What does android mean. What is "Android"? Android features. The main features of the Android operating system

Versatility "Android-OS"

Today, everyone knows about the new Android operating system. It is used in modern smartphones and tablet computers. It opens up huge opportunities for both developers and users who can download ready-made programs that change the style of the interface and download all kinds of useful applications. Users who are interested in the device of a computer roughly understand what Windows is, however, in order to find out what Android is, you need to get acquainted with the history of the creation and evolution of the system.

Android Developers

The operating system was created by Google employees who had the idea to make a universal platform for a number of new gadgets: smartphones, tablets, e-readers, netbooks and even Google glasses. Thus, it can be argued that Android is the operating system of Google. Linux became the core for system development. Google did not immediately become the founders of the new system. They only bought the company Android Inc, which began work in a promising direction. Such a move made it possible to attract leading minds to work on the project and invest quite large sums in it.

Operating system features from Google

Today, every student knows what Android is, because thousands of smartphones and tablets, which are sold at a low price, work on the basis of this system. The announcement of the system took place in 2007, and the full version of the OS was released in 2008. This event turned the mobile world upside down, where small systems were still used, which did not allow achieving maximum performance. The whole world learned what Android is as soon as the first device based on it was released. Thanks to the developers, users were able to look at their smartphones from a different perspective. Devices have become an excellent platform for quality games. With the help of a smartphone, it became possible to create Internet access points without unnecessary settings and complex algorithms. Each new version of the system made it possible to correct the inaccuracies made in the first one and improve the platform.

Benefits for developers and owners of Android devices

Every modern developer knows what Android is, because it is for this platform that it is easiest to develop an application that will allow you to become famous. A huge number of games posted in the Google Market store are made by enthusiasts. If users show a certain interest in the application, its creator can set himself up for success, he will definitely be noticed and offered to conclude a lucrative contract. It is also important for the average user to know what Android is in order to understand the possibilities that the system gives and start using their gadgets to the fullest. Programs for the operating system can be downloaded through the market, a huge number of applications are distributed free of charge.

Download useful apps for pennies

Some games and programs that have earned a high rating from users can be downloaded by paying a symbolic price - a few dollars. Also, programs can be downloaded from a regular site through a computer and downloaded to the device via a standard cable.

What is Android, and why is it needed? Many beginners, when buying a modern gadget, be it a tablet or a smartphone, ask a similar question. It is worth clarifying the situation and highlighting some of the advantages of this platform.

History of appearance

Today, there are many devices that run on the Android platform. This operating system is designed for smartphones and tablets, watches and e-books, game consoles and even Google glasses. Perhaps soon there will be TVs and cars with Android support.

The history of OS creation began in 2003. At that time, a small organization called Android inc was founded. Its founders were Rich Miner, Chris White, Andy Rubin and Nick Sears. Even then, some developments were underway that were planned to be implemented in the new operating system. The company carried out its activities in the strictest secrecy.

Soon the organization ran out of money, and there were no significant achievements in the development of the OS. Due to the lack of results, it was not possible to attract investors. After a while, Google became interested in development. In 2005, the company became the property of the search giant.

After that, the Open Handset Alliance corporation was founded. It includes leading manufacturers of mobile devices. In 2007, the Android platform was first introduced. As you know, it is based on the Linux kernel. The first version of this operating system was released in 2008.

What it is

Android is the operating system that runs on smartphones, tablets, and many other devices. Thanks to this OS, even the most inexpensive phone will be able to acquire new features. The system will allow you to install various useful programs on the device that will help you to fully use all the functions of the device.

All the necessary software can be downloaded from the Play Market. More than 700 thousand programs are collected on this site. A wide range will allow you to find any desired application. With the help of the operating system, you can easily access the Internet, watch video files, communicate on social networks, listen to music, take photos and immediately place them on your account or read e-books.

It is worth noting that the OS is completely free. In addition, it is very easy to use. It won't take long to get to grips with the interface. Thanks to all its advantages, it has become the most common in the world. In 2014, more than 86% of devices operating on this platform were sold.

Video: Android phone

OS application

Since the advent of the Android operating system and up to our time, developers have not been sitting idly by. The platform is constantly being improved. At the same time, its functionality is expanding by introducing new features.

Photo: Android 4.0 is the latest mobile version

The platform has become so popular and comfortable to use that many companies that develop modern gadgets have decided to release their devices based on this OS.

Using Android is not as difficult as it seems. With its help, you can perform almost the same actions on the device as on the computer.

The system provides several standard applications. Among them are:

• browser;
• Email;
• calendar;
• voice search;
• social network;
• navigator;
• weather;
• news.

All apps are from Google.

