Host here. The things the Android team had to do to get a working mobile OS out the door in the early days are fascinating to me. One of my favs is 'finding mem

Host here. The things the Android team had to do to get a working mobile OS out the door in the early days are fascinating to me. One of my favs is 'finding memory.' Adam: The web browser group was working weekends to try to get the memory usage down. Then Brian Swetland came out of nowhere with a simple fix. Chet: He made a little one line change in the kernel that freed up 32 megs. So he basically had hid the memory. He made a little change to the kernel that basically only exposed 168 megs to the operating system, so that’s all they had to work with. Even though there physically was more memory available, he just wasn’t giving it to them until the end of their release. By then, it was too late. They couldn’t expand to fill the space. Instead, they could just be a part of a much larger sandbox that was opened up to them right before they shipped.Now, all of a sudden, you had a couple hundred megs on that device that only had 168, and that’s a huge change. He gave back 30% or whatever it is. People were not happy with Brian.