Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

The most interesting tidbit comes from David Pierce, a senior staff writer at our sister site Wired. Speaking on the Wired Podcast, Pierce said he was told that the Pixel phones had a mere nine months of development time. After asking Google why the phone didn’t have the same level of water resistance as other high-end flagships, Pierce said, “their answer was essentially ‘We ran out of time.’ There apparently had been this plan for a long time, and at the end of 2015, they blew it all up and started over. So they essentially went from nothing to launch in nine months and a week.”

And:

Let’s examine this timeline. Why would Google “blow everything up” at the end of 2015? We can fill in the blanks with a report from Android Police, which claims that Google’s 2016 smartphone lineup was originally going to be built by Huawei.

“Shortly after the Nexus 5X and 6P launched, Google began talks with Huawei to produce its 2016 smartphone portfolio,” the report reads. “Google, though, set a hard rule for the partnership: Huawei would be relegated to a manufacturing role, producing phones with Google branding.” According to the report, Huawei balked at the lack of branding, and “CEO Richard Yu himself ended negotiations with Google right then and there.”

If we put these two accounts together, it’s easy to conclude that Google and Huawei’s talks ate into the development time of the Google/HTC Pixel. When the decision to go with a self-branded phone came down, Huawei walked away, which led to—as Pierce said—Google “blowing everything up” and switching to HTC.

To some, the Ars Technica headline might imply that the Pixel is less than excellent. I’ll leave that to others to judge, but the Pixel certainly has a lot of fans. To me, getting there with only 9 months of dedicated engineering calendar time is incredibly impressive. The backstory is interesting, though.