ANDROID TECHNOLOGY

Android Technology

What is Android?

Android is an open source and Linux-based Operating System for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers.

Different version of Android system

Android version 1.0 – Astro

Android version 1.1 – Beta

Android version 1.5 – cupcake

Android version 1.6 – donut

Android version 2.0 – Eclaire

Android version 2.2 – FRO YO

Android version 2.3 – Ginger-Bread

Android version 3.0, 3.1,3.2- Honeycomb

Android version 4.0 – Ice cream sandwich

Android version 4.2 – jellybean

Android version 4.4 - kitkat

Android version 5.0,5.1 – lollipop

Android version 6.0 – marshmallow

Android version 7.0 – Nougat

History of Android:-

Android was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, led by Google, and other companies. The first beta version of the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) was released by Google in 2007 where as the first commercial version, Android 1.0, was released in September 2008.

On June 27, 2012, at the Google I/O conference, Google announced the next Android version, 4.1 Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean is an incremental update, with the primary aim of improving the user interface, both in terms of functionality and performance.

Features of Android:-

Android is a powerful operating system competing with Apple 4GS and supports great features. Few of them are listed below:

Feature	Description
Beautiful UI	Android OS basic screen provides a beautiful and intuitive user interface.
Connectivity	GSM/EDGE, IDEN, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LTE, NFC and WiMAX.
Storage	SQLite, a lightweight relational database, is used for data storage purposes.
Media support	H.263, H.264, MPEG-4 SP, AMR, AMR-WB, AAC, HE-AAC, AAC 5.1, MP3, MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP
Messaging	SMS and MMS
Web browser	Based on the open-source WebKit layout engine, coupled with Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine supporting HTML5 and CSS3.
Multi-touch	Android has native support for multi-touch which was initially made available in handsets such as the HTC Hero
Multi-tasking	User can jump from one task to another and same time various application can run simultaneously
Resizable widgets	Widgets are resizable, so users can expand them to show more content or shrink them to save space
Multi-Language	Supports single direction and bi-directional text.
GCM	Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a service that lets developers send short message data to their users on Android devices, without needing a proprietary sync solution.
Wi-Fi Direct	A technology that lets apps discover and pair directly, over a high-bandwidth peer-to-peer connection
Android Beam	A popular NFC-based technology that lets users instantly share, just by touching two NFC- enabled phones together.

Android Applications

Android applications are usually developed in the Java language using the Android Software Development Kit.

Once developed, Android applications can be packaged easily and sold out either through a store such as Google Play or the Amazon Appstore.

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 more than 1 million new Android devices are activated worldwide.

This tutorial has been written with an aim to teach you how to develop and package Android application. We will start from environment setup for Android application programming and then drill down to look into various aspects of Android applications.