Google will celebrate the fourth anniversary of its flagship mobile operating system, Android. In relatively short time, more than 500 million Android devices have been activated worldwide, with 1.3 million new Android devices activated each day.
Android also managed to become a mobile operating system is the most dominant, with a global market share of 68% or four times larger than Apple’s market share, according to data from IDC. The two most popular mobile operating systems have a combined market share of 85%.
The first version of this operating system, Android 1.0, was released on September 23rd, 2008.
Subsequent versions which brought improvements and adding new features followed:
- Android 1.1 (February 2009)
- Android 1.5 “Cupcake” (April 30, 2009)
- Android 1.6 “Donut” (September 1st, 2009)
- Android 2.0 / 2.1 “Eclair” (October 26th, 2009)
- Android 2.2 “Froyo” (May 20th 2010)
- Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” (December 6th, 2010)
- Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” (February 22nd, 2011)
- Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (October 19th, 2011)
- Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” (June 27th, 2012)
History of Android itself can be traced back to well before the time of its first appearance, the moment where Rich Miner, Andy Rubin, Nick Sears and Chris White co-founded a company called Android in October 2003, nearly nine years ago.
Android subsequently joined Google as the Internet giant to buy the company for 50 million dollars in August 2005.
The first Android phone released to the market is the HTC Dream, which is known as the T-Mobile G1 in the U.S. market. Although relatively slow even for that time, the phone is equipped with a 384MHz processor and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard is successfully sold 1 million units in April 2009.
Today, the most advanced Android devices such as the LG Optimus G and the Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC One X and Google Nexus 7 respectively are reinforced with quad-core processor Qualcomm Snapdragon and Samsung Exynos. Along with iOS, Android has become the most popular mobile operating system in the world.
