In the interest of documenting it for the historical record, Ars Technica has just posted an immense 40,000-word retrospective on all versions of Android to date, with as many screen shots and as much information as they can gather.
It’s possibly the biggest article I’ve seen on their site, at 26 separate pages; Ars Technica premier subscribers can view it in single page form on the site or download a PDF. Those folks who don’t pay for a subscription may want to use an aggregator like Instapaper to view it in a more manageable form. It might even make a decent e-book; saving the Instapaper version as a complete webpage and importing it into Calibre seems to work.
I’ve read the first section or two, and feel like I barely even scratched the surface. This is going to take some time to work through. But this does promise to provide the answers I was disappointed that Dogfight didn’t have about how Android was developed. Happy reading!