Andy Rubin Concepts

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

by Steven Levy · 12 Apr 2011 · 666pp · 181,495 words

left. “A lot of Google is organized around the fact that people still think they’re in college when they work here,” says Eric Schmidt. Andy Rubin, who came to Google in 2004 when the company bought his mobile-technology start-up, guessed that since Brin and Page had never been in

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office to Mountain View in August 1999. The tenant moving into the space Google vacated was a start-up company named Danger. Danger’s cofounder, Andy Rubin, was a veteran of Apple in the early 1990s and a fabled start-up called General Magic. He’d started Danger to make a mobile

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the phone’s capabilities, the main presentation was a list of boring self-congratulatory speeches by representatives of the partners with shockingly little product information. Andy Rubin had a glazed grin throughout. “The last thing I wanted to do was talk about it,” he says. “The only thing I wanted to do

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want to do with an expensive phone whose most fragile component was a large glass touch screen is throw it into the air. “Ad hoc,” Andy Rubin later characterized the performance with a shrug. “That’s Larry and Sergey, and that’s pretty much how the company’s run.” The G1 phone

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had decimated an entire subindustry by offering a product for free, the company was anything but apologetic. “We don’t monetize the thing we create,” Andy Rubin says. “We monetize the people that use it. The more people that use our products, the more opportunity we have to advertise to them.” Surely

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Android partners who made phones and sold them. But in mid-2009, while discussing ideas for a new Android model with the head of HTC, Andy Rubin asked, why not break the usual procedure where Google created and gave away the software, the handset maker designed and manufactured the hardware, and the

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arrangement. The phone itself would be called Nexus One. “Nexus,” explained Queiroz, “is a convergence of connections.” But the real origin of the name was Andy Rubin’s robot fixation: in the movie Blade Runner, the model name of one of the humanlike robots was Nexus 6. “We’re not at six

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would have to come through phones not made directly by Google. On May 14, 2010, barely five months after Google introduced its direct-sales model, Andy Rubin posted an official “never mind” blog item announcing that Nexus had reached its exit. He brightly noted that “innovation requires constant iteration,” while admitting that

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Google had ordered a sophisticated surveillance-capable autonomous drone, poured rocket fuel on the conflagration. (Actually, the drone was a private purchase by Android honcho Andy Rubin, ever the robotics enthusiast.) On August 13—a Friday—protesters took to the Googleplex. The scene was more a geek version of Yippie theater than

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understand Google: Paul Buchheit, Matt Cutts, David Drummond, Urs Hölzle, Bradley Horowitz, Kai-Fu Lee, Salar Kamangar, Joe Kraus, Andrew McLaughlin, Marissa Mayer, Sundar Pichai, Andy Rubin, Amit Singhal, Hal Varian, and Susan Wojcicki. (Apologies in advance to others worthy of explicit mention.) I also benefited from the friendship and insights from

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution

by Fred Vogelstein · 12 Nov 2013 · 275pp · 84,418 words

a recent acquisition. But as he watched Jobs’s presentation from a run-down office above a T-shirt shop there, he knew his boss, Andy Rubin, would be thinking the same thing he was. He and Rubin had worked together for most of the previous seven years, when DeSalvo had been

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’s mistress—lavished with attention and gifts but still hidden away. This secrecy wasn’t Schmidt’s, Page’s, or Brin’s idea. It was Andy Rubin’s. Rubin didn’t want anyone to know about his project. Like most entrepreneurs, he’s a control freak, and he believed that the only

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were going to get this done was not to go through Alan anymore,” said someone who talked to Jobs about it. “Alan was translating for Andy [Rubin], and I think they felt like they had to go right to the source to get these things changed.” Another Apple executive said that it

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sweating to get one,” the Jobs confidant said. “So we talked a lot about how we could make sure the iPad caught on right away.” Andy Rubin and the Android team at Google scrambled to keep up with the relentless pace of Apple’s innovations. But in 2011 they were being outflanked

