The history of android 4

The T-Mobile G1

T-Mobile

Android 1.0—introducing Google Apps and actual hardware

By October 2008, Android 1.0 was ready for launch, and the OS debuted on the T-Mobile G1 (AKA the HTC Dream). The G1 was released into a market dominated by the iPhone 3G and the Nokia 1680 classic. (Both of those phones went on to tie for the best selling phone of 2008, selling 35 million units each.) Hard numbers of G1 sales are tough to come by, but T-Mobile announced the device broke the one million units sold barrier in April 2009. It was way behind the competition by any measure.
The G1 was packing a single-core 528Mhz ARM 11 processor, an Adreno 130 GPU, 192MB of RAM, and a whopping 256MB of storage for the OS and Apps. It had a 3.2-inch, 320x480 display, which was mounted to a sliding mechanism that revealed a full hardware keyboard. So while Android software has certainly come a long way, the hardware has, too. Today, we can get much better specs than this in a watch form factor: the latest Samsung smart watch has
512MB of RAM and a 1GHz dual-core processor.
While the iPhone had a minimal amount of buttons, the G1 was the complete opposite, sporting almost every hardware control that was ever invented. It had call and end call buttons, home, back, and menu buttons, a shutter button for the camera, a volume rocker, a trackball, and, of course, about 50 keyboard buttons. Future Android devices would slowly back away from thousand-button interfaces, with nearly every new flagship lessening the number of buttons.
But for the first time, people saw Android running on actual hardware instead of a frustratingly slow emulator. Android 1.0 didn't have the smoothness, flare, or press coverage of the iPhone. It wasn't as capable as Windows Mobile 6.5. Still, it was a good start.

The default app selection of Android 1.0 and 0.9.

Ron Amadeo

The core of Android 1.0 didn't look significantly different from the beta version released two months earlier, but the consumer product brought a ton more apps, including the full suite of Google apps. Calendar, Email, Gmail, IM, Market, Settings, Voice Dialer, and YouTube were all new. At the time, music was the dominant media type on smartphones, the king of which was the iTunes music store. Google didn't have an in-house music service of its own, so it tapped Amazon and bundled the Amazon MP3 store.
The most important addition to Android 1.0 was the debut of Google's store, called "Android Market Beta." While most companies were content with calling their app catalog some variant of "app store"—meaning a store that sold apps and only apps—Google had much wider ambitions. It went with the much more general name of "Android Market." The idea was that the Android Market would not just house apps, but everything you needed for your Android device.

Enlarge / The first Android Market client. Screenshots show the main page, “my downloads," an app page, and an app permissions page.

Google

At the time, the Android Market only offered apps and games, and developers weren't even able to charge for them. Apple's App Store had a four-month head start on the Android Market, but Google's big differentiator was that Android's store was almost completely open. On the iPhone, apps were subject to review by Apple and had to meet design and technical guidelines. Potential apps also weren't allowed to duplicate the stock functionality. On the Android Market, developers were free to do whatever they wanted, including replacing the stock apps. The lack of control would turn out to be a blessing and a curse. It allowed developers to innovate on the existing functionality, but it also meant even the trashiest applications were allowed in.

Today, this client is another app that can no longer communicate with Google's servers. Luckily, it's one of the few early Android apps actually documented on the Internet. The main screen provided links to the common areas like Apps, Games, Search, and Downloads, and the top section had horizontally scrolling icons for featured apps. Search results and the "My Downloads" page displayed apps in a scrolling list, showing the name, developers, cost (at this point, always free), and rating. Individual app pages showed a brief description, install count, comments and ratings from users, and the all-important install button. This early Android Market didn’t support pictures, and the only field for developers was a description box with a 500-character limit. This made things like maintaining a changelog very difficult, as the only spot to put it was in the description. Right out of the gate, the Android Market showed permissions that an app required before installing. This is something Apple wouldn't get around to implementing until 2012, after an iOS app was caught uploading entire address books to the cloud without the user's knowledge. The permissions display gave a full rundown of what permissions an app was using, although this version railroaded users into agreeing. There was an “OK" button, but no way to cancel other than the back button.

Enlarge / Gmail showing the inbox, the inbox with the menu open.

