9 ms·

The history of Android: The endless iterations of Google’s mobile OS

101 points by ismavis 12y ago

geerlingguy 12y ago
Unlike some of Ars' other epic history articles, this one didn't really get me too excited. It seemed pretty screenshot-heavy, thin on technical details (especially the 'why's behind version-to-version changes, the 'who's behind the original and ongoing development, etc.). Most of the information is nice to know, but the story really remains to be told. This article is far from a Sircusa Mac OS X review (which I usually spend at least an hour reading every year). In the end, the article reminded me more of a journal of someone's spelunking adventure rather than a personal story with an interesting slant, so I felt less inclined to power through the last few pages.
- bobbles 12y ago
  I'm really glad that this article has been put together just to at least have some idea of the way things were. If they are planning to keep this updated as android evolves I really hope they go back to each of these previous versions and give a bit more context around the industry at the time. There are certain comments in there generalizing around 'people weren't ready for xxx' but they obviously were as other OSs had the functionality at the time.
msoad 12y ago
I strongly believe Google will replace ChromeOS with Android some day. ChromeOS compared to Android "Just Works™". I'm usually an iPhone user but I am very curious about Android so often make the switch. Last time I switched to Galaxy Nexus my experience was not so good. Battery life and UI smoothness was far from iPhone. I switched back to iPhone. This time I switched to Android via a Nexus 5. Battery life is still not acceptable and many times I experienced things not working. Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don't want to do on my phone. Specially when I'm trying to get around or find a very urgent information. I'm going to switch to iPhone with next release and wait for an operation system from Google that work as good as Chrome or iPhone.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  Not going to happen. Android is phenomenal success and needs no messing with. It will spread from tablets and handsets to TVs, cameras, cars, appliances, etc. Android will have a multi-decades dominance like Windows had, but spread across more different touchscreen hardware platforms. Chrome OS is doing a brilliant job soaking up Windows refugees with a laptop/netbook form factor, where you have a touchpad or other pointing device, so you don't have to make the Web finger-touchable, which it isn't. People will try to mix the two, but there is no point. EDIT: Yes I know TV isn't touch, but it is a d-pad/select style of interaction, which Android always supported, even before touch.
  - MarkMc 12y ago
    Android on TV may be d-pad/select style, but many Android apps aren't. For example, the Australian public broadcaster ABC produces an Android app called iView, but it is almost unusable on an Android set-top box without a mouse.
    - Zigurd 12y ago
      Sadly, that's correct. Those apps should declare that limitation in their manifests. Which would in the case you cite lead to a TV app not being offered to TV devices. Botches like that are mostly due to buying cheapass, low-bidder implementations that don't implement the d-pad navigation methods in custom View classes. Actually, it's pretty difficult to avoid inheriting the default method implementations so the deficiency is probably mostly in not handling the highlighting and selection methods. Shoddy!
- rayiner 12y ago
  I think Android benefits from the general Google halo effect, but it just isn't very good. It's OK, in the same way Windows 98 was OK. My Nexus 5 has been buggier than my Lumia 620 or the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4 I had before that. Just little things: messed up text boxes in Chrome, app hangs in Chrome, etc. Some random bad design: if you turn off location services, which I do because of the marginal battery life, Maps will just sit around waiting for a location--it won't tell you to turn it on in the preferences. Its not the reliable appliance I want it to be. I have a regimented weekday schedule, and by midday I could be on my last legs battery wise, or still have half a tank. For some reason, I have a Gallery app as well as a Photos app. Of course, it'll continue to be popular because it's free. It's fine. It's just not that great. I too am back on the iPhone when they come out with bigger screens.
wallflower 12y ago
One thing that you have to respect about Google and Android, like a constantly changing (dare we say gentrifying and revitalizing) urban neighborhood - they aren't afraid to try new things, tear down old things, invest, and divest. John Gruber had a much favorited tweet during WWDC that he revisited in his blog. "Microsoft: one OS for all devices. Apple: one continuous experience across all devices. That tweet was massively popular,1 but I missed a word: across all Apple devices. Microsoft and Google are the ones who are more similarly focused. Microsoft wants you to run Windows on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs. Google wants you signed into Google services on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs." http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/only_apple http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/only_apple
- Zigurd 12y ago
