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A Love Letter to Android

How and why I fell in love with Android development

Zachary Allegretti
Better Programming
6 min readJun 29, 2022

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Photo by author

I remember unboxing my first smartphone when I was 16 years old. I left the AT&T store with a white Samsung Galaxy S3. The experience of unboxing and setting up a smartphone for the first time was magical to my teenage self. I honestly don’t remember why I didn’t choose the iPhone, but my decision set me down a path that would affect me for the rest of my life.

Circa 2014, Android had a strange reputation. While the refined experience of iOS appealed to everyone, Android seemed to attract nerds and tech junkies. Although KitKat moved things in the right direction, Android was still rough around the edges. But with this roughness came some quirks that made Android stand out to me. At the time, the Android market was still very much contested. A brutal arms race to capture the massive international market for Android devices pushed smartphone manufacturers to innovate in unique ways to make their phones stand out among the crowd. I became infatuated with following the latest developments in the Android market. I’d spend countless hours watching tech YouTubers review the latest devices, researching specs on the state-of-the-art processors, and squinting at camera comparisons between the newest flagships.

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Zachary Allegretti
Zachary Allegretti

Written by Zachary Allegretti

Software engineer at Google trying to figure out life. Unfortunately there’s no documentation.

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