Ron Amadeo

The next most important app was probably Gmail. Most of the base functionality was here already. Unviewed messages showed up in bold, and labels displayed as colored tags. Individual messages in the Inbox showed the subject, author(s), and number of replies in a conversation. The trademark Gmail star was here—a quick tap would star or unstar something. As usual for early versions of Android, the Menu housed all the buttons on the main inbox view. Once inside a message, though, things got a little more modern, with "reply" and "forward" buttons as permanent fixtures at the bottom of the screen. Individual replies could be expanded and collapsed just by tapping on them.
The rounded corners, shadows, and bubbly icons gave the whole app a "cartoonish" look, but it was a good start. Android's function-first philosophy was really coming through here: Gmail supported labels, threaded messaging, searching, and push e-mail.

Enlarge / Gmail’s label view, compose screen, and settings on Android 1.0.

Ron Amadeo

But if you thought Gmail was ugly, the Email app took it to another level. There was no separate inbox or folder view—everything was mashed into a single screen. The app presented you with a list of folders and tapping on one would expand the contents in-line. Unread messages were denoted with a green line on the left, and that was about it for the e-mail interface. The app supported IMAP and POP3 but not Exchange.

Both screens of the Email app. The first two screenshots show the combined label/inbox view, and the last shows a message.

Ron Amadeo

The message view was—surprise!—white. Android's e-mail app has historically been a watered-down version of the Gmail app, and you can see that close connection here. The message and compose views were taken directly from Gmail with almost no modifications.

Enlarge / The “IM" applications. Screenshots show the short-lived provider selection screen, the friends list, and a chat.

Ron Amadeo

Before Google Hangouts and even before Google Talk, there was "IM"—the only instant messaging client that shipped on Android 1.0. Surprisingly, multiple IM services were supported: users could pick from AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo. Remember when OS creators cared about interoperability?
The friends list was a black background with white speech bubbles for open chats. Presence was indicated with colored circles, and a little Android on the right hand side would indicate that a person was mobile. It's amazing how much more communicative the IM app was than Google Hangouts. Green means the person is using a device they are signed into, yellow means they are signed in but idle, red means they have manually set busy and don't want to be bothered, and gray is offline. Today, Hangouts only shows when a user has the app open or closed.
The chats interface was clearly based on the Messaging program, and the chat backgrounds were changed from white and blue to white and green. No one changed the color of the blue text entry box, though, so along with the orange highlight effect, this screen used white, green, blue, and orange.

Enlarge / YouTube on Android 1.0. The screens show the main page, the main page with the menu open, the categories screen, and the videos screen.

Ron Amadeo

YouTube might not have been the mobile sensation it is today with the 320p screen and 3G data speeds of the G1, but Google's video service was present and accounted for on Android 1.0. The main screen looked like a tweaked version of the Android Market, with a horizontally scrolling featured section along the top and vertically scrolling categories along the bottom. Some of Google's category choices were pretty strange: what would the difference be between "Most popular" and "Most viewed?"
In a sign that Google had no idea how big YouTube would eventually become, one of the video categories was "Most recent." Today, with 100 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, if this section actually worked it would be an unreadable blur of rapidly scrolling videos.
The menu housed search, favorites, categories, and settings. Settings (not pictured) was the lamest screen ever, housing one option to clear the search history. Categories was equally barren, showing only a black list of text.
The last screen shows a video, which only supported horizontal mode. The auto-hiding video controls weirdly had rewind and fast forward buttons, even though there was a seek bar.

Enlarge / YouTube’s video menu, description page, and comments.

Ron Amadeo

Additional sections for each video could be brought up by hitting the menu button. Here you could favorite the video, access details, and read comments. All of these screens, like the videos, were locked to horizontal mode.
"Share" didn't bring up a share dialog yet; it just kicked the link out to a Gmail message. Texting or IMing someone a link wasn't possible. Comments could be read, but you couldn't rate them or post your own. You couldn't rate or like a video either.

Enlarge / The camera app’s picture taking interface, menu, and photo review mode.

