Introduction to Android (Part - 01)

Throughout this article series, I am planning to give a brief introduction to Android mobile application development and this first part will cover the background of Android from it's starting age to present versions as well as hope to cover the granular level of the Android platform. 


So what is Android?

Android is an open source mobile platform which consists of an operating system, middleware and key applications. 

      Google says.....

Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google, based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software and designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. 

History

In September 2003 this mobile platform was founded by a company called Android incorporated but due to some financial later this company decided to sell this entire platform to Google Inc. So, in July 2005 android acquired by Google.

After few years Google decided to make this platform an open source platform for all the mobile phone manufactures. As a result of that in the year 2007, November Google announced a community called OHA (Open Handset Alliance) for further development of this platform. Once the community got the chance to experience this new platform they made it stronger than ever. Because of all these stages, android came across. Google and the OHA announced their brand new Android newbie to the market as G1 in October 2008.

With the help of the open source contributors of OHA google developers have made a lot of versions of this mobile platform since 2008 and it is still developing to power up the next generation's mobile phones. So above chart is showing us the roadmap of Android versions while the chart which I have attached below is showing a detailed chart from Wikipedia.org related to all android versions.

As the next part of this article, I am going to cover the architectural view of Android platform and the reasons to pick this platform as a mobile application developer.

The basic architecture of Android?

As I mentioned in the first part of this article android is a mobile platform which is made up of an OS, a middleware and some key applications. So, to justify the definition which I gave, I made a basic architectural diagram which will help you to get a better understanding of Android mobile platform.

Since, I have covered the introduction, I hope to write a indeptth review about the basic architecture of Android mobile platform in my next article. Hope you have got a basic idea to take a step foward with platform.

Feel free to write your suggestion or quetsions in the comment section below.