As Android fans, we’re always on the lookout for every piece of inside information out of Building 44 at the Googleplex. That’s why I was happy to see this morning that CNNMoney has a 1500-word article with all kind of facts and interesting details about how Android came to be.

Even though Android now has more than 100 million users and runs on more than 300 different devices, not a lotof  people at Google were confident the platform would be able to take off. In one instance, after Andy Rubin finished a speech at a strategy meeting, Eric Schmidt burst Andy’s bubble by telling him: “Andy, you have zero market share. You haven’t launched yet.” Ouch.

However, there were two people that really saw the potential of Android from the beginning. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met Andy Rubin during a talk at Stanford University, where the three agreed to talk about Andy’s latest project: Android. Andy explained to the Google co-founders that “his new startup Android would build an open operating system that anyone could use,” and that he intended to “give it away.” Larry Page fell in love with the idea, and they decided to acquire Android.

When talking about life inside Building 44, Andy Rubin says even though he’s been offered “bigger and fancier buildings,” he wants to maintain a startup atmosphere inside the Android team. Android still functions much like a small company inside Google, with long hours of nonstop coding and something called Bacon Sundays. As if that isn’t encouragement to work during the weekends! If you’re wondering how they manage to crank out Android updates faster than we can enjoy them, this is how:  A bunch of hardcore engineers working overnight and during the weekends… and eating bacon.

There are even more fun stories like the ones above in the CNNMoney article. It’s a must-read for any Android fan. There’s also a very interesting video (embedded below) with some of the guys behind our favorite mobile OS. Ten points if you recognize the guy responsible for the Honeycomb UI.

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