Ron Amadeo

Real Android on real hardware meant a functional camera app, even if there wasn't much to look at. That black square on the left was the camera interface, which should be showing a viewfinder image, but the SDK screenshot utility can't capture it. The G1 had a hardware camera button (remember those?), so there wasn't a need for an on-screen shutter button. There were no settings for exposure, white balance, or HDR—you could take a picture and that was about it.
The menu button revealed a meager two options: a way to jump to the Pictures app and Settings screen with two options. The first settings option was whether or not to enable geotagging for pictures, and the second was for a dialog prompt after every capture, which you can see on the right. Also, you could only take pictures—there was no video support yet.

Enlarge / The Calendar’s month view, week view with the menu open, day view, and agenda.

Ron Amadeo

Like most apps of this era, the primary command interface for the calendar was the menu. It was used to switch views, add a new event, navigate to the current day, pick visible calendars, and go to the settings. The menu functioned as a catch-all for every single button.
The month view couldn't show appointment text. Every date had a bar next to it, and appointments were displayed as green sections in the bar denoting what time of day an appointment was. Week view couldn't show text either—the 320×480 display of the G1 just wasn't dense enough—so you got a white block with a strip of color indicating which calendar it was from. The only views that provided text were the agenda and day views. You could move through dates by swiping—week and day used left and right, and month and agenda used up and down.

Enlarge / The main settings page, the Wireless section, and the bottom of the about page.

Ron Amadeo

Android 1.0 finally brought a settings screen to the party. It was a black and white wall of text that was roughly broken down into sections. Down arrows next to each list item confusingly look like they would expand line-in to show more of something, but touching anywhere on the list item would just load the next screen. All the screens were pretty boring and samey looking, but hey, it's a settings screen.
Any option with an on/off state used a cartoony-looking checkbox. The original checkboxes in Android 1.0 were pretty strange—even when they were "unchecked," they still had a gray check mark in them. Android treated the check mark like a light bulb that would light up when on and be dim when off, but that's not how checkboxes work. We did finally get an "About" page, though. Android 1.0 ran Linux kernel 2.6.25.
A settings screen means we can finally open the security settings and change lock screens. Android 1.0 only had two styles, the gray square lock screen pictured in the Android 0.9 section, and pattern unlock, which required you to draw a pattern over a grid of 9 dots. A swipe pattern like this was easier to remember and input than a PIN even if it did not add any more security.

Enlarge / The Voice Dialer, pattern lock screen, low battery warning, and time picker.

Ron Amadeo

Voice functions arrived in 1.0 with Voice Dialer. This feature hung around in various capacities in AOSP for a while, as it was a simple voice command app for calling numbers and contacts. Voice Dialer was completely unrelated to Google's future voice products, however, and it worked the same way a voice dialer on a dumbphone would work.
As for a final note, low battery popup would occur when the battery dropped below 15 percent. It was a funny graphic, depicting plugging the wrong end of the power cord into the phone. That wasn't (and still isn't) how phones work, Google.
Android 1.0 was a great first start, but there were still so many gaps in functionality. Physical keyboards and tons of hardware buttons were mandatory, as Android devices were still not allowed to be sold without a d-pad or trackball. Base smartphone functionality like auto-rotate wasn't here yet, either. Updates for built-in apps weren't possible through the Android Market the way they were today. All the Google Apps were interwoven with the operating system. If Google wanted to update a single app, an update for the entire operating system needed to be pushed out through the carriers. There was still a lot of work to do.

Android 1.1—the first truly incremental update

Enlarge / All of Android 1.1’s new features: Search by voice, the Android Market showing paid app support, Google Latitude, and the new “system updates" option in the settings.

Ron Amadeo

Four and a half months after Android 1.0, in February 2009, Android got its first public update in Android 1.1. Not much changed in the OS, and just about every new thing Google added with 1.1 has been shut down by now. Google Voice Search was Android's first foray into cloud-powered voice search, and it had its own icon in the app drawer. While the app can't communicate with Google's servers anymore, you can check out how it used to work on the iPhone. It wasn't yet Voice Actions, but you could speak and the results would go to a simple Google Search.
Support for paid apps was added to the Android Market, but just like the beta client, this version of the Android Market could no longer connect to the Google Play servers. The most that we could get to work was this sorting screen, which lets you pick between displaying free apps, paid apps, or a mix of both.
Maps added Google Latitude, a way to share your location with friends. Latitude was shut down in favor of Google+ a few months ago and no longer works. There was an option for it in the Maps menu, but tapping on it just brings up a loading spinner forever.
Given that system updates come quickly in the Android world—or at least, that was the plan before carriers and OEMs got in the way—Google also added a button to the "About Phone" screen to check for system updates.

