Article by sheets.works: “Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people. We counted them from the code itself…
People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled “all modern digital infrastructure” and it stands on one small block, “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”.
We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC…(More)”.
