Androids

If you have any interest in the in-depth and behind the scenes history of the Android hardware and software development this is definitely a book worth reading.

As a fan of computer/engineering history books I fully expected to enjoy this book and I was not disappointed. A good book in this genre is not just about the product but also about the people behind the making of the product. This book does a great job providing lots of details on the many many people, some points of decision contention, inflection points in design, etc. from Android's prehistory through 1.0. It then is a pretty big whirlwind for the post-1.0 and post-G1 releases. That's fine because much of that is more well documented since the sausage is more made in the open at that point. You really get to see lots of inside details about how things unfolded, the culture, and the people who were doing the work. The footnotes and references are a wealth of information in and of themselves. I have many of them queued up for additional reading. He also provided lots of explanation of common terms software developers/engineers use that lay people may not be familiar with.

Why four not five stars? While I appreciated the information density and appropriate thoroughness it lacked the narrative quality I've seen in other books like this, specifically Brian Bagnall's series on the history of Commodore and the Amiga. There are narratives within vignettes but it wasn't tied together nearly as well. That didn't detract from the usefulness of the information or ability to follow along but it just didn't flow as well. I think part of the problem is that the engineering product and team size is so much larger. It could also be that with this only being 10-15 years ago not 30-50 years ago people aren't ready to divulge as much so openly and colorfully. My only other stylistic nit was that when introducing a new team member and briefly getting their history we often have to divine their age with ancillary details. Age isn't directly important but the state of computer science/computer engineering changed drastically over the last several decades and the ages experiences of the team span those decades so it would have provided good centering.