Enlarge / Android 1.5’s on-screen keyboard showing the suggestion bar while typing, the capital letters keyboard, the number and symbols screen, and an additional key popup.

Ron Amadeo

Android 1.5, Cupcake—a virtual keyboard opens up device design

In April 2009, almost three months after the release of 1.1, Android 1.5 was released. It was the first Android version to have a public, marketed code name: Cupcake. From here on out, Android releases would have alphabetical, snack-themed names.

The most important Cupcake addition was easily the on-screen keyboard. For the first time, it was possible for OEMs to build a slate-style Android device without a thousand hardware keyboard keys and a complicated slide mechanism. Android's key labels could switch between uppercase and lowercase, depending on if caps lock was on or not. While it was off by default, there was an option to turn on the suggestion bar, which appeared along the top edge of the keyboard. Keys with ellipses in the popup, like the "u," above, could be held down to input diacritical marks, which would display in a popup. The keyboard could switch to numbers and alternate characters, and long pressing on the period key would bring up even more punctuation.

Enlarge / Composite images of the app lineup in 1.5 and 1.1 and the notification panels from each version.

Ron Amadeo

New icons were added for the new "Camcorder" functionality, and Google Talk was broken out from IM into its own separate app. The Amazon MP3 and Browser icons were redesigned, too. The Amazon MP3 icon was changed primarily because Amazon was planning on launching other Android apps soon, and the "A" icon was far too generic. The browser icon was easily the worst in Android 1.1, so it was changed and no longer resembled a desktop OS dialog box. The last app drawer change was to "Pictures," which was renamed to "Gallery."
The notification panel was redesigned again as well. The panel background got a weave texture, and the gradients on notifications were smoothed out. Android 1.5 had a lot of little design changes to core OS pieces that affected all apps. On the "Clear notifications" button, you could see the new system-wide button style, which had a gradient, a thinner outline, and less shadowing than the old version.

Enlarge / The “Add to Home" dialog boxes in 1.5 and 1.1.

Ron Amadeo

Third-party widgets were another headline feature of Cupcake, and they still remain one of Android's defining features. Developers could bundle a home screen widget along with their apps that would either control or display information from that app. Google showed off a few new widgets of its own, too, with the Calendar and Music apps.

Enlarge / Left: a screenshot of the calendar widget, music widget, and a row of live folders. Center: the folder list. Right: an open view of the “contacts with phone numbers" live folder.

Ron Amadeo

On the left screenshot, above, you can see the new Calendar and Music icons. The Calendar widget could only show a single event for the day, and tapping it would open the calendar. It wouldn't let you choose what calendars to display, and widgets weren't resizable—it only ever looked like this. The music widget was blue—despite the music app not having a drop of blue in it—and showed the song and artist name, along with play and next buttons.
Also in the left shot, the first three folders on the bottom row were a new feature called "Live Folders." These were accessible under the new top-level "Folders" section in the "Add to Home" menu, which you can see in the center picture. Live Folders showed the content of an application without having to open that application. The ones that came with Cupcake were all contacts-related, showing all of the user's contacts, contacts with phone numbers, or starred contacts.
Rather than icons, Live Folders used a simple list view that popped up over the home screen. Contacts were just for starters, Live Folders was a whole API that developers could use. Google demoed a folder of books from the Google Books app, and it was possible to have an RSS feed or top stories from a website as a live folder. Live folders were one of the few Android ideas that didn't work out, and the feature was shut down in Honeycomb.

Enlarge / The camcorder and camera UI, with on-screen shutter buttons.

