As Rubin Leaves, Did He Solve The ‘Device by Device’ mobile build issue?

Posted on by

Google’s blog post on Andy Rubin ‘handing over the reins’ of Android to Sundar Pichai has this doozy:

But his insight immediately struck a chord because at the time it was extremely painful developing services for mobile devices. We had a closet full of more than 100 phones and were building our software pretty much device by device. It was nearly impossible for us to make truly great mobile experiences.

Go on, ask any Android developer how many mobile devices they have to address with the platform to make a great mobile experience. I guess that Pichai’s first task will be to get the number of models to test to drop under the 100 phones mark.