In this article, I'm explaining the concept of android.

What is Android?

·        Android is a mobile operating system (OS) based on Linux kernel and currently developed by Google. With a user interface based on Direct Manipulation, Android is designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, with specialized user interface televisions (Android TV) , cars (Android auto) , and wristwatches (Android Wear). 

·         OS uses touch inputs that loosely correspond to real-world actions, like swiping, tapping, pinching, and reverse pinching to manipulate on-screen objects, and a virtual Keyboard. 

·        It’s also widely used in game consoles , digital cameras,        regular PCs and other electronics 

·         Android is a software bunch comprising not only operating system but also middleware and key applications 

·         Android is the most widely used mobile device and, as of 2014, the highest selling OS overall. Android devices sell more than Windows, iOS, and Mac OS X devices combined

History of Android:

 Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto of California, U.S. by Andy Rubin, Rich miner, Nick sears and Chris White in 2003. Later Android Inc. was acquired by Google in 2005. After original release there have been number of updates in the original version of Android. 

Features of Android: 

Android comes with an Android market which is an online software store. It was developed by Google. It allows Android users to select, and download applications developed by third party developers and use them. There are around 2.0 lack+ games, application and widgets available on the market for users. 

Android applications are written in java programming language. Android is available as open source for developers to develop applications which can be further used for selling in android market. There are around 200000 applications developed for android with over 3 billion+ downloads. Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. For software development, Android provides Android SDK (Software development kit). 

Hardware’s that support Android are mainly based on ARM architecture platform. Some of the current features and specifications of android are:

Applications: 

These are the basics of Android applications: 

·         Android applications are composed of one or more application components (activities, services, content providers, and broadcast receivers).

·          Each component performs a different role in the overall application behavior, and each one can be activated individually (even by other applications).

·         The manifest file must declare all components in the application and should also declare all application requirements, such as the minimum version of Android required and any hardware configurations required

·          Non-code application resources (images, strings, layout files, etc.) should include alternatives for different device