 1080p screen) and there were no commission incentives to push them, which made these a nonstarter.
oh, definitely. When I was first shown it I assumed it was a test model (it was common to get test models with big ugly casing pre-launch so any photos leaked looked didn't have much to go on), but nope, the big ugly thing was what shipped...
I assume you were meeting with business types - I bet 90+% of SWEs at google have androids. And to be fair, Google ad business basically has nothing to do with android.
Deep into the Android years, Eric Schmidt got a lot of flack for proudly announcing that he loved his blackberry and you could pry his physical keyboard from his cold, dead hands.
Does Google ban it's employees from using Apple products? Google is barely a hardware company, it would hardly be surprising if large number of Google employees using Apple laptops/imacs/ipods...and yes iphones.
Using an iPhone while promoting Google Pixel is directly damaging to the Google Pixel brand.
This employee made a significant mistake.
It may not be that easy to undo; the Internet has a long memory.
Years later, people will still be having conversations like, "LOL, you're not thinking of buying a Pixel? Did you know Google themselves send tweets from an iPhone to promote that thing? Incredible, but true!"
What Google can do here is use their dominance in the search space to make it hard to search for this incident.
Apple is gaining more and more market share in the US (55% right now) and they're gaining in Europe and China also while Android is losing. Mark Zuckerberg did an interview with The Verge recently and even he said iPhone is winning the smartphone war. I would ring the alarm if I were Google.
Taste is subjective though, and if you don't happen to like what Apple provides you are out of luck. There are many more ways to customize Android without rooting, and I think that is cool.
Hacker news does sort of self select for people who value tinker-ability over any kind of aesthetic design choices. I think we are part of a relatively small minority here.
apple isn't innovating their designs either, they are more going for fossilizing their increasingly rounded corners, kind of like the rolls-royce of phones
I love their new format, because little tidbits like this don't have to get padded out into an entire (fluffy) article. I don't even have to click a link from their home page to see the full post
Visually, I think the new design is hideous. But you do bring up a great point about how the layout allows little blurbs like this that aren't worth a full page. But that only helps if I can stand looking at the page. :-)
At least, in the android wear team, the higher-ups directly told us that the dogfooding population had to have certain percentages of certain sexes and skin colors. Unfortunately, engineering didn’t have enough people to fill each cell of that grid, so the limited number of development watches got allocated to many people outside of the team and outside of engineering, who, then proceeded to not use them (we kept track of dogfooding devices that were or were not used. People outside of our team rarely used the devices more than once a week) and/or file useless bug reports(a-la “connection seemed flaky last Tuesday, no I did not collect a bug report then, when it was happening”). As a result, we got fewer bug reports, and a lower percentage of them were usable. Predictably, quality suffered.
The solution would’ve been simple: make more test devices, so that all the engineers, who actually file bug reports get one, and whoever else you want can get one to collect dust on their desk too. Didn’t happen.
Similar situation played out an android proper. In 2012 in 2013, almost all android engineers were carrying a dogfood device. By 2019, they were almost impossible to obtain, except ...
> And were you also blocked from redeploying the testing units away from those who didn't care?
That was not really done. Chasing down people one by one to recall units they were barely using would have taken more time than our one tired & overworked dogfooding program admin had.
The tweet was responding to Tim Cook and throwing shade in the iPhone. It's not just that they were using an iPhone, it's that the tweet was hypocritical
I spent ages with various crappy Android emulators and phones making the best demos I could, I learnt heaps about optimising the Android webview and animation, and rendering and versioning differences, it took me weeks of hard work, but I finally made some killer demos.
We took them to present at Google at the office in the heart of London, the head of the EU ad division was there, everyone was excited about seeing what their new Android Ad SDK could do.
I told them I had live demos, to pull our your phones and go to this URL and you can try it!
Not one of them had an Android phone, every single one had an iPhone. There was 10 seconds of awkward silence that felt like 100 years, and then I burst out laughing when I realised none of them had an Android phone. They didn't see the funny side as much as I did