Android Intro.

Timeline :

2005 : Google acquire a company Android Inc. (Andy Rubin)

2007 : Open Handset Alliance (OHA) formed

2008 : First shipping Android handset – the T-Mobile G1 – was developed by handset manufacturer HTC with service provided by T-Mobile.

2010 : Android starts to dominate the smart phone market

2011 : more than 310 Android devices were being shipped to 120 countries.

2012-till now : everything is known to us

Free * : Android applications are free to develop. There is no licensing or royalty fees to develop on the platform. No required membership fees, testing fees, signing or certificate fees. Android application can be distributed and commercialized in a variety of ways.

Android SDK and tools are freely available to download.

The SDKs in Android are named alphabetically after sweets:

• Alpha (1.0)
• Beta (1.1)
• Cupcake (1.5)
• Donut (1.6)
• Eclair (2.0-2.1)
• Froyo (2.2 -2.2.3)
• Gingerbread (2.3-2.3.7)
• Honeycomb (3.0-3.2.6)
• Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0-4.0.4)
• Jelly Bean (4.1-4.3.1)
• KitKat (4.4-4.4.4)
• Lollipop (5.0)

Eclipse IDE is the most popular and free IDE for Android development, and an Android plug-in is available for facilitating Android development.

Android applications can be developed on the following operating systems:

1. Windows XP (32-bit), Windows Vista (32-bit or 64-bit), Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit) and
   Windows 8 (32-bit or 64-bit)
2. Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later (x86 only)
3. Linux ( Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx, 8.04 LTS or later )

The Operating System of Android is licenced under GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2), a strong “copyleft” license where any third-party improvements must continue to fall under the open-source licensing aggrement terms.

Android Framework is distributed under the Apache Software License (ASL/Apache2), which allows for the distribution of both open- and closed- source derivations of the source code.

Developers can write open-source freeware or traditional licensed applications for profit and everything in between.

Android application are written in programming language : Java

Familier libraries like java.net and java.text is used.

For graphics OpenGL Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES) libraries are used.

For database SQLite speciality libraries are used.