The history of android 5

Android 2.0, Éclair‎—blowing up the GPS industry

Forty-one days—that was how much time passed between Android 1.6 and 2.0. The first big version number bump for Android launched in October 2009 on the Motorola Droid, the first "second generation" Android device. The Droid offered huge hardware upgrades over the G1, starting with the massive (at the time) 3.7 inch, 854×480 LCD. It brought a lot more power, too: a (still single-core) 600Mhz TI OMAP Cortex A8 with 256MB of RAM.

Enlarge / The Motorola Droid stares into your soul.

The most important part of the Droid, though, was the large advertising campaign around it. The Droid was the flagship device for Verizon Wireless in the US, and with that title came a ton of ad money from America's biggest carrier. Verizon licensed the word "droid" from Lucasfilm and started up the "Droid Does" campaign—a shouty,

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

The history of Android 3

From left to right: Android 0.9’s home screen, add drawer, and shortcut deletion interfaces.

Ron Amadeo

Android 0.9, Beta—hey, this looks familiar!

Six months after Milestone 5, in August 2008, Android 0.9 was released. While the Android 0.5 milestone builds were "early looks," by now 1.0 was only two months away. Thus, Android 0.9 was labeled "beta." On the other side of the aisle, Apple already released its second version of the iPhone—the iPhone 3G—a month prior. The second-gen iPhone brought a second-gen iPhone OS. Apple also launched the App Store and was already taking app submissions. Google had a lot of catching up to do.

Google threw out a lot of the UI introduced in Milestone 5. All the artwork was redone again in full-color, and the white square icon backgrounds were tossed. While still an emulator build, 0.9 offered something that looked familiar when compared to a released version of Android. Android 0.9 had a working desktop-style

The history of Android 2

Left: the Milestone 5 home screen showing the “all" button, two dock icons, and four recent apps. Center: the home screen with the app list open. Right: the power menu.

Ron Amadeo

Android 0.5, Milestone 5—the land of scrapped interfaces

The first major Android change came three months after the first emulator release: the "m5-rc14" build. Released in February 2008, “Milestone 5" dumped the stretched-out BlackBerry interface and went with a totally revamped design—Google's first attempt at a finger-friendly interface.

This build was still identified as "Android 0.5" in the browser user agent string, but Milestone 5 couldn't be more different from the first release of Android. Several core Android features can directly trace their lineage back to this version. The layout and functionality of the notification panel was

The history of Android

 Android's home screen over the years.

Ron Amadeo

Android has been with us in one form or another for more than six years. During that time, we've seen an absolutely breathtaking rate of change unlike any other development cycle that has ever existed. When it came time for Google to dive in to the smartphone wars, the company took its rapid-iteration, Web-style update cycle and applied it to an operating system, and the result has been an onslaught of continual improvement. Lately, Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that's slower than it used to be. For the first year of Android’s commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version every two-and-a-half months.