7:49 AM
Jade Byfield
Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google in partnership with the Open Handset Alliance(OHA). The operating system is primarily designed for touch screen smartphones and tablet devices. The OHA is basically a big group of hardware and software manufacturers. It consists of about 86 companies dedicated to "advancing open standards for mobile devices".
One of the beauties of Android is that it's Open Source. This means that the code behind the operating system is fully transparent and accessible to anyone that is interested. Google released the OS under the Apache License(see here ). This is great for the open source community, and many programmers have created custom versions of the operating system for their own personal devices or to publish as custom roms(click here for a great article on AndroidPolice about custom ROMS).
The first Android phone was sold in late 2008. That phone(HTC Dream) was shipped with the first version of the operating system(1.0) and there has been several updates since then. Here's a breakdown of those versions, their names and release dates. Taken from the Android wiki page found here
| Version | Release date | API level | Distribution (October 2, 2012) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.1.x Jelly Bean | July 9, 2012 | 16 | 1.8% |
| 4.0.x Ice Cream Sandwich | October 19, 2011 | 14-15 | 23.7% |
| 3.x.x Honeycomb | February 22, 2011 | 11-13 | 1.9% |
| 2.3.x Gingerbread | December 6, 2010 | 9-10 | 55.8% |
| 2.2 Froyo | May 20, 2010 | 8 | 12.9% |
| 2.0, 2.1 Eclair | October 26, 2009 | 7 | 3.4% |
| 1.6 Donut | September 15, 2009 | 4 | 0.4% |
| 1.5 Cupcake | April 30, 2009 | 3 | 0.1% |
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