Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of developers known as the Open Handset Alliance, though its most widely used version is primarily developed by Google. It was unveiled in November 2007, with the first commercial Android device, the HTC Dream, being launched in September 2008.
Over 70 percent of smartphones based on the Android Open Source Project run Google's ecosystem (which is known simply as Android), some with vendor-customized user interfaces and software suites, such as TouchWiz and later One UI by Samsung and HTC Sense.[10] Competing ecosystems and forks of AOSP include Fire OS (developed by Amazon), ColorOS by Oppo, OriginOS by Vivo, MagicUI by Honor, or custom ROMs such as LineageOS.
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Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White.[14][15] Rubin described the Android project as having "tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences".[15] The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004.[16] The company then decided that the market for cameras was not large enough for its goals, and five months later it had diverted its efforts and was pitching Android as a handset operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.[16][17]
In 2005, Rubin tried to negotiate deals with Samsung[20] and HTC.[21] Shortly afterwards, Google acquired the company in July of that year for at least $50 million;[15][22] this was Google's "best deal ever" according to Google's then-vice president of corporate development, David Lawee, in 2010.[20] Android's key employees, including Rubin, Miner, Sears, and White, joined Google as part of the acquisition.[15] Not much was known about the secretive Android Inc. at the time, with the company having provided few details other than that it was making software for mobile phones.[15] At Google, the team led by Rubin developed a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel. Google marketed the platform to handset makers and carriers on the promise of providing a flexible, upgradeable system.[23] Google had "lined up a series of hardware components and software partners and signaled to carriers that it was open to various degrees of cooperation".[attribution needed][24]
Speculation about Google's intention to enter the mobile communications market continued to build through December 2006.[25] An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007's Apple iPhone meant that Android "had to go back to the drawing board".[26][27] Google later changed its Android specification documents to state that "Touchscreens will be supported", although "the Product was designed with the presence of discrete physical buttons as an assumption, therefore a touchscreen cannot completely replace physical buttons".[28] By 2008, both Nokia and BlackBerry announced touch-based smartphones to rival the iPhone 3G, and Android's focus eventually switched to just touchscreens. The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, also known as T-Mobile G1, announced on September 23, 2008.[29][30]
On November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of technology companies including Google, device manufacturers such as HTC, Motorola and Samsung, wireless carriers such as Sprint and T-Mobile, and chipset makers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, unveiled itself, with a goal to develop "the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices".[31][32][33] Within a year, the Open Handset Alliance faced two other open source competitors, the Symbian Foundation and the LiMo Foundation, the latter also developing a Linux-based mobile operating system like Google. In September 2007, InformationWeek covered an Evalueserve study reporting that Google had filed several patent applications in the area of mobile telephony.[34][35]
Android's default user interface is mainly based on direct manipulation, using touch inputs that loosely correspond to real-world actions, like swiping, tapping, pinching, and reverse pinching to manipulate on-screen objects, along with a virtual keyboard.[83] Game controllers and full-size physical keyboards are supported via Bluetooth or USB.[84][85] The response to user input is designed to be immediate and provides a fluid touch interface, often using the vibration capabilities of the device to provide haptic feedback to the user. Internal hardware, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and proximity sensors are used by some applications to respond to additional user actions, for example adjusting the screen from portrait to landscape depending on how the device is oriented,[86] or allowing the user to steer a vehicle in a racing game by rotating the device, simulating control of a steering wheel.[87]
The dedicated option key, also known as menu key, and its on-screen simulation, is no longer supported since Android version 10. Google recommends mobile application developers to locate menus within the user interface.[97] On more recent phones, its place is occupied by a task key used to access the list of recently used apps when actuated. Depending on device, its long press may simulate a menu button press or engage split screen view, the latter of which is the default behaviour since stock Android version 7.[98][99][100]
The earliest vendor-customized Android-based smartphones known to have featured a split-screen view mode are the 2012 Samsung Galaxy S3 and Note 2, the former of which received this feature with the premium suite upgrade delivered in TouchWiz with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.[101]
The SDK includes a comprehensive set of development tools,[112] including a debugger, software libraries, a handset emulator based on QEMU, documentation, sample code, and tutorials. Initially, Google's supported integrated development environment (IDE) was Eclipse using the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin; in December 2014, Google released Android Studio, based on IntelliJ IDEA, as its primary IDE for Android application development. Other development tools are available, including a native development kit (NDK) for applications or extensions in C or C++, Google App Inventor, a visual environment for novice programmers, and various cross platform mobile web applications frameworks. In January 2014, Google unveiled a framework based on Apache Cordova for porting Chrome HTML 5 web applications to Android, wrapped in a native application shell.[113] Additionally, Firebase was acquired by Google in 2014 that provides helpful tools for app and web developers.[114]
In addition to running on smartphones and tablets, several vendors run Android natively on regular PC hardware with a keyboard and mouse.[151][152][153][154] In addition to their availability on commercially available hardware, similar PC hardware-friendly versions of Android are freely available from the Android-x86 project, including customized Android 4.4.[155] Using the Android emulator that is part of the Android SDK, or third-party emulators, Android can also run non-natively on x86 architectures.[156][157] Chinese companies are building a PC and mobile operating system, based on Android, to "compete directly with Microsoft Windows and Google Android".[158] The Chinese Academy of Engineering noted that "more than a dozen" companies were customizing Android following a Chinese ban on the use of Windows 8 on government PCs.[159][160][161]
Android's source code does not contain the device drivers, often proprietary, that are needed for certain hardware components,[168] and does not contain the source code of Google Play Services, which many apps depend on. As a result, most Android devices, including Google's own, ship with a combination of free and open source and proprietary software, with the software required for accessing Google services falling into the latter category.[citation needed] In response to this, there are some projects that build complete operating systems based on AOSP as free software, the first being CyanogenMod (see section Open-source community below).
Android's kernel is based on the Linux kernel's long-term support (LTS) branches. As of 2024[update], Android (14) uses versions 6.1 or 5.15 (for "Feature kernels", can be older for "Launch kernels", e.g. android12-5.10, android11-5.4, depending on Android version down to e.g. android11-5.4, android-4.14-stable, android-4.9-q), and older Android versions, use version 5.15 or a number of older kernels.[191] The actual kernel depends on the individual device.[192]
Android uses Android Runtime (ART) as its runtime environment (introduced in version 4.4), which uses ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to entirely compile the application bytecode into machine code upon the installation of an application. In Android 4.4, ART was an experimental feature and not enabled by default; it became the only runtime option in the next major version of Android, 5.0.[216] In versions no longer supported, until version 5.0 when ART took over, Android previously used Dalvik as a process virtual machine with trace-based just-in-time (JIT) compilation to run Dalvik "dex-code" (Dalvik Executable), which is usually translated from the Java bytecode. Following the trace-based JIT principle, in addition to interpreting the majority of application code, Dalvik performs the compilation and native execution of select frequently executed code segments ("traces") each time an application is launched.[217][218][219]For its Java library, the Android platform uses a subset of the now discontinued Apache Harmony project.[220] In December 2015, Google announced that the next version of Android would switch to a Java implementation based on the OpenJDK project.[221] 0852c4b9a8
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