  The article is much about look and not enough about what makes Android different. The two biggest changes in Android were the Fragment class and a greater emphasis on multiple layouts to scale UIs across many screen geometries, and Google Play Services. Outwardly, Android looks much much prettier. But it's the same Home app, with an evolved but fundamentally the same AppWidget architecture under that prettier face. Android's core features, like AIDL-based IPC, Intent and filters for Intent types, and ContentProvider have been remarkably stable and constant. And they have been under-appreciated and under-exploited, with the exception of ACTION_SEND intents for the "Share" menu. Too few apps expose an API or expose their data through a ContentProvider. Too few apps provide Intent matching for actions other than ACTION_SEND.
sharpneli 12y ago
I got a massive nostalgy rush out of the 0.5 screenshots. When I was summer intern at Nokia back in 2007 we installed android beta version into N800 (the small Linux tablet by Nokia). And for maximum amount of trolling we even taped the text "gPhone" in it (iPhone had just been released). This was absolutely non official but hey. It was fun! The actual port was made by someone at maemo forums so we didn't even waste too much work hours on it.
higherpurpose 12y ago
I really hope Android 5.0 is coming out at I/O. It's a bit overdue. Google usually pushes major .0 revisions every 2 years. 2.0 in 2009. 4.0 in 2011, and 5.0 in 2013...NOT. It's 2014 and no 5.0 in sight, except for a very weak rumor about the date on a Nexus phone being 5:00. If they wait until fall this year, it would be 3 years for the 5.0 release, just as much as for a typical Windows release, which I find pretty ridiculous considering Android isn't even trying to work on all devices out there before it's released. Hopefully Google will release it soon, otherwise I'll be very disappointed.
- nly 12y ago
  From what I've read, the general hypothesis is that Goog will likely stick with 4.x numbering for some time. Imho they'll switch to 5.x when they decide to drop support for ~2012 Nexus devices (Nexus 4, Nexus 7 etc).
- koyote 12y ago
  What would you want in a 5.0? I feel the OS has been updated a lot in the last year or two but mostly by app updates as Google is now moving a lot of their stock Android apps to the play store. Much sought after features like a tighter Hangouts/Voice/Sms integration would 'only' need an app upgrade as opposed to a new OS.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    I'd like the enterprisy features that Samsung is shipping, without dealing with a Samsung-only bolt on technology.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  To be honest, there have only been two major relevant Android versions; 2.x and 4.x. Under 4.x, they realised that getting updates to devices (where they had to rely on phone manufacturers) just wasn't dependable, and they overhauled both their OS's architecture (moving most services out of the core OS into Google Play Services) and their release system (allowing for over-the-air updates without the phone manufacturers' intervention). So unless they've rebuilt Android from the ground up, I doubt they're going to do a 5.0.
serge2k 12y ago
> The Play Store, for instance, has had five major redesigns in five years. Is that a good thing?
segmondy 12y ago
Very great article, and yet quite sad and scary. You can grab an old apple ][ and run programs from 30years ago! If you can get access to a PDP computer, you can run programs from 40 years ago on it! Or even the emulator. You are not going to be able to run your favorite andorid programs 10-20years from now. Just the other day, a link was posted on here about how to get a Lisp machine running in your Linux. I downloaded the binary and some source and got one up and running about 2 years ago. To be able to time travel to the past and explore what has been done without just reading about it is a great experience. With the mobile eco system, we are going to miss out on this. There are going to be great programs that will be written and then rot away with time never to be recovered. Quite sad if you ask me.
- th0ma5 12y ago
  I don't see why you couldn't run your favorite Android programs in an emulator 10-20 years from now?
  - geerlingguy 12y ago
    Because many of the apps require connections to deprecated (and usually non-working) Google APIs to even start up. Thus the white screens, crashes, etc., as mentioned in the article. If you can find a way to emulate Google's infrastructure and services circa 2007, and redirect all your DNS traffic to this local infrastructure setup, then you may be able to run the apps in an emulator. But it's more effort than it's worth :(
    - th0ma5 12y ago
      Oh I see, well from that perspective quite a lot of things will go away, like I probably won't be able to emulate Gmail, $ing, all kinds of stuff, probably in 50 years. That doesn't seem to be a particularly Android specific issue.
      - segmondy 12y ago
        gmail doesn't belong to you. With android, you wouldn't be able to run your own code without much effort/porting to new platforms. If you wrote a game for the amiga or apple, and still have the original machine, you can still run your own code. There are programs being used today that are 30+ years old which serve their purpose. This will be used to force extinction of programs.
mattquiros 12y ago
"I'd like to tell you about something I'm really excited about. It's called Android." My first reaction was, "Haha, no shit." And then it gave me goosebumps to realize how it's just seven years ago but so much has happened.