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needs Google now. Without Google apps on Samsung phones—which are now half of all Android sales—half of Google’s mobile advertising base disappears. Andy Rubin is no longer the Google executive to query about Android’s future. In early 2013 he handed Android’s reigns to Sundar Pichai, who had

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available over the years for this project and/or for other stories I have written, including its former CEO Eric Schmidt and former Android boss Andy Rubin. The most important sources for this book weren’t officially sanctioned interviews anyway. They were the myriad engineers and executives who actually worked on these

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sure I recounted accurately what happened—many on the record. Although Steve Jobs and Google executives such as Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Andy Rubin get all the credit for building the iPhone, the iPad, and everything that has grown out of Google’s Android project, these people are the

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, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), e-book location 4497. Rubin believed that: Trial testimony of Andy Rubin in Oracle v. Google, 3/23/2012. He said the iPhone was: Steve Jobs’s iPhone keynote address, 1/9/2007, available at www.youtube

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Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web,” Wired, 9/2/2008. 6. Android Everywhere “It [Android] is”: Brad Stone, “Google’s Andy Rubin on Everything Android” (Bits blog), New York Times, 4/27/2010. It was as if little else: This data comes from Google financial statements as

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tried: “Customer Backlash Forces Vodafone to Renege on Software Update” (Technology blog), Guardian, 8/12/2010. Intellectually, it’s easy to understand: Stone, “Google’s Andy Rubin”; Jesus Diaz, “This Is Apple’s Next iPhone,” Gizmodo, 4/19/2010; Rosa Golijan, “The Tale of Apple’s Next iPhone,” Gizmodo, 6/4/2010

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System

by Chet Haase · 12 Aug 2021 · 580pp · 125,129 words

directly about this book. There were many other people on the Android team at that time who contributed substantially to the product. Cast Member: Role Andy Rubin: Founder, robot maker Chris White: Founder, designer, engineer, electric skateboarder Tracey Cole: Administrative business partner, manager of managers Brian Swetland: Engineer, kernel hacker, systems team

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-quality lenses with increasingly large sensors to capture more and more detail in digital image files. But the software for these cameras was… not great. Andy Rubin, who had founded and recently left the mobile phone manufacturer Danger, was looking for a new project. Along with Chris White, a former colleague at

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handy for the people who later found themselves on Android building very similar things. Danger, Inc. Danger, Inc. was founded in December of 1999 by Andy Rubin, Matt Hershenson, and Joe Britt. Initially, the company was building a portable data exchange device, nicknamed “Nutter Butter”29 because it was shaped like the

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, who were looking for something less business-centric. Nick went to CES in 2001, hunting for consumer device possibilities. He met with Danger’s CEO, Andy Rubin, who showed him a mockup of the latest version of Danger’s device. Like BlackBerry, it also was data-only. And like BlackBerry, Nick told

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the Demo In May of 2005, Andy McFadden (known to the team as “Fadden”45) joined the company. Fadden had worked with Andy Rubin and Chris White at WebTV. When Andy [Rubin] was looking to hire someone else for his startup, he emailed Fadden: WTF? How are you? I want to hire you. It

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in March of 2013. 45 Andy McFadden will also be known as Fadden in this book, to make it easier to distinguish Andy McFadden from Andy Rubin. Too many people, too few unique names. 46 Assembly language is the lowest-level code that programmers use. It maps very closely onto actual hardware

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there were like twelve of us and we were never going to make that work. So we said ‘OK, we have to pick a language.’” Andy Rubin saw the choice of just one language as a simplification for developers. Swetland said, “We were toying with some concepts of doing Java and C

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through the acquisition by Microsoft and another ten years until joining the Android team. At WebTV and Microsoft, Ed worked with future Android people, including Andy Rubin, Steve Horowitz, Mike Cleron, and Andy McFadden. Ed started on the Android team around the time that the Android SDK was first released, in October

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, Cary suggested that Mike should meet with a startup called Android, which had been founded by a couple of Cary’s former colleagues at WebTV: Andy Rubin and Chris White. In late 2004, Android was quite small, with only the two co-founders plus new employees Brian Swetland and Tracey Cole. Android

