In the early days of the release of the Android system, it was not difficult to find a number of themed statues of the Android operating system outside Building 44 of Google’s Mountain View headquarters. At the peak, there were a total of 18 statues in Google’s backyard.
Recently, Google moved the statues from Building 44 to a small park outside the visitor center. Now, though, the Android statue is completely gone. At some point in the past few weeks, they moved all the statues to an undisclosed location.
Over the past two years, Google’s campus has been sparsely occupied due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Near the park’s visitor center, the place where the Android statue used to be has been closed for a long time. From 2020 until a few weeks ago, visitors to the park reported that the statue looked bad.
“I was expecting a feast, only to see desolation and destruction,” one critic wrote in an interview three weeks ago. “The whole area seems to be deserted, and the formerly crowded merchandise stores look like those apocalyptic stores you see in video games and movies from the outside.”
Now, Google’s HQ seems to be completely devoid of Android statues, just a patch of dirt, and there’s no official announcement on whether or not they’ll be coming back.
It is speculated that Google may have removed the statues in order to make some repairs to them. Because the reviews on the site in the past two years mentioned that most of the statues now look shabby due to the wind and the sun.
Interestingly, Google I/O 2022 will actually have some people in attendance this year. Google will hold its themed events for select audiences at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. It’s quite possible that Google is preparing an interesting reopening of Android statue parks to accompany this gradual return to normal offline activities.
However, Google also hasn’t made a new physical statue for the park in years, with both Android 11 and Android 12 sticking with virtual statues. Maybe Google is moving away from the whole idea of having statues and we won’t see them again?