The Summer of Silence

... "And then in late May, the Google contingent stopped posting on those groups.

There was no “goodbye”, or “hey, we need to focus on other things for a while”, or any other sort of announcement. One day, they were just gone. Eventually, we heard via “the grapevine” that top management (presumably Andy Rubin) had screamed fairly loudly about Googlers being involved with the community, particularly with deadlines looming. That seems plausible (both the justification and the screaming), though I never attempted to get corroboration for that story.

The reverberations from that lingered for years, as it seemed as though Google engineers were prevented from even acknowledging that the community existed. I distinctly remember an early Google I|O conference session, where Romain Guy was struggling not to say “ActionBarSherlock” when trying to answer a question about ActionBarSherlock, Jake Wharton’s legendary early UI framework." ...