When was android launched

Black and green seeped all over the UI as Android started its slow march toward distinctive design. Android 3. Under the guidance of newly arrived design chief Matias Duarte , Honeycomb introduced a dramatically reimagined UI for Android.

It had a space-like "holographic" design that traded the platform's trademark green for blue and placed an emphasis on making the most of a tablet's screen space. While the concept of a tablet-specific interface didn't last long, many of Honeycomb's ideas laid the groundwork for the Android we know today.

The software was the first to use on-screen buttons for Android's main navigational commands; it marked the beginning of the end for the permanent overflow-menu button; and it introduced the concept of a card-like UI with its take on the Recent Apps list.

With Honeycomb acting as the bridge from old to new, Ice Cream Sandwich — also released in — served as the platform's official entry into the era of modern design. The release refined the visual concepts introduced with Honeycomb and reunited tablets and phones with a single, unified UI vision.

ICS dropped much of Honeycomb's "holographic" appearance but kept its use of blue as a system-wide highlight. And it carried over core system elements like on-screen buttons and a card-like appearance for app-switching.

Android 4. And it started the slow process of bringing a standardized design framework — known as "Holo" — all throughout the OS and into Android's app ecosystem. Spread across three impactful Android versions, and 's Jelly Bean releases took ICS's fresh foundation and made meaningful strides in fine-tuning and building upon it. The releases added plenty of poise and polish into the operating system and went a long way in making Android more inviting for the average user.

Visuals aside, Jelly Bean brought about our first taste of Google Now — the spectacular predictive-intelligence utility that's sadly since devolved into a glorified news feed.

It gave us expandable and interactive notifications, an expanded voice search system, and a more advanced system for displaying search results in general, with a focus on card-based results that attempted to answer questions directly. Multiuser support also came into play, albeit on tablets only at this point, and an early version of Android's Quick Settings panel made its first appearance. Jelly Bean ushered in a heavily hyped system for placing widgets on your lock screen , too — one that, like so many Android features over the years , quietly disappeared a couple years later.

Late's KitKat release marked the end of Android's dark era, as the blacks of Gingerbread and the blues of Honeycomb finally made their way out of the operating system. Lighter backgrounds and more neutral highlights took their places, with a transparent status bar and white icons giving the OS a more contemporary appearance.

The release was Google's first foray into claiming a full panel of the home screen for its services, too — at least, for users of its own Nexus phones and those who chose to download its first-ever standalone launcher. Here are the latest Insider stories. Motorola had to get permission and pay some money to Lucasfilm to use the name for its phone. Motorola continued using the Droid brand for many of its phones as late as Android 2. Smartphones sporting Froyo could take advantage of several new features, including Wi-Fi mobile hotspot functions, push notifications via the Android Cloud to Device Messaging C2DM service, flash support, and more.

This marked a new approach for Google, with the company working closer than ever before with hardware manufacturer HTC to showcase pure Android. The OS received a user interface refresh under Gingerbread. It added support for using near field communication NFC functions for smartphones with the required hardware.

Gingerbread also laid the groundwork for the selfie by adding support for multiple cameras and video chat support within Google Talk. This version of the OS is perhaps the oddball of the bunch. Honeycomb was created for tablets and other mobile devices with larger displays. It was first introduced in February , along with the Motorola Xoom tablet. The idea was that Honeycomb would offer features that could not be handled by the smaller displays found on smartphones at the time.

Even though Honeycomb was available, some tablets were still released with the smartphone-based Android 2. In the end, Honeycomb ended up being a version of Android that did not see wide adoption. Google decided to integrate most of its features in its next major 4. Released in October , the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android brought a number of new features. It combined many of the options of the tablet-only Honeycomb version with the smartphone-oriented Gingerbread.

That kind of biometric sign-in support has evolved and improved considerably since. Other notable changes with ICS included support for all on-screen buttons, swipe gestures to dismiss notifications and browser tabs, and the ability to monitor your data usage over mobile and Wi-Fi.

Google quickly released versions 4. Android 4. Instead, he decided to do something different. He contacted Nestle, the creators of the KitKat bar, and asked them if they could use the name for Android 4. Nestle agreed and KitKat became the name of the next Android version. This allowed phone makers to use the latest version of Android on much cheaper handsets. First launched in the fall of , Android 5. It made liberal use of lighting and shadow effects, among other things, to simulate a paper-like look for the Android user interface.

The UI also got some other upgrades, including a revamped navigation bar, rich notifications for the lock screen, and much more. The subsequent Android 5. This included official support for dual-SIM, HD Voice calls, and Device Protection to keep thieves locked out of your phone even after a factory reset.

Released in the fall of , Android 6. It included features such as a new vertically scrolling app drawer, along with Google Now on Tap, native support for fingerprint biometric unlocking, USB Type-C support, the introduction of Android Pay now Google Pay , and much more. Version 7. Google made a number of big changes behind the scenes too.

Google also used the release to make a bold push into the premium smartphone market. In March , Google officially announced and released the first developer preview for Android O, also known as Android 8. Before that release, Hiroshi Lockheimer, the senior vice president of Android at Google, posted a GIF of an Oreo cake on Twitter — the first solid hint that Oreo, the popular cookie, would indeed be the official codename for Android 8.

In August, Google confirmed the cookie-inspired public name for Android 8. It was the second time in which the company chose a trademarked name for Android Oreo is owned by Nabisco. In a break from its tradition, Google showed off the Android Oreo mascot statue for the first time in a press event in New York City, rather than at its Googleplex headquarters.

The statue depicts the Android mascot as a flying superhero, complete with a cape. As far as features go, Android Oreo packed in lots of visual changes to the Settings menu, along with native support for picture-in-picture mode, notification channels, new autofill APIs for better management of passwords and fill data, and much more.

Google launched the first developer preview of the next major Android update, Android 9. On August 6, , the company officially launched the final version of Android 9. Android 9. One of them ditched the traditional navigation buttons in favor of one elongated button in the center, which became the new home button. Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google.

It is based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software, and is designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In other words, Smartphones are computers, not just phones.

This year, OpenSignal counted more than 24, unique Android devices—both smartphones and tablets—on which its app has been installed. That is six times as many as in Actually, Android is Andy Rubin — coworkers at Apple gave him the nickname back in because of his love for robots. Authors have used the term android in more diverse ways than robot or cyborg.

In some fictional works, the difference between a robot and android is only their appearance, with androids being made to look like humans on the outside but with robot-like internal mechanics.

Android versions 1. Android made its official public debut in with Android 1. The Android 1. The first patent on a ballpoint pen was issued on October 30, , to John J Loud.