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.
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