Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System

by Chet Haase

“People discovered if you typed ‘root’93 in Gchat94 you could get root access on your phone. And then people realized that it also worked when you typed ‘shutdown.’ Or ‘reboot.’”

Joe Onorato, on the framework team, added the WeakHashMap API. Sort of. He said, “I had this library that depended on WeakHashMap, and I needed to link123 it, so I created a class called WeakHashMap.” The problem was, Joe’s class wasn’t a ‘weak’ HashMap, it was just a standard HashMap. It subclassed HashMap and didn’t add any of the logic that would have made it weak. Sometime later, Jeff Hamilton (also on the framework team) was writing code that needed the functionality of WeakHashMap. He saw that the class existed in the core libraries, used it, and had memory problems that required a lot of debugging until Jeff discovered that Joe’s WeakHashMap class wasn’t cleaning up memory at all. It was just a regular HashMap, which didn’t do the garbage-collecting work that Jeff expected.