Ron Amadeo

If you couldn't tell from the new "Camcorder" icon, video recording was added to Android in 1.5. The two icons, camera and camcorder, were actually the same app, and you could jump between the two of them with an option in the menu labeled "Switch to camera" and "Switch to camcorder." Video quality on the T-Mobile G1 was not that great. A test video on "High" quality output; a .3GP video file with a resolution of 352 x 288 and a lagtastic frame rate of 4 FPS.
Along with the new video feature, the Camera app saw a few much-needed UI tweaks. A thumbnail in the top left showed the last picture that was taken, and tapping on it would jump to the camera roll in the Gallery. The circle icon on the top right of both screens was an on-screen shutter button, meaning that, post 1.5, Android devices no longer required a hardware camera button.
This interface was actually much closer to the Android 4.2 design than many of the subsequent camera apps. While later designs would add silly leather textures and more controls to the camera, Android went back to basics with later designs, and that 4.2 redesign shares a lot in common with this. What was a primitive layout in Android 1.5 became a minimal, full-screen viewfinder in Android 4.2.

Enlarge / Google Talk running in the Google Talk app versus Google Talk running in the IM app.

Ron Amadeo

Android 1.0's IM app was used for Google Talk functionality, but in Android 1.5, Google Talk was broken off into its own app. Support for it in the IM app was removed. Google Talk (above, left) was clearly based on the IM app (above, right), but as soon as the stand alone app was released in 1.5, work on the IM app was abandoned.
The new Google Talk app had a redesigned status bar, presence lights on the right side, and a redesigned mobile icon, which was a gray monogram of the bugdroid. The blue compose bar switched to a more sensible gray in the chat view, and the message backgrounds changed from light green and white to light green and green. With a stand alone app, Google could add Gtalk-only features like chatting "off the record," which would stop Gmail from saving a copy of every chat.

Enlarge / The calendar in Android 1.5 got a lot lighter.

Ron Amadeo

The calendar dumped the ugly white squares on a black background and changed to an all-light app. The background of everything became white, and day-of-the-week headers were changed to blue. The individual appointment blocks switched from a small color strip to entirely colored, and the text changed to white. This will be the last time the calendar is touched for a long time.

Enlarge / From left to right: the browser’s new controls, the zoomed-out magnifying view, and highlighting text for copy/pasting.

Ron Amadeo

Android 1.5 changed the zoom controls system-wide. Instead of two big circles, the zoom controls became two halves of a rectangle with rounded corners. These new controls applied to the browser, Google Maps, and the gallery.
The browser had lots of work done on the zoom functionality. After zooming in or out, the "1x" button would return you to the standard zoom level. The button in the bottom right corner would zoom all the way out of the page and display a magnifying rectangle over the page, which you can see in the center image. Grabbing the rectangle and releasing it would zoom that part of the page to a "1x" view. Android didn't have acceleratable scrolling, which made the max scrolling speed pretty slow—this was Google's solution for navigating a long webpage.
Another addition to the browser was the ability to copy text on a webpage—previously you could only copy text from an input box. Selecting "copy text" from the menu would activate highlight mode, and dragging your finger over text in a Web page would highlight it. The G1’s trackball was very handy for super-precise movement like this and could control the mouse cursor. There were no draggable handles, and as soon as you lifted your finger off the screen, Android would copy the text and remove the highlight, so you had to be ridiculously precise to get any use out of the copy feature.
The browser in Android 1.5 would crash a lot—much more than in previous versions. Just viewing Ars Technica in desktop mode would crash the browser, as did many other sites.

Enlarge

Ron Amadeo

The default lock screen and pattern lock screen both changed their empty, black backgrounds to the same wallpaper as the home screen.
The lighter background on the pattern unlock screen revealed the sloppy job Google did on the alignment of the circles. The white circles were nowhere near centered inside the black circles—basic alignment issues like this continued to be a frequent problem for Android in these early days.

Enlarge / The YouTube uploader, contacts thumbnails, the auto rotate setting, and the new music design.

Ron Amadeo

The HTC Magic, the second Android device, and the first without a hardware keyboard.

HTC

Google Maps is the first built-in app to hit the Android Market

While this article is (mostly) organizing app updates by Android version for simplicity's sake, there are a few outliers that deserve special recognition. On June 14, 2009, Google Maps was the first packed-in Android app to be updated via the Android Market. While every other app required a full system release to be updated, Maps was broken out of the OS, free to receive out-of-cycle updates whenever a new feature was ready.

