Android - Everything You Need To Know

"Android is probably the Most widely known and used Linux based Operating System." Only for mobile devices like Smartphones and Tablets, the OS has made a huge impact on the smartphone market which was previously dominated by Apple's iPhone, Nokia's Symbian and RIM's Blackberry OS . It didn't even stop there and is now giving a fierce competition to low and mid end feature phones whilst dominating the High end market.

Android was initially developed by Android Inc. However Google acquired 'Android Inc.' in August 2005 and made further developments with the Android Inc. team.
Android was first unveiled on November 5, 2007 by the Open Handset Alliance, an association of companies like Google, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung and a few more, as a platform for mobile devices based on Linux Kernel.

Android consists of forked Linux kernel , is based on ARM Architecture with the APIs written in C language and GUI in Java and XML. It is developed by Google under the project  'Android Open Source Project' which means anybody can download the source code and use it on their devices and the Best Part about it is that you won't have to pay anything to Google to use their OS.

Apps for Google's OS are compiled to produce Dalvik dex-code which runs in Dalvik Virtual Machine . Apps are written in Java, and dx tool converts .class files to .dex which can be executed on Android using Dalvik Virtual Machine. The reason Android used .dex executables but .class is the limited hardware capabilities of the mobile devices like processing power and memory as compared to standalone PCs and Laptop etc.(which use JVM).

The first Android powered mobile device was HTC Dream launched in October,2008 and ran Android v1.0 out of the box. However it gained popularity in mid 2009 when Google introduced Android v1.5 a.k.a Cupcake and along with it there new naming convention , where each updated version was to be named after a dessert in alphabetical order. However, the first Android phone I remember that actually made some news was Sony Ericsson(it was Ericsson then) Xperia X10 back in November 2009. It was 2010 when Android actually gained popularity, with Samsung, the largest smartphone vendor now, releasing their Android flagship Galaxy S in March, 2010. The phone didn't sell just well but quite well. As of 2011 Samsung has sold more than 10 Million Galaxy S. The phone was succeeded by another best seller Galaxy S-II in 2011 which , the recently launched Galaxy S-III will succeed .

Companies like HTC,Samsung,Sony,Motorola and few more local ones use Android as their primary Smartphone OS. Reasons are -

It is supported by Google, one of the largest Software Giants.
Second Largest and soon to be 'The Largest' Apps Store.
They don't have to pay anything to Google to use their OS.
Being Open Source, they can alter the UI and other functionalities to differentiate themselves from other Manufacturers.   

However being OpenSource has its disadvantages too. One of them is Fragmentation, that'll be discussed in other posts. As of Quarter1 of 2012, Android is leading the Smartphone market with a share of 59% with iOS being 2nd   at a market share of 23%.

Android ,despite its disadvantages, is leading the Smartphone Market and will do so for at least a few years to come.