Google surprised everyone by announcing that the newest iteration of the Android mobile operating system would not be Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie - as most suspected - but would be known as Android 4.4 "KitKat."
The announcement comes after a deal between Google and Nestle (maker of the KitKat) was made in which neither company paid the other. "This is not a money-changing-hands kind of deal," said John Lagerling, director of Android global partnerships to BBC News. According to Lagerling, the move was intended to be "fun and unexpected."
The deal was made on the spur of the moment late last year, after Lagerling and company realized that few people actually knew what key lime pie tasted like. "One of the snacks that we keep in our kitchen for late-night coding are KitKats," said Lagerling, "And someone said: 'Hey, why don't we call the release KitKat?'" Following that, Lagerling made a cold call to Nestle's U.K. ad agency to propose the idea, and 24 hours later, the two companies made the deal. That was late November 2012.
Since then, Google and Nestle have kept the partnership a secret, even calling the new Android operating system Key Lime Pie internally, within Google. Most Mountain View employees only found out what the new Android mascot was when it appeared on their lawn.
For the announcement, Google put up a YouTube ad showing its employees sharing KitKats while watching the new Google Android statue go up on the Mountain View company's lawn, made of giant-looking fake KitKats. (The video has since been removed, as it also accidentally tipped details about the Google Nexus 5, when one of Google's employees was filmed taking a picture of the new KitKat statue with the new phone.)
In the KitKat Partnership, Nestle Wins
But while no money changed hands, and Google gets a fun new statue on its lawn, as well as the chance to surprise everyone (and, you would think, free KitKats for life), Nestle has definitely done a lot more, already, with the partnership. First, it will feature the Android mascot on its KitKat packaging, which is fun, but not awesome.
What is awesome is the new KitKat.com. Nestle's advertisers have taken the partnership and run with it, making a parody of tech culture by calling their candy bars "Kit Kat 4.4," saying, "The future of confectionery has arrived."
The website shares the same high-tech scroll-down design as some of the top technology companies. When you scroll, images animate and flip around, and eventually a KitKat bar is digitally stripped of its chocolate, showing the wafer insides as if it were the motherboard of a new laptop.
"Features" such as "adjustable orientation" for "portrait or landscape" are expounded upon, along with the KitKat's "mobility" and "accessories" (such as coffee or water). The "tech specs" page for the KitKat show the wafer cookie's dimensions, weight, and "edge to edge" display, along with its universal compatibility, meaning it can be eaten anywhere in the world. It comes in 2 mega-bites, 4 mega-bites, or a chunky-bite option.
The final clever coup de gras for KitKat's canny ribbing of tech companies and spec-obsessed tech culture is the video at the bottom of the page, which you can view below. Its pitch-perfect English-accented spokesperson talks just like you've come to expect from technology companies such as Google, Facebook, or Apple -- presenting the KitKat as an item of such tailored, overblown perfection that you'd think Jony Ive wrote the script for the video, himself.
He even holds the KitKat edge-to-edge, like a smartphone!