How Android was born? ... and Today, what?

The 5 of November of 2007, Android was presented to the people powered by Google and the Open Handset Alliance, but...it´s only that? Even though a company named Android was stared in 2003 by three well known personalities ( Andy Rubin :co-founder of Danger; Rich Miner-co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Inc; Nick Sears - VP at T-Mobile) , the company operated secretly, revealing only that the company is working on a new mobile operating system.

In 2005 Google acquired Android Inc and the road map of the company was reset according the the interests of Google. Google basically wanted their powerful searching technologies to be on mobile devices and working hard towards achieving that objective through Android acquisition. In 2007, they applied to obtain several telephone technology related patents apparently proving this speculation.

In 2007, again several well known companies got together and formed an alliance known as " Open Handset Alliance" and the idea behind was to develop "open stand" for mobile devices. The companies that were involved were, Broadcom Corporation, Google, HTC, Intel, LG, Marvell Technology Group, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Texas Instruments .

As a result of all these efforts, first product , Android, a mobile device platform built on the Linux kernel version 2.6 was introduced. 


Android application developers now deal with multiple versions of the operating system, geared for either phones or tablets but not both. They also have had to cope with customized interfaces, making it tough to build applications to run across the variety of Android units on the market. "I'm anticipating [the operating system upgrade] hotly," said Brian Hardy, a software engineer and instructor at mobile software developer Big Nerd Ranch. "It's always nice to see what's new, but it will be refreshing to be able to develop on one platform at some point in the future." 


Currently, developers can use the Android 2.x platform for smartphones and 3.x platform for tablets. Google has released a compatibility library for sharing some functionality between 2.x and 3.x systems, but does not solve all problems, Hardy said. As an example, he cited that the action bar functionality is not available in the library.

Fragmentation has even affected Android's WebKit browser engine, said Mike Burns, a developer at Thoughtbot. "This is part of the fragmentation problem. They fix bugs in one version and introduce bugs in another version," he noted.

Android 4's arrival is anticipated as part of a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone debut in Hong Kong scheduled for this evening in U.S. time zones. Google has emphasized the unity the operating system upgrade is supposed to bring to the fragmented Android landscape. "Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about [the Honeycomb release of Android] on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher, and richer widgets," wrote Hugo Barra, Google's product management director for Android, in a May blog post.

But "Ice Cream Sandwich" will not solve all problems with the platform, said David Cao, organizer of the Silicon Valley Android Developer Group and vice president of mobile at BeyondSoft. He is not a developer himself, but said Android still has problems in which Google controls the release of code and some device vendors get the code before others, he said: "Android is somewhat open, but it's not completely open."

Android 4.0 is with us, now we can use this new version and I still waiting for the stable version Android 5.0. 

Best Regards,see you, Mariano Salvetti!