Book excerpt: The fascinating inside story of how the Android operating system came to be. In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software but couldn't get investors interested. Today, Android is a large team at Google, delivering an operating system (including camera software) to over 3 billion devices worldwide. This is the inside story, told by the people who made it happen. Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System is a first-hand chronological account of how the startup began, how the team came together, and how they all built an operating system from the kernel level to its applications and everything in between. It describes the tenuous beginnings of this ambitious project as a tiny startup, then as a small acquisition by Google that took on an industry with strong, entrenched competition. Author Chet Haase joined the Android team at Google in May 2010 and later recorded conversations with team members to preserve the early days of Android's history leading to the launch of 1.0. This engaging and accessible book captures the developers' stories in their own voices to answer the question: How did Android succeed?