It's useful indicator in these days of useless slop coded shit. Few things are a bigger waste of my time than reading about someone's proudly "ai"-generated pile of garbage.
Actually it's quite useful information. As soon as I see another useless "ai coded" project I immediately stop reading/caring about it. Fuck your slop code. Nobody wants that shit.
Don't suppose there's actually documentation for the CPU anywhere?
(I mean more than a tiny "datasheet" with a very high level overview and/or a pile of random Linux/uboot patches)
I had moved on from Android by 2013, so I definitely don't have much insight into what it's become over the past decade. In the earlier years it was very much about working hard to build the platform, products, and ecosystem. The team was pretty small and generally isolated from the rest of the company, which was both good (we got to focus on doing our thing and not get distracted) and bad (integrating with Google properties, services, etc was often rather painful).
Part of the reason I left the team was Clockwork (before it became Wear) turning into "just cram Android on to a watch", which was very much not an approach I was excited about and things getting more political and "too big to fail", combined with burnout and needing a change of scenery.
The whole "throw everything in the trash and start over" thing is massively overstated. The iPhone announcement absolutely impacted things, not entirely all bad -- there was interest from OEMs before that, but it went through the roof after -- and it did mean we moved from the plan to ship a blackberry-style device first followed by a touchscreen device to skipping right to touch for initial launch, recognizing that the landscape had absolutely changed.
Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway before iPhone was announced.
Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience.
Yeah, I take exception to the painting of Android as inherently "unhealthy" and not "solving real problems for users." Also with lumping it in with the unmitigated disaster that was the Social/G+ effort. I attribute much of Android's success to Larry & Eric being very supportive, shielding the team from constant interference from the rest of the company, and letting us get shit done and ship.
I came aboard during the Android acquisition, some months before he started at Google, so of course I may be a bit biased here. I was pretty skeptical about landing at Google and didn't think I'd be there for more than a couple years, but spent 14 years there in the end.
Android had plenty of issues, but shipping consumer electronics successfully really does not happen without dealing with external partners and schedules that you can't fully control.
No idea what the laundry bins thing is about -- never saw that.
Meanwhile people are creating garbage with "ai" tools. I wish them the best of luck with their shit.