Before Android ever publicly launched, before the little green fella we know and love came into existence ... there were the Dandroids.
According to a Google+ post made by Dan Morrill, who worked on the Android developer relations team when the mobile operating system was being prepared for launch, he drew the silly looking characters in order to add some "eye candy" to presentation slides in 2007.
While Morrill's creations did see "a brief flurry of minor popularity" among his team, they didn't manage to make a lasting impression. It was designer Irina Blok's work which became the Android mascot we recognize nowadays. (That one is dubbed "Bugdroid," according to Morrill.) Nonetheless, the Dandroids remain the "first proposed mascots for Android," as far as anyone can tell right now.
And as if Morrill's illustrations aren't already enough of a peek into an alternate universe, it turns out that we could've been referring to Android by the names of famous robots instead of desserts. The internal developer launch of Android, Morrill explains, "was called 'R2-D2' which stood for 'Release to Developers 2,' as it was the second such internal event."
"This was, of course, before we abandoned robots as the naming scheme," he adds, "since they are mostly all trademarked."
Ah, well. We can always quietly refer to Android 1.6 (currently known as "Donut") as "Dalek."
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