Google acquired Android Inc. on August 17, 2005; key employees of Android Inc., including Rubin, Miner, and White, stayed at the company after the acquisition. Not much was known about Android Inc. at the time, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market with this move. 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, upgradable system. Google had lined up a series of hardware component and software partners and signaled to carriers that it was open to various degrees of cooperation on their part.
Speculation about Google's intention to enter the mobile communications market continued to build through December 2006. The unveiling of the iPhone, a touchscreen-based phone by Apple, on January 9, 2007 had a disruptive effect on the development of Android. At the time, a prototype device codenamed "Sooner" had a closer resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen, and a physical, QWERTY keyboard. Work immediately began on re-engineering the OS and its prototypes to combine traits of their own designs with an overall experience designed to compete with the iPhone. In September 2007, InformationWeek covered an Evalueserve study reporting that Google had filed several patent applications in the area of mobile telephony.
Eric Schmidt, Andy Rubin and Hugo Barra at a press conference for the Google's Nexus 7 tablet.
On November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of technology companies including Google, device manufacturers such as HTC, Sony and Samsung, wireless carriers such as Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile, and chipset makers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, unveiled itself, with a goal to develop open standards for mobile devices.That day, Android was unveiled as its first product, a mobile device platform built on the Linux kernel version 2.6.25. The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, released on October 22, 2008.
In 2010, Google launched its Nexus series of devices – a line of smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system, and built by a manufacturing partner. HTC collaborated with Google to release the first Nexus smartphone, the Nexus One. The series has since been updated with newer devices, such as the Nexus 5 phone and Nexus 7 tablet, made by LG and Asus respectively.
Google releases the Nexus phones and tablets to act as their flagship Android devices, demonstrating Android's latest software and hardware features. On March 13, 2013, it was announced by Larry Page in a blog post that Andy Rubin had moved from the Android division to take on new projects at Google. He was replaced by Sundar Pichai, who also continues his role as the head of Google's Chrome division, which develops Chrome OS.Since 2008, Android has seen numerous updates which have incrementally improved the operating system, adding new features and fixing bugs in previous releases. Each major release is named in alphabetical order after a dessert or sugary treat; for example, version 1.5 Cupcake was followed by 1.6 Donut. The latest released version is 4.4.2 KitKat, which was released on December 9, 2013.
Android has a growing selection of third party applications, which can be acquired by users either through an app store such as Google Play or the Amazon Appstore, or by downloading and installing the application's APK file from a third-party site.Google Play Store allows users to browse, download and update applications published by Google and third-party developers, and the Play Store client application is pre-installed on devices that comply with Google's compatibility requirements and license the Google Mobile Services software.
The client application filters the list of available applications down to those compatible with the user's device, and developers may restrict their applications to particular carriers or countries for business reasons. Purchases of unwanted applications can be refunded within 15 minutes of the time of download,and some carriers offer direct carrier billing for Google Play application purchases, where the cost of the application is added to the user's monthly bill.
As of July 2013, there are more than one million applications available for Android in Play Store. As of May 2013, 48 billion apps have been installed from Google Play store.
Applications ("apps"), that extend the functionality of devices, are developed primarily in the Java programming language language using the Android software development kit (SDK). The SDK includes a comprehensive set of development tools, including a debugger, software libraries, a handset emulator based on QEMU, documentation, sample code, and tutorials. The officially supported integrated development environment (IDE) is Eclipse using the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin. Other development tools are available, including a Native Development Kit 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.
It was announced in January 2014 that Chrome HTML5 web applications should become available, using a compatibility layer from the open source Apache Cordova framework to allow such applications to be wrapped in a native application shell, enabling their distribution over Google Play.
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