101 points by ismavis 12y ago

Unlike some of Ars' other epic history articles, this one didn't really get me too excited. It seemed pretty screenshot-heavy, thin on technical details (especially the 'why's behind version-to-version changes, the 'who's behind the original and ongoing development, etc.). Most of the information is nice to know, but the story really remains to be told. This article is far from a Sircusa Mac OS X review (which I usually spend at least an hour reading every year). In the end, the article reminded me more of a journal of someone's spelunking adventure rather than a personal story with an interesting slant, so I felt less inclined to power through the last few pages.

bobbles 12y ago
I'm really glad that this article has been put together just to at least have some idea of the way things were. If they are planning to keep this updated as android evolves I really hope they go back to each of these previous versions and give a bit more context around the industry at the time. There are certain comments in there generalizing around 'people weren't ready for xxx' but they obviously were as other OSs had the functionality at the time.

msoad 12y ago

I strongly believe Google will replace ChromeOS with Android some day. ChromeOS compared to Android "Just Works™". I'm usually an iPhone user but I am very curious about Android so often make the switch. Last time I switched to Galaxy Nexus my experience was not so good. Battery life and UI smoothness was far from iPhone. I switched back to iPhone. This time I switched to Android via a Nexus 5. Battery life is still not acceptable and many times I experienced things not working. Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don't want to do on my phone. Specially when I'm trying to get around or find a very urgent information. I'm going to switch to iPhone with next release and wait for an operation system from Google that work as good as Chrome or iPhone.

Zigurd 12y ago
Not going to happen. Android is phenomenal success and needs no messing with. It will spread from tablets and handsets to TVs, cameras, cars, appliances, etc. Android will have a multi-decades dominance like Windows had, but spread across more different touchscreen hardware platforms. Chrome OS is doing a brilliant job soaking up Windows refugees with a laptop/netbook form factor, where you have a touchpad or other pointing device, so you don't have to make the Web finger-touchable, which it isn't. People will try to mix the two, but there is no point. EDIT: Yes I know TV isn't touch, but it is a d-pad/select style of interaction, which Android always supported, even before touch.
- MarkMc 12y ago
  Android on TV may be d-pad/select style, but many Android apps aren't. For example, the Australian public broadcaster ABC produces an Android app called iView, but it is almost unusable on an Android set-top box without a mouse.
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    Sadly, that's correct. Those apps should declare that limitation in their manifests. Which would in the case you cite lead to a TV app not being offered to TV devices. Botches like that are mostly due to buying cheapass, low-bidder implementations that don't implement the d-pad navigation methods in custom View classes. Actually, it's pretty difficult to avoid inheriting the default method implementations so the deficiency is probably mostly in not handling the highlighting and selection methods. Shoddy!
rayiner 12y ago
I think Android benefits from the general Google halo effect, but it just isn't very good. It's OK, in the same way Windows 98 was OK. My Nexus 5 has been buggier than my Lumia 620 or the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4 I had before that. Just little things: messed up text boxes in Chrome, app hangs in Chrome, etc. Some random bad design: if you turn off location services, which I do because of the marginal battery life, Maps will just sit around waiting for a location--it won't tell you to turn it on in the preferences. Its not the reliable appliance I want it to be. I have a regimented weekday schedule, and by midday I could be on my last legs battery wise, or still have half a tank. For some reason, I have a Gallery app as well as a Photos app. Of course, it'll continue to be popular because it's free. It's fine. It's just not that great. I too am back on the iPhone when they come out with bigger screens.

wallflower 12y ago

One thing that you have to respect about Google and Android, like a constantly changing (dare we say gentrifying and revitalizing) urban neighborhood - they aren't afraid to try new things, tear down old things, invest, and divest. John Gruber had a much favorited tweet during WWDC that he revisited in his blog. "Microsoft: one OS for all devices. Apple: one continuous experience across all devices. That tweet was massively popular,1 but I missed a word: across all Apple devices. Microsoft and Google are the ones who are more similarly focused. Microsoft wants you to run Windows on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs. Google wants you signed into Google services on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs." http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/only_apple http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/only_apple

