Diane Hackborn started the Easter egg tradition. She was an Android framework team lead and she was friends with a local artist named Jack Larson. Larson’s specialty was painting portraits of zombies. Hackborn thought it would be fun to hide a painting of his in Android somewhere. Thus the tradition of Easter Eggs was born. Easter eggs have varied throughout the years. Sometimes they’re simple graphics; other times they’re games or mini-apps that are good for killing time. Since Android Honeycomb, they have all been designed by Google software engineer Dan Sandler. This list will continue to be updated as new versions of Android come out, with the most recent Easter egg first. First, you have to get to the typical Easter egg screen which was just a stylized letter N. Long tapping the N gives you a little cat emoji below the “N”. Tap that to activate the game. Then, add a Quick Setting called Android Easter Egg to your Quick Settings panel. Tap that new icon to get a selection of food to feed a cat. Tap the desired item. Eventually, this will attact a virtual cat that you catch and collect. You can rename, share, delete, or collect as many cats as you like. This Easter egg is so popular, it has evolved into a collection of games you can still download from the Play Store today. Google / Pang Ka Kit Pang Ka Kit Further, at the time, Android Jelly Bean was the first Easter egg to incorporate system-wide functionality into the phone. If you long-tap the mini-game you are taken to what was called at the time “Daydream settings”. This is the origin of the screen saver functionality in all forthcoming versions of Android. Later, the Daydream name moved over to Google’s virtual reality headset. Pang Ka Kit