Moving apps out of the core OS and onto the Android Market would be a big focus for Google going forward. In general, OTA updates were a big initiative—they required the cooperation of the OEM and the carrier, both of which could drag their feet. Updates also didn’t make it to every device. Today, the Android Market gives Google a direct line to every Android phone with no such interference from outside parties.

These were problems for a later date, though. In 2009, Google had only two unskinned phones to support, and the early Android carriers were seemingly responsive to Google’s update needs. This early move would prove to be a very proactive decision on Google’s part. At first, the company went this route only with its most important properties—Maps and Gmail—but later it would port the majority of the packed-in apps to the Android Market. Later initiatives like Google Play Services even brought app APIs out of the OS and into Google’s store.

As for the new Maps at the time, it gained a new directions interface, along with the ability to give mass transit and walking directions. For now, directions were given on a plain black list—turn-by-turn-style navigation would come later.

June 2009 was also the time Apple launched the third iPhone—the 3GS—and the third version of iPhone OS. iPhone OS 3's headline features were mostly catch-up items like copy/paste and MMS support. Apple's hardware was still nicer, and the software was smoother, more cohesive, and better designed. Google's insane pace of development was putting it on a path to parity though. iPhone OS 2 launched just before the Milestone 5 build of Android 0.5, which makes five Android releases in the span of the yearly iOS release cycle.

Android 1.5 gave the YouTube app the ability to upload videos to the site. Uploading was accomplished by sharing a video from the Gallery to the YouTube app, or by opening a video directly from the YouTube app. This would bring up an upload screen, where the user would set things like the video title, tags, and access rights. Photos could be uploaded to Picasa, Google's original photo site, in a similar fashion.
There were little tweaks all over the OS. Favorite contacts now showed a picture in the contacts list (although regular contacts were still pictureless). The third picture shows the new auto-rotate option in the settings—this was also the first version to support automatically switching orientations based on readings from the devices’ internal sensors.
Cupcake did a great job of improving Android, particularly in terms of hardware options. The on-screen keyboard meant a hardware keyboard was no longer necessary. Auto rotate brought the OS a little closer to the iPhone, and an on-screen camera shutter button meant that hardware camera buttons were now optional, too. Shortly after the release of 1.5, a second Android device came out that would show the future direction of the platform: the HTC Magic. The Magic (right) didn’t have a hardware keyboard or a camera button. It was a solid, slider-less slate device that relied on Android’s on-screen buttons to get the job done.
Android flagships started with the most buttons possible—a hardware qwerty phone—and slowly began whittling the button count down over time. While the Magic was a big step, eliminating an entire keyboard and a camera button, it still used start and end call buttons, four system buttons, and a trackball.

Enlarge / The new Android Market—less black, more white and green.

Ron Amadeo

Android 1.6, Donut—CDMA support brings Android to any carrier

The fourth version of Android—1.6, Donut—launched in September 2009, five months after Cupcake hit the market. Despite the myriad of updates, Google was still adding basic functionality to Android. Donut brought support for different screen sizes, CDMA support, and a text-to-speech engine.
Android 1.6 is a great example of an update that, today, would have little reason to exist as a separate point update. The major improvements basically boiled down to new versions of the Android Market, camera, and YouTube. In the years since, apps like this have been broken out of the OS and can be updated by Google at any time. Before all this modularization work, though, even seemingly minor app updates like this required a full OS update.

The other big improvement—CDMA support—demonstrated that, despite the version number, Google was still busy getting basic functionality into Android. The Android Market was christened as version "1.6" and got a complete overhaul. The original all-black design was tossed in favor of a white app with green highlights—the Android designers were clearly using the Android mascot for inspiration.
The new market was definitely a new style of app design for Google. The top fifth of the screen was dedicated to a banner logo announcing that this app is indeed the “Android Market." Below the banner were buttons for Apps, Games, and Downloads, and a search button was placed to the right of the banner. Below the navigation was a thumbnail display of featured apps, which could be swiped through. Below that were even more featured apps in a vertically scrolling list.

Enlarge / The new Market design, showing an app page with screenshots, the apps categories page, an app top list, and the downloads section.

