Yahoo hires Google’s Technical Lead for Android’s Open Source Project

Jean-Baptiste Queru, Google’s Technical Lead for the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for nearly six years, is now a Yahoo employee. Queru announced the move via Twitter on Tuesday and Yahoo tweeted a welcoming confirmation. The employer change for Queru, also known as JBQ, won’t shock those who paid attention to Queru’s Google+ page: Last month, he said was “quitting” his AOSP involvement amid challenges with hardware partners and driver support.

At that time, Queru posted his frustrations publicly, writing:

“Well, I see that people have figured out why I’m quitting AOSP.

There’s no point being the maintainer of an Operating System that can’t boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support, especially when I’m getting the blame for something that I don’t have authority to fix myself and that I had anticipated and escalated more than 6 months ahead.”

Clearly, there were internal issues at play back then and from the sounds of it, Queru had raised them to deaf ears.

Queru’s LinkedIn profile page actually lists the termination of his Google employment as of last month; it wasn’t clear when he “quit” AOSP if he took another role at Google or not. Based on LinkedIn, it appears not. It’s not clear what his role will be at Yahoo, but here’s what he did at Google:

“I was responsible for the technical aspects of the Android Open Source Project. My primary role was to manage its source code, releasing Google’s contributions to the Open Source world and importing public contributions into Google’s releases.

I also worked on improving Android performance, and I originally wrote the Android Download Manager which allows to reliably download large amounts of data in a constrained environment and over unreliable connections.”

As they say, everyone is replaceable, but this is still a big loss for Google and potentially a nice win for Yahoo which is trying to reinvent itself in the mobile space.

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