Zigurd 12y ago
The article is much about look and not enough about what makes Android different. The two biggest changes in Android were the Fragment class and a greater emphasis on multiple layouts to scale UIs across many screen geometries, and Google Play Services. Outwardly, Android looks much much prettier. But it's the same Home app, with an evolved but fundamentally the same AppWidget architecture under that prettier face. Android's core features, like AIDL-based IPC, Intent and filters for Intent types, and ContentProvider have been remarkably stable and constant. And they have been under-appreciated and under-exploited, with the exception of ACTION_SEND intents for the "Share" menu. Too few apps expose an API or expose their data through a ContentProvider. Too few apps provide Intent matching for actions other than ACTION_SEND.

sharpneli 12y ago

I got a massive nostalgy rush out of the 0.5 screenshots. When I was summer intern at Nokia back in 2007 we installed android beta version into N800 (the small Linux tablet by Nokia). And for maximum amount of trolling we even taped the text "gPhone" in it (iPhone had just been released). This was absolutely non official but hey. It was fun! The actual port was made by someone at maemo forums so we didn't even waste too much work hours on it.

higherpurpose 12y ago

I really hope Android 5.0 is coming out at I/O. It's a bit overdue. Google usually pushes major .0 revisions every 2 years. 2.0 in 2009. 4.0 in 2011, and 5.0 in 2013...NOT. It's 2014 and no 5.0 in sight, except for a very weak rumor about the date on a Nexus phone being 5:00. If they wait until fall this year, it would be 3 years for the 5.0 release, just as much as for a typical Windows release, which I find pretty ridiculous considering Android isn't even trying to work on all devices out there before it's released. Hopefully Google will release it soon, otherwise I'll be very disappointed.

nly 12y ago
From what I've read, the general hypothesis is that Goog will likely stick with 4.x numbering for some time. Imho they'll switch to 5.x when they decide to drop support for ~2012 Nexus devices (Nexus 4, Nexus 7 etc).
koyote 12y ago
What would you want in a 5.0? I feel the OS has been updated a lot in the last year or two but mostly by app updates as Google is now moving a lot of their stock Android apps to the play store. Much sought after features like a tighter Hangouts/Voice/Sms integration would 'only' need an app upgrade as opposed to a new OS.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  I'd like the enterprisy features that Samsung is shipping, without dealing with a Samsung-only bolt on technology.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
To be honest, there have only been two major relevant Android versions; 2.x and 4.x. Under 4.x, they realised that getting updates to devices (where they had to rely on phone manufacturers) just wasn't dependable, and they overhauled both their OS's architecture (moving most services out of the core OS into Google Play Services) and their release system (allowing for over-the-air updates without the phone manufacturers' intervention). So unless they've rebuilt Android from the ground up, I doubt they're going to do a 5.0.

serge2k 12y ago

> The Play Store, for instance, has had five major redesigns in five years. Is that a good thing?

segmondy 12y ago

Very great article, and yet quite sad and scary. You can grab an old apple ][ and run programs from 30years ago! If you can get access to a PDP computer, you can run programs from 40 years ago on it! Or even the emulator. You are not going to be able to run your favorite andorid programs 10-20years from now. Just the other day, a link was posted on here about how to get a Lisp machine running in your Linux. I downloaded the binary and some source and got one up and running about 2 years ago. To be able to time travel to the past and explore what has been done without just reading about it is a great experience. With the mobile eco system, we are going to miss out on this. There are going to be great programs that will be written and then rot away with time never to be recovered. Quite sad if you ask me.

th0ma5 12y ago
I don't see why you couldn't run your favorite Android programs in an emulator 10-20 years from now?
- geerlingguy 12y ago
  Because many of the apps require connections to deprecated (and usually non-working) Google APIs to even start up. Thus the white screens, crashes, etc., as mentioned in the article. If you can find a way to emulate Google's infrastructure and services circa 2007, and redirect all your DNS traffic to this local infrastructure setup, then you may be able to run the apps in an emulator. But it's more effort than it's worth :(
  - th0ma5 12y ago
    Oh I see, well from that perspective quite a lot of things will go away, like I probably won't be able to emulate Gmail, $ing, all kinds of stuff, probably in 50 years. That doesn't seem to be a particularly Android specific issue.
    - segmondy 12y ago
      gmail doesn't belong to you. With android, you wouldn't be able to run your own code without much effort/porting to new platforms. If you wrote a game for the amiga or apple, and still have the original machine, you can still run your own code. There are programs being used today that are 30+ years old which serve their purpose. This will be used to force extinction of programs.

mattquiros 12y ago

"I'd like to tell you about something I'm really excited about. It's called Android." My first reaction was, "Haha, no shit." And then it gave me goosebumps to realize how it's just seven years ago but so much has happened.