Comment by BoorishBears
3 years ago
I have some pretty unique insight into this since I work with AOSP a lot and have worked with a few engineers on Android's core system apps:
Google's engineers working on Android at a system level regularly break basic functionality in the "userspace"*. Google's engineers working on Android apps get early access to the Android versions and work through the resulting bugs, bubbling them back up until they get fixed.
(*userspace being used loosely here, it's all userspace vs being in a kernel, but it's interfaces that are implemented at the OS level and consumed at the app level)
Like Google is large enough that I'm sure someone will take offense to implying that such questionable engineering takes place there, but this isn't a story I've heard just once. People working on apps that are part of every GMS enabled Android image have confirmed this completely bizarre setup on multiple separate occasions
Of course, this issue did not get fixed in Google’s apps.
I think that just proves how stupid of a process it is?
You're relying on your internal teams' relatively outlay to catch contract breaking. And sure in this case internal is Google, meaning there are some pretty widely used apps acting as filters... but relative to the millions of apps out there, they're not likely to catch all the regressions.
They must have automated testing, but at the point where it's just accepted that things will break and your own engineers regularly have to "convince" your OS team that they broke things, you know something is wrong.