Another nice plus is the ability to customize your desktop yourself. You can add an additional screen to your device where you can place shortcuts or widgets. You can also install any theme or wallpaper you like, thereby modifying the interface.

What is good

This OS has a number of advantages. The main ones are:

Stages of Android development

After the presentation of the first version of the platform, it was refined over the next year, as a result of which some system errors were corrected.

Five updated versions were introduced in 2009:

2010 was marked by the release of two more versions. They became:

The next development of manufacturers was the 3.0 platform, which was presented in 2011. The new OS was specifically designed for tablets.

• improved interface;
• the ability to synchronize links with Google Chrome;
• external keyboard support;
• now it is possible to change the size of widgets on the screen;
• work on a multi-core processor.

The developers did not stop there and created Android 4.0, which was called "Ice Cream Sandwich". This platform has become more versatile. It can be used on both phone and tablet.

Photo: Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich"

The OS has a lot of new features and improvements:

• the notification panel has been changed;
• added a way to control Internet traffic;
• there was a function of voice dictation of the text;
• spell checker;
• the application for the camera has improved - a panoramic shooting mode, various effects and an image stabilizer have appeared;
• the browser has been updated;
• support for screenshots;
• updated system of security and protection of the gadget.

Throughout 2012 and 2013, manufacturers have been working on the development of the Jelly Bean OS.

The next versions were 4.1, 4.2, 4.3. New changes mainly affected the speed of the interface. Thanks to new developments, productivity has been increased. Now the graphics processor and the central one work in parallel.

In the updated version of the platform appeared:

At the end of 2013, another version of Android 4.4 "Kitkat" was announced. The new platform has been optimized to run on cheaper devices that have 512MB of RAM.

There are also some changes here:

• now in smartphones, contacts with which the user communicates more often are located at the top of the list;
• the voice assistant is constantly active;
• automatic caller ID;
• subtitles are now displayed in the video player;
• the file uploader has an updated design;
• support for pedometer applications;
• Numerous bugs and shortcomings have been fixed.

The latest development of the company was version 5. The new OS is called "Lollipop". The main highlight was the Material design, which is distinguished by its versatility.

Competitors

The main competitors with which the Android platform has to fight for the palm are:

• Apple iPhoneOS;
• Microsoft Windows Mobile;
• RIM BlackBerryOS;
• Maemo/MeeGo;
• Samsung Bad OS;
• Palm web OS
• SymbianOS.

Today, Android has become the most common mobile platform in the world than iOS. However, a presentation of the new Ubuntu Phone OS is planned soon. Perhaps it will become another serious competitor to Android.

Android devices

In 2008, the first Android device was released. The device was developed by HTC. They became a smartphone called HTC Dream. After that, several other phone manufacturers expressed their desire to release mobile devices with support for this operating system.

An Android tablet was soon announced. In 2009, a photo frame running on this OS appeared on the market. In addition, after 2 years, the Blue Sky organization developed a new watch, which was called i'm Watch. They also support this system.

Camera manufacturers also decided to keep up and introduced the world's first camera that runs on Android. The novelty was released by Nikon. In addition, game consoles, e-books and media players operate on this platform. It is expected that soon there will be some more devices.

With such a pace of development, the Android platform will become the absolute leader among other operating systems, leaving all competitors behind.

Thanks to a well-thought-out interface, convenient use and reliable data protection, devices based on this OS are certainly worthy of attention.

The definition of what "Android" is in a phone is this: it's designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices. Originally developed for Android Inc with financial support from Google and later acquired by that company in 2005, the OS was introduced in 2007 with the Open Handset Alliance. The first phone on this platform was sold in October 2008.

Android is open source, which is released by Google under the Apache license. This means that software can be developed with permissive licensing, and the OS quickly became popular among professionals and developers. Therefore, speaking about what “Android” is in a phone, we can safely say that this is a platform that has a large community of developers who write applications that expand the functionality of devices. As a rule, all applications are written on a special version. In October 2012, there were about 700,000 applications available for download on the Android phone, and the estimated number of applications downloaded from Google Play, the primary official store, was $ 25 billion.

These factors contributed to Android becoming the most widely used smartphone platform in the world, overtaking Symbian in the fourth quarter of 2010. Many tech companies quickly figured out what "Android" was in a phone, and today it's ubiquitous as a low-cost, customizable, and easy-to-use operating system for high-tech devices.

Although it is primarily designed for phones and tablets, additional applications have been developed for TVs, game consoles, digital cameras, and other electronics. If earlier only the question of how to install Android on a phone was relevant, today the possibility of downloading the OS to any gadget is being discussed. The open nature of Android further influenced the formation of a large community of developers and enthusiasts who began to use its open source code as the basis for collaborative projects. As a result of these projects, new features have appeared that are designed for advanced users.