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introduced a software-based solution instead, selling it for just a dollar per handset. Dave Sparks was in charge of that product at Sonivox when Andy Rubin came calling. With Android’s plans to open source the OS, Andy’s needs were different from Sonivox’s typical customers; he wanted the product

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logic. On the other side, the framework team preferred a more code-centric approach. This decision, like so many in Android, happened through sheer effort. Andy Rubin had recently decided that Android would use Java as the main programming language. Joe Onorato decided it was time to dive in and implement the

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screen), and a parallax effect between the wallpaper background and the pages of the home screen. Later on, for the launch of the Nexus One, Andy Rubin wanted something visually exciting. Joe Onorato explained: “For Eclair, Rubin wanted something flashy.” Andy was light on specifics; Joe remembered him saying, “Just do something

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career at NeXT Inc., but later moved to WebTV (which was then acquired by Microsoft), where he worked with future Android people including Chris White, Andy Rubin, and Steve Horowitz. After co-founding Android, Chris reached out to Jeff to see if he was interested in joining their startup (which was then

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-themed UI with a gradient color: green for connected and red for hung-up. Toward the end, before we shipped, it got a review between Andy Rubin, myself, and Sergey Brin. Brin was notorious about speed, and said, ‘Why do we need gradients? They take more processing power.’ I think he’d

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, he wanted to do something else. “Helping people watch more TV didn’t seem like a really noble thing.” Steve put Wei in touch with Andy Rubin at Danger. Danger had not yet made the pivot to phones; they were still working on their “Nutter Butter” data exchange device, which didn’t

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Danger’s Hiptop devices. Eventually, he was ready for something new, hopefully at another startup. A friend from Danger, Chris DeSalvo, suggested he talk to Andy Rubin, who had since left Danger and was running a startup in stealth mode called Android. Wei IM’d Andy that evening. Andy asked if he

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-minute project to get pinch-to-zoom250 working for the Nexus One launch in early January of 2010. Grace returned from the holidays to find Andy Rubin asking how long it would take to implement that feature. He really wanted it for the upcoming launch, which was happening that month. Three weeks

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application in eight minutes. The talk went well and Dave was feeling pretty good about it until the next day. “I got an email from Andy Rubin, going ‘Who the hell is this guy and why is he talking about my project publicly?’” Apparently, Rich hadn’t gotten around to telling Andy

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UI. Some devices caused a lot more trouble than others, but overall we pulled it off.”269 Some time after Android was acquired by Google, Andy Rubin contacted Cédric. As the lead of the mobile Gmail team, Cédric was a likely person to help write Gmail for the nascent Android platform. He

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talking about Brian. So I got to know some of the personalities very early on.” Debajit continued working on the mobile team, checking in with Andy Rubin and his team occasionally. Then, in late 2006 he reached out to Cédric Beust, a former colleague on the mobile team. He also chatted with

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sending data to and from Google servers, so the team collaborated on a centralized sync mechanism. Soon after that initial services engineering team got rolling, Andy Rubin brought in someone he knew from Danger to lead the project: Michael Morrissey. Michael Morrissey and the Services Team Michael Morrissey went to college and

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-equipped to take on that additional burden. Through meetings like this and various other obstacles, the project had a hard time making forward progress. Meanwhile, Andy Rubin kept checking in with Michael every quarter to see if he wanted to come help out on Android. Eventually, Michael ran out of patience with

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View. Meanwhile, Dan heard rumors, along with the rest of Google, about what was happening in that skunkworks project of Andy Rubin’s. “It was all very secretive. ‘Are they making Cameras? Andy Rubin — he was the guy at Danger, right?’” Dan had always been a mobile enthusiast. “I had been carrying a [Danger

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an executive review for a go/no-go decision for launching the Android SDK. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin would all be there. Andy Rubin was presenting, along with Steve Horowitz, and they asked Charles to bring his Bounce demo. That morning, the demo still wasn’t complete. Charles and

