“Androids” Author Chet Haase is Leaving Google

After nearly 14 years at Google, Chet Haase, a key member of the Android team, said Friday that he is leaving the company. Haase is the author of Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System, which I consider to be the Showstopper! of the Android world.

“Unlike many of my excellent and unfortunate colleagues in the last couple of rough years of tech layoffs, my departure is self-inflicted: I quit,” he writes in the announcement post on his personal blog. “It is time for me to do something else — something very very else. It’s not so much that I’m leaving Google (Android), but that I’m leaving tech for, as Monty Python would say, something completely different.”

That something, oddly enough, is comedy screenwriting, thanks to a two-year MFA program he started last Fall at DePaul, along with comedy classes at Second City. Haase had been writing comedy on the side for many years, but it’s hard not to imagine that all the recent changes at Google inspired this change of career as well.

Haase joined Google in 2010 to lead the Android UI Toolkit team, a role he held for almost 9 years. Since then, he’s been “gradually rewinding” his career, he says, to focus more on writing code. And so in more recent years, he’s been an Android developer advocate, chief Android developer advocate, and Android graphics engineer, roles he held for roughly two years each. Now, he’s “rewinding it all the way to where it began” by focusing full-time on school.

But his chief contribution to those of us outside Google will outlive his career at the company: Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System is the definitive insider’s history of the world’s most popular personal computing platform as told by the people who were there. I purchased this book in Kindle format in 2021 when it was first published, and when I discovered Haase was leaving today, I grabbed the Audible version so I could reacquaint myself with the story. Either way, it’s highly recommended.

“I had written many things before that book, and had even written several books before that book,” he writes of Androids. “But that 4+ year project of interviewing and compiling first-hand tales of how it all came together is the highlight of my writing life (so far!).”