Android is an operating system for mobile devices such as
cellular phones, tablet computers and netbooks. Android was developed by Google
and based upon the Linux kernel and GNU software. It was initially developed by
Android Inc. (a firm later purchased by Google) and lately by the Open Handset
Alliance. According to NPD Group, unit sales for Android OS smartphones ranked
second among all smartphone OS handsets sold in the U.S. in the first quarter
of 2010. BlackBerry OS holds 36% and iOS holds 21% ranked first and third
respectively with Android at second with 28%. A Nielsen report for the same
quarter placed Android in fourth place with 9% of the market.
Android has a large community of developers writing apps that
extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 70,000 apps
available for Android, which makes it the second most popular mobile
development target. Developers write managed code in the Java language,
controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.
The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007
was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of
71 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open
standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under
the Apache License, a free software and open source license.
The Android operating system software stack consists of Java
applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on
top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT
compilation. Libraries written in C include the surface manager, OpenCore[1]
media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D
graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics engine, SSL, and Bionic libc.
The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3
million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and
1.75 million lines of C++.
Source : XDA Developers
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