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are sitting in their usual chairs. Jonathan Rosenberg. It was pretty packed. The whole team is there. I was sitting in the back, and then Andy Rubin started. ‘We’re going to talk about what Android is, and at the end we’re going to have some demos.’ “Eric’s like, ‘Let

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screen. He made this demo; it was like the first time it was a full screen map. You could pan around on the big screen. Andy [Rubin] gave him the first G1 prototype within the team because of that.” In late 2007, Adam was joined by Charles, who set aside his Bounce

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Andy later joined Google, and was involved in some meetings with the Android team early on. 301 Andy Hertzfeld knew Andy Rubin; Hertzfeld was a co-founder of the company General Magic, where Andy Rubin worked in the early 90s. 302 Cat is a command in Unix which is short for “concatenate.” It is

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pull things together weren’t responsible for individual pieces; they were responsible for the overall effort. Welcome to the ‘business’ side of Android. Andy Rubin and Managing Android Andy Rubin’s interest in robots was there from the start of his career, when he worked at Carl Zeiss AG on robotics. He later took

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ten years. I’m tired. I’m going to leave.’” Tracey Cole and Administrating Android One of the people responsible for a smooth transition after Andy Rubin left was Tracey Cole. Tracey had been Andy’s administrative assistant for fourteen years, and was the lead admin for Android when he left. She

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the company that wasn’t bought.” Three years later, Hiroshi was ready for something new. Hiroshi’s colleague at Be, Steve Horowitz, introduced Hiroshi to Andy Rubin, and Hiroshi joined Danger. “I ended up being the first employee at Danger Research. There were three founders and I was the first lackey they

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, Steve moved to Microsoft, joining the WebTV division just after it was acquired by Microsoft. There, he worked with future Android people like Mike Cleron, Andy Rubin, and Wei Huang. He also eventually hired Hiroshi to run the system software group for the Microsoft IPTV platform. Steve transitioned into management while he

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effort. So in some weird alternate universe, I could have been working on iOS instead of Android.” Over the years that Steve was at Microsoft, Andy Rubin tried to get him to join Danger, but Steve wasn’t convinced that they had what it would take, so he stayed where he was

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Google shipping Android phones; it was everyone.351 In the early days, there were several people working on different aspects of partnerships and business deals. Andy Rubin had ideas about whom to work with and how to make this strategy succeed. After all, he co-founded and ran a successful mobile device

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hallway, I had two immediate thoughts: (1) That’s hilarious! (2) I’d better not touch it. Because you never know. 33. Fun with Robots Andy Rubin always had a thing for robots and machines of any sort. He continued that interest in all of his projects, including leaving Android in 2013

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back into the office. The only time she saw me was coming in for dinner.” Fadden remembered Brian Swetland’s efforts and focus: “One day, Andy Rubin pops in and says, ‘Hey Swetland, how’s it going?’ Without looking up, Swetland grumbles something to the effect that things would be going much

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.” The slogan was invented in engineering. Marketing had come up with the slogan, “It’s got Google.” But Rebecca, on the systems team, complained to Andy Rubin: “It’s not even grammatical! What about ‘With Google’ instead?” Andy said “Okay!” The co-branding slogan was born. The Nexus One was released in

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it was going to be a Google-branded phone, with more ownership and control over the final product. Meanwhile, the Droid languished without love internally. Andy Rubin didn’t even want to do the deal to begin with, for various reasons including the carrier network details. Rich Miner recalled, “Andy didn’t

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, Rich Miner, Dan Morrill, Michael Morrissey, Tom Moss, Marco Nelissen, Joe Onorato, Jason Parks, Nick Pelly, Andrei Popescu, Jean-Baptiste Quéru, Mike Reed, Nicolas Roard, Andy Rubin, Dan Sandler, Nick Sears, Jeff Sharkey, Dave Sparks, Brian Swetland, David Turner, Paul Whitton, Jesse Wilson, Peisun Wu, Jeff Yaksick, and Rebecca Zavin. I’d

