Android and Android Phones

Android powers hundreds of millions of mobile devices in more than 190 countries around the world. It's the largest installed base of any mobile platform and growing fast—every day another million users power up their Android devices for the first time and start looking for apps, games, and other digital content.

Android gives you a world-class platform for creating apps and games for Android users everywhere, as well as an open marketplace for distributing to them instantly.

Android’s openness has made it a favorite for consumers and developers alike, driving strong growth in app consumption. Android users download more than 1.5 billion apps and games from Google Play each month.

Android devices are being activated faster than ever. Presumably, due to the sheer number of manufacturers using the OS, much faster than Windows Phone devices are being activated.

Google said there are now more than one million Android device activations a day, or 12 devices every second of every day. 400 million Android devices have also been sold to date.

Android gives you everything you need to build best-in-class app experiences. It gives you a single application model that lets you deploy your apps broadly to hundreds of millions of users across a wide range of devices—from phones to tablets and beyond.

Android also gives you tools for creating apps that look great and take advantage of the hardware capabilities available on each device. It automatically adapts your UI to look it's best on each device, while giving you as much control as you want over your UI on different device types.

For example, you can create a single app binary that's optimized for both phone and tablet form factors. You declare your UI in lightweight sets of XML resources, one set for parts of the UI that are common to all form factors and other sets for optimizations specific to phones or tablets. At runtime, Android applies the correct resource sets based on its screen size, density, locale, and so on.

Android phones currently rank first in terms of smartphone operating systems and cover more than half the smartphones numbers around the world.

An Android™ phone, sometimes called a Droid™ phone, is a mobile telephone that uses the Google-developed Android™ operating system. This operating system has become a popular option in recent years for so-called "smart phones," because developers and manufacturers may freely customize it to their specific needs.

Android™ phones are considered revolutionary in some circles because of the open source structure of the basic firmware. All developers, whether professional or hobbyists, are encouraged to write programs and applications for the operating system, and contribute to the evolving Android™ project by submitting them to Google's Play Store™, a closed source application for Android™ phones.

Multitasking

An Android™ phone can run multiple applications at the same time in the background, making multitasking easier. This makes the functionality of the phone more fluid than some competing platforms, although the extent of this capability depends on the hardware of the individual phone.

Non-Proprietary Approach

Some comparable devices using other operating systems are governed by strict proprietary rules. Developers interested in writing applications for the iPhone™, for example, may not be permitted to create programs that closely mirror applications owned by Apple, such as iTunes™. All applications must be approved by Apple before they are permitted to appear in the Apple App Store™.

Historical Background

Initially, Google partnered with the High Tech Computer Corporation (now HTC Corporation) to build the first mobile phone to run the Android™ platform, known as the G1™ in the United States. In 2008, T-Mobile premiered the G1™ Android™ phone to the American public.

SDK

Android™ offers a Software Development Kit (SDK) to help developers create functional applications. While some parts of the Android™ operating system are protected under the Apache™ License to guard against applications that could compromise the phones' basic functionality, much of it is released under the General Public License, which invites developers to freely make modifications.

Rooting

Despite the relatively open structure of the operating system, manufacturers of many devices that use Android™ do frequently restrict user access to certain resources and functions within the structure of the software.

Android became the world’s leading smartphone platform at the end of 2010.[14] For the first quarter of 2012, Android had a 59% smartphone market share worldwide.

Android is without a shadow of doubt now the best selling mobile Operating system landing more market shares than even the iPhone.

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