Android is based on direct manipulation through touch input. All actions in this OS poorly correspond to real clicks, since you can use the menu with light finger movements. On such devices, the response to user input is immediate and provided by the liquid contained in the displays with a touch interface. Internal ones (accelerometers, gyroscopes, and sensors) are also used by some applications and allow them to respond to other user actions. These are changing the screen orientation from portrait to landscape, as well as the ability to perform various actions in games.

If we talk about what Android is in a phone visually, then the desktop consists of application icons and widgets. With this layout, icons are meant to launch the corresponding application, while widgets display live content such as a weather forecast, a user's email status, or a news ticker.

Hello friends, I'm starting to develop a rubric related to smartphones, now it's full-fledged. Now on the site you will find a bunch of interesting articles about smartphones based on Android. I will build in as much detail as possible to convey to users about new smartphones, that is, there will be a lot of news. The emphasis, of course, will be on the creation of materials on working with the OS. So to speak, instructions from A to Z. For now, I’ll start with the simplest, and write an article about what it is and what its advantages and disadvantages are. Now let's get to the point.

What is Android OS

Android is an operating system based on the Linux kernel, which was acquired in 2005 by Google. In 2008, the first version of the operating system was released. This OS is designed for smartphones, tablets and many other devices. At the moment, it is built into watches, various navigators, set-top boxes and players.

Now a huge number of smartphones and other devices with this system are being created. It has gained terrible popularity, so it has almost no competitors, except perhaps iOS.

I think it's not worth listing the well-known brands of today's phones that are growing by leaps and bounds. So, they all use Android. If we talk about a clean system, we can say that it is very nimble and productive. Many manufacturers, taking this OS as a basis, make their shell with additional functions, features and design. Someone does it better, and the system flies, but in some devices it doesn’t work very well.

With the help of the operating system, you have the ability to manage functions such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, GPS, create Wi-Fi access points, that is, make a modem out of your phone, and much more. Modern smartphones are embedding fingerprint and iris scanning sensors, which allows for many times better protection - all this can be controlled using Android. Naturally, Apple with its iOS is trying to keep up.

Advantages and disadvantages

Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages:

• Since it is developed on the open source Linux kernel, the mobile system is also open source, which allows you to create whatever your heart desires for this system.
• A clean OS is highly optimized and not demanding on devices. It can work on the weakest phone that is now available, although this is already a rarity.
• The ability to customize the system for yourself.
• A huge number of add-ons and applications that greatly expand the capabilities of the OS.
• Speed ​​of work (not in all cases).
• The system is available for the following hardware platforms: ARM, x86, MIPS.

These are the main positive characteristics that I noted for myself. Maybe there is something else. In addition to the pros, there are also cons:

• An open source operating system gives an advantage to smartphone and tablet manufacturers to create shells that are not always as optimized and efficient as possible. In addition, the shell update may come much later than the latest version of the official system.
• If the system is poorly optimized, then there is a possibility of a strong energy consumption. And atomicity is now very much appreciated. But it depends more on device manufacturers.
• Because of its popularity, hackers and other bad people write viruses for the OS and look for vulnerabilities. Of course, this OS has some protection, not like Windows. Therefore, the disadvantage is minor.
• Cases have been observed where several million dollars have generally been stolen from users around the world. This was done by sending SMS without the knowledge of the user.

In addition to the clean system from Google, there are a number of enthusiasts developing their own firmware, which have their own functionality and capabilities. You will see a completely different design, it happens that the firmware of another manufacturer will work better than pure Android.

At the moment, there are such companies that create firmware for smartphones and other devices: CyanogenMod, which is now LineageOS, AOKP, MIUI, Paranoid Android, AOSP, Replicant and others.

Enthusiast developers try to release firmware versions on time, along with the release of a clean OS. But sometimes it is not necessary to flash the phone, as the manufacturers could take care of it.

Applications and Play Market

Everyone knows that every day hundreds of programs and games are uploaded to the Google Play Market app store. You can find whatever your heart desires, these are various audio and video players, desktop wallpapers, file managers, of which there are probably thousands, a lot of software for communicating with people - social networks, instant messengers and others. You can also download movies, books and music from there. Of course, the content there is both paid and free.

A little bit of theory. The Android application code is written for the so-called Dalvic virtual machine. Applications are in .apk format, this is the only format. Until recently, applications themselves could be written in Java, and since 2009, Google has added a special package of features that allows you to create software in C and C ++. Also, there are many development environments, such as Embarcadero RAD Studio.

As for the app store itself, it was opened in 2008. The agreement was that software developers give 30% of the profits to Google. By the standards of 2017, there are about 2.8 million applications in the Play Market database.

