Android – Multitasking Mobile Phone Operating System

The first version of the Android OS was released in 2007. It was the flagship release from Google via the Open Handset Alliance, a group of big companies including Google, HTC, Samsung and Motorola . Their aim was to create an open source mobile phone platform which could compete with the big mobile platforms from Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Research In Motion and Palm.

This mobile device platform is powered by the Linux kernel and it was developed as a flexible and easily upgradeable system for mobile phone manufacturers and carriers. Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.
The unveiling of the Android platform on was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 48 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google has made most of the Android platform available under the Apache free-software and open source license.

Android is a freely downloadable open source software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications based on Linux and Java.

Google developed Android collaboratively as part of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 mobile and technology companies working to open up the mobile handset environment. Android's development kit supports many of the standard packages used by Jetty, and so, due to that fact and Jetty's modularity and lightweight footprint, it was possible to port Jetty to it so that it will be able to run on the Android platform.
Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.

By providing an open development platform, Android offers developers the ability to build extremely rich and innovative applications. Developers are free to take advantage of the device hardware, access location information, run background services, set alarms, add notifications to the status bar, and much, much more.

In order to use Android OS you need a device that supports it and there are plenty of Android smartphones to choose from. Many manufacturers have developed their own user interface which sits on top of the basic Android OS and improves on the usability, perhaps most notably the HTC Sense UI. There have been thousands of Android applications and games developed since the Android OS was released. The choice of free and premium apps is simply astounding. Although there are still more iPhone apps, the number of Android applications has climbed to over 50,000. Android provides access to a wide range of useful libraries and tools that can be used to build rich applications. For example, Android enables developers to obtain the location of the device, and allows devices to communicate with one another enabling rich peer-to-peer social applications. In addition, Android includes a full set of tools that have been built from the ground up alongside the platform providing developers with high productivity and deep insight into their applications.

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