Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System

by Chet Haase

There was a cover on the G1’s SD Card slot that users had to open before popping the card out. Opening that cover sent a signal into the system, which could be used as a cue to quickly get everything into a stable state in case the user popped the card out. But it was difficult to find all of the places in the code where this needed to happen. To make things worse, debugging the situation required a lot of tedious card-popping. Over, and over, and over. Eventually, San asked for help. He reached out to Andy: “‘Hey, you’re into robots. Do we have someone that could make me a robot that could do this?’ He hooked me up with someone. I told them what I needed: a little bot that allows me, through software, to control how it goes in and out, and then I would create a little closed-loop test. That allowed me to track down all of these bugs.” San used the SD card robot to chase those bugs one by one until the system worked reliably.