Of course, sometimes unscrupulous users posted applications with malicious code, which caused a scandal around 2011, but the problems were quickly hushed up and the vulnerabilities were closed.

Whoever says anything, but the direct specific Play Market is the App Store - an application store for iPhone, iPad, iPod and others. They have less software than in the Play Market. In terms of developer income, the same as that of Google. You create a paid application for which you will give 30% of the profit.

What's Inside Android

And now, almost the penultimate fad, in which I want to talk about the internal components of the system. Those who use this system should understand it at least a little. And compare it with Windows.

So, Linux differs from Windows in that the second one has information sorted into disks and folders, of course, in Linux as well, but it's all displayed differently. In Linux systems, a tree structure.

There are also differences in registers. If you create several folders with the same name, then on Windows there will be no difference, but on Linux they will be completely different folders. This also applies to files. These names will be different in Linux - Papka, papka, PAPKA.

Always the cache for the system and some application will be saved in a special section - cache.

Surely everyone saw the folder in the file manager data. This directory has other folders related to installation files and directories from applications.

Configuration files and software libraries can be found in the app-lib folder.

To make applications work, they are written in Java for a special Dalvik virtual machine. Therefore, you may come across a catalog dalvic-cache. Sometimes it needs to be cleaned, for example, before flashing the phone. This is done with the help of root rights or from, but I will definitely talk about all this in future articles.

You will definitely see the directory in the file manager system. From the name it is clear that system settings are stored there, changing which can ruin your system.

In catalog etc you will find files that allow the system to start normally.

These are not all the folders that are in the Android system. It will take a few additional articles to sort it all out.

Additional features

Many people know that each modification of the system has a key name, usually some kind of dessert. For example, Cupcake, which means cupcake. One of the popular versions 4.1-4.3 is called Jelly Bean (Jelly beans). But version 4.4 is named after the famous chocolate bar KitKat. The next modification 5.0 and 5.1 is called Lollipop - lollipop. The sixth variant is Marshmallow and, finally, the latest variant 7.0-7.1.2 received the Nougat code.

It’s already quite a bit left before the release of version 8, or as it is called Android O. The beta version of the operating system is already installed on some flagships and works stably. Full OS will be released at the end of 2017. And yes, the keyword is likely to be Oreo. Below you will see a video of the presentation of the eighth version.

Well guys, I finished the article, now you know what Android is, where it is used, its chips. In future articles, I will cover almost everything related to this operating system. Well, I wish you good luck!

You can often hear an expression like "I bought an Android phone." For many, the word "Android" means absolutely nothing at all, even if they use a smartphone. It's okay, now we'll put everything on the shelves.

Android in this case is an operating system primarily for smartphones, as well as tablets, netbooks, laptops, smart watches, e-books, TVs, etc. Yes, a huge number of various devices work on the basis of this OS.

Today, the Android operating system belongs to the Internet giant Google, but Android, Inc. was originally developed by Android, Inc., which was later bought by Google in 2005. But the first official release of the platform took place much later - only at the end of 2008, that is, more than a year later after the introduction of iOS from Apple. But despite this, the Android OS is the leader among mobile devices, and its advantage is colossal. Thus, according to the data, 86% of smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2014 are running Android.

Android means the word "robot" or "humanoid robot". Therefore, do not be surprised that the Android logo is such a funny character:

The first Android-based device was the HTC Dream smartphone, which was released by T-Mobile under the name T-Mobile G1. Here is the smartphone:

And in Russia, the Highscreen PP5420, which entered the market in 2009, is considered the first official device based on the Android OS:

After that, many manufacturers began to create their devices based on Android.

Google also releases a line of its own smartphones. For example, Google Pixel 2 XL:

We also note that there is a line of Android One smartphones: these are third-party devices that run the so-called pure or unmodified version of Android. One of these smartphones is Xiaomi Mi A2:

Third-party manufacturers often add various embellishments to their firmware versions. Moreover, the changes are often so impressive that it is difficult to recognize stock Android. Take a look, for example, at the screenshot of the Xiaomi desktop based on the MIUI firmware:

But this is exactly what users love: the same MIUI has a huge number of fans around the world.

The Android operating system is constantly being upgraded, and, ironically, the name of each version is the name of a dessert. For example, 4.1 / 4.2 / 4.3 Jelly Bean is chewy candy, 4.4 KitKat is a famous chocolate bar, 7.0 Nougat is nougat.

At the time of this writing, there were reports that the Android OS has exhausted itself, and therefore Google is preparing a replacement for it in the form of OS Fuchsia, which is supposedly being developed by Google specialists for more than one year. A complete replacement is expected around 2023. The reasons are as follows: the operating system is not the best protected from hacker attacks and malicious applications. In addition, not all devices receive patches at the same time due to a fragmented system. True or not, time will tell.