From October 8 to November 5, 2025, a lean engineering team working alongside Codex and consuming roughly 5 billion tokens, shipped Sora for Android from prototype to global launch. Despite its scale, the app has a crash-free rate of 99.9 percent and an architecture we’re proud of. If you’re wondering whether we used a secret model, we used an early version of the GPT‑5.1‑Codex model – the same version that any developer or business can use today via CLI, IDE extension, or web app.

When Sora launched on iOS, usage exploded. People immediately began generating a stream of videos. On Android, by contrast, we had only a small internal prototype and a mounting number of pre-registered users on Google Play.

A common response to a high stakes, time-pressured launch is to pile on resources and add process. A production app of this scope and quality would typically involve many engineers working for months, slowed down by coordination.

American computer architect Fred Brooks famously warned that “adding more people to a late software project makes it later.” In other words, when trying to ship a complex project quickly, adding more engineers can often slow down efficiency by adding to communication overhead, task fragmentation, and integration costs. We leaned into this insight instead of ignoring it; we assembled a strong team of four engineers – all equipped with Codex to drastically increase each engineer’s impact.