Ron Amadeo

The biggest addition to the market was the inclusion of app screenshots. Android users could finally see what an app looked like before installing it—previously they only had a brief description and user reviews to go on. Your personal star review and comment was given top billing, followed by the description, and then finally the screenshots. Viewing the screenshots would often require a bit of scrolling—if you were looking for a well-designed app, it was a lot of work.
Tapping on App or Games would bring up a category list, which you can see in the second picture, above. After picking a category, more navigation was shown at the top of the screen, where users could see "Top paid," "Top free," or "Just in" apps within a category. While these sorta looked like buttons that would load a new screen, they were really just a clunky tabbed interface. To denote which "tab" was currently active, there were little green lights next to each button. The nicest part of this interface was that the list of apps would scroll infinitely—once you hit the bottom, more apps would load in. This made it easy to look through the list of apps, but opening any app and coming back would lose your spot in the list—you’d be kicked to the top. The downloads section would do something the new Google Play Store still can't do: simply display a list of your purchased apps.
While the new Market definitely looked better than the old market, cohesion across apps was getting worse and worse. It seemed like each app was made by a different group with no communication about how all Android apps should look.

Enlarge / The Camera viewfinder, photo review screen, and menu.

Ron Amadeo

For instance, the camera app was changed from a full-screen, minimal design to a boxed viewfinder with controls on the side. With the new camera app, Google tried its hand at skeuomorphism, wrapping the whole app in a leather texture roughly replicating the exterior of a classic camera. Switching between the camera and camcorder was done with a literal switch, and below that was the on-screen shutter button.
Tapping on the previous picture thumbnail no longer launched the gallery, but a custom image viewer that was built in to the camera app. When viewing a picture the leather control area changed the camera controls to picture controls, where you could delete, share a picture, or set the picture as a wallpaper or contact image. There was still no swiping between pictures—that was still done with arrows on either side of the image.
This second picture shows one of the first examples of designers reducing dependence on the menu button, which the Android team slowly started to realize functioned terribly for discoverability. Many app designers (including those within Google) used the menu as a dumping ground for all sorts of controls and navigational elements. Most users didn't think to hit the menu button, though, and never saw the commands.
A common theme for future versions of Android would be moving things out of the menu and on to the main screen, making the whole OS more user-friendly. The menu button was completely killed in Android 4.0, and it's only supported in Android for legacy apps.

Enlarge / The battery and TTS settings.

Ron Amadeo

Donut was the first Android version to keep track of battery usage. Buried in the "About phone" menu was an option called "Battery use," which would display battery usage by app and hardware function as a percentage. Tapping on an item would bring up a separate page with relevant stats. Hardware items had buttons to jump directly to their settings, so for instance, you could change the display timeout if you felt the display battery usage was too high.
Android 1.6 was also the first version to support text-to-speech (TTS) engines, meaning the OS and apps would be able to talk back to you in a robot voice. The “Speech synthesizer controls" would allow you to set the language, choose the speech rate, and (critically) install the voice data from the Android market. Today, Google has its own TTS engine that ships with Android, but it seems Donut was hard coded to accept one specific TTS engine made by SVOX. But SVOX’s engine didn’t ship with Donut, so tapping on “install voice data" linked to an app in the Android Market. (In the years since Donut’s heyday, the app has been taken down. It seems Android 1.6 will never speak again.)

Enlarge / From left to right: new widgets, the search bar UI, the new notification clear button, and the new gallery controls.

Ron Amadeo

There was more work on the widget front. Donut brought an entirely new widget called "Power control." This comprised on/off switches for common power-hungry features: Wi-FI, Bluetooth, GPS, Sync (to Google's servers), and brightness.
The search widget was redesigned to be much slimmer looking, and it had an embedded microphone button for voice search. It now had some actual UI to it and did find-as-you-type live searching, which searched not only the Internet, but your applications and history too.
The "Clear notifications" button has shrunk down considerably and lost the "notifications" text. In later Android versions it would be reduced to just a square button. The Gallery continues the trend of taking functionality out of the menu and putting it in front of the user—the individual picture view gained buttons for "Set as," "Share," and "Delete."