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff · 24 Aug 2015 · 413pp · 119,587 words

the work of the designers who alternatively augment and replace humans in the systems they build. This distinction is clearest in the contrasting philosophies of Andy Rubin and Tom Gruber. Rubin was the original architect of Google’s robot empire and Gruber is a key designer of Apple’s Siri intelligent assistant

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company is dramatically echoing Shockley’s six-decade-old trainable robot ambition. The dichotomy between AI and IA had been clear for many years to Andy Rubin, a robotics engineer who had worked for a wide range of Silicon Valley companies before coming to Google to build the company’s smartphone business

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move around in the environment,” Rubin said in 2005.4 Since then there has been a growing wave of interest in robotics in Silicon Valley. Andy Rubin was simply an early adopter of Shockley’s original insight. However, during the half decade after Shockley’s 1955 move to Palo Alto, the region

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. It is capable of little else. Despite its limitations, however, Baxter represents a new chapter in robotics. It is one of the first examples of Andy Rubin’s credo that personal computers are sprouting legs and beginning to move around in the environment. Baxter is the progeny of Rodney Brooks, whose path

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-hacker J. F. Sebastian and finds himself in a menagerie of grotesque, quirky synthetic creatures. The real-life J.F. lording over this lair is Andy Rubin, a former Apple engineer who in 2005 joined Google to jump-start the company’s smartphone business. At the time the world thought of Google

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’s efforts to seed the convergence of personal information, computing, and telephony became an influential and high-profile failure in the new mobile computing world. Andy Rubin went on a buying spree for Google when the company decided to develop next-generation robotics technologies. Despite planning a decade-long effort, he walked

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him as “the android.” In his home in the hills near Palo Alto, evidence of the coming world of robots was everywhere, because, once again, Andy Rubin had seen something that hadn’t yet dawned on most others in Silicon Valley. Rubin would soon get the opportunity to make the case for

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self-driving cars, the Robotics Challenge will bring us close to Gill Pratt’s dream of a robot that can work in hazardous environments and Andy Rubin’s vision of the automated Google delivery robot. What Homestead-Miami also made clear was that there are two separate paths forward in defining the

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out to build would remain very much a work in progress after his abrupt departure at the end of 2014. In the weeks after Homestead, Andy Rubin made it clear that his ultimate goal was to build a robot that could complete each of the competitive tasks in the challenge at the

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population. Today Google’s robot laboratory sits just several hundred feet from the building where the Xerox pioneers conceived of personal computing. The proximity emphasizes Andy Rubin’s observation that “Computers are starting to sprout legs and move around in the environment.” From William Shockley’s initial plan to build an “automatic

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just one trade show, Automatica, in Chicago in January 2012. As it turned out, they didn’t even need that much publicity. A year later, Andy Rubin visited their offices. He was traveling the country, scouting and acquiring robotics firms. He told those he visited that in ten to fifteen years, Google

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tremendous impact on the economy and the modern workforce. It has both empowered individuals and unlocked human creativity on a global scale. Three decades later, Andy Rubin’s robotics project at Google is representative of a similar small group of engineers who are advancing the state-of-the-art of robots. Rubin

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet

by Charles Arthur · 3 Mar 2012 · 390pp · 114,538 words

Canadian maker of the BlackBerry.5 Android The September 2005 announcement of the Microsoft–Palm tie-up grabbed the interest of one particular Google employee: Andy Rubin, a former Apple employee, whose second mobile start-up, called Android, had been purchased by Google the month before. (He had left his first mobile

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for general computing, that a fully featured browser and heavy-duty internet services were impossible due to [network] bandwidth and latency… even Danger [the company Andy Rubin had founded and then left] was just working on a better BlackBerry. Another told me that the quarterly ‘vision meetings’ held by co-chief executive

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emphasized that this was not a ‘Google Phone’: it was a Google phone platform. ‘Is there a Google phone coming?’ asked USA Today’s writer. Andy Rubin replied: ‘Another way to think about the G-phone is that there will be thousands of Google phones – some you like, some you don’t

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

by Mark Bergen · 5 Sep 2022 · 642pp · 141,888 words

, type As, who sat on Larry Page’s management council, the coveted “L Team.” No fiefdom was as insular and absolute as Android. Its leader, Andy Rubin, a brilliant programmer and robotics nerd, built his Google fiefdom by giving free operating software to the legion of phone makers trying to rival Apple

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a company listserv for moms that she frequented and found a link to a morning headline from the Times about her company. Click. Google gave Andy Rubin, the creator of Android mobile software, a hero’s farewell when he left the company in October 2014. . . . What Google did not make public was

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few other women from YouTube held a private meeting with their CEO. Wojcicki had confided to some staff that she knew nothing of charges against Andy Rubin and felt disgusted by them. In this meeting her employees raised concerns about YouTube’s gender pay gaps and its scarcity of Black leadership. Wojcicki

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remainder of the chapter. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT found a link to a morning headline: Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner, “How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android,’ ” The New York Times, October 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment

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-andy-rubin.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “like Joan of Arc or something”: Morris, “When Google Walked.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT would later

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words

lived there kind of 24/7. John Giannandrea: Zarko Draganic famously slept under his desk for months at a time. Zarko shared a cube with Andy Rubin. Megan Smith: You’d say “Hey Zarko, let’s meet at three o’clock.” And then he would say, “A.M. or P.M.?” Michael

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group. Amy Lindburg: Tony went on to do the iPod and the iPhone. Steve Perlman: Phil Goldman and Bruce Leak both founded WebTV with me. Andy Rubin joined later. Amy Lindburg: And then Andy went on to do Android. And Zarko spun out the software modem—which was the first modem ever

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

by Ken Auletta · 1 Jan 2009 · 532pp · 139,706 words

run everything and works for people pretty well, it’s been very difficult to do that on phones,” Page said. Google’s mobile quarterback was Andy Rubin. A former Microsoft employee, Rubin had left to cofound a mobile software company called Android, which Google had acquired in 2005. As the senior director

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Anand, mobile marketing manager, May 2008. 207 “As compared to the internet model”: Larry Page, October 10, 2007. 207 Google’s mobile quarterback was Andy Rubin: author interview with Andy Rubin, March 24, 2008. 208 “Since we think we have the most reliable network”: author interview with Ivan Seidenberg, February 19, 2008. 210 “they

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives

by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen · 22 Apr 2013 · 525pp · 116,295 words

of a high school science project, what does that tell us about the future? These “projects” are an unfortunate consequence of what the Android creator Andy Rubin describes as the “maker phenomenon” in technology, which outside the terrorism context is often applauded. “Citizens will more easily become their own manufacturers by piecing

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; the Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú; Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali of Tunisia; the former DARPA administrator turned Googler Regina Dugan; Android’s senior vice-president Andy Rubin; Microsoft’s chief research officer, Craig Mundie; Vodafone’s CEO, Vittorio Colao; the Brookings senior fellow Peter Singer; former Mossad chief Meir Dagan; Taj Hotels

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data point with additional anecdotes from civilian and military officials who have been working on or deployed in Iraq over the past decade. “maker phenomenon”: Andy Rubin in discussion with the authors, February 2012. Somalia’s al-Shabaab insurgent group on Twitter: Will Oremus, “Twitter of Terror,” Slate, December 23, 2011, http

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell · 2 May 2022 · 411pp · 119,022 words

that kills companies, that collapsed Nokia, that toppled Kodak. It’s probably what was in Steve Jobs’s head when he refused to meet with Andy Rubin. I’d known Andy, the founder of Android, since we worked together at General Magic. And in the spring of 2005 he heard through the

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, 17 on marketing, 271, 277 Not Invented Here Syndrome, 327 as parent CEO, 329 passion of, 69, 70 on processors, 148 respect for, 329–30 Andy Rubin and, 327–28 Wendell Sander and, 24 on “staying a beginner,” 268 storytelling of, 177, 286 vacations of, 207–8 walking of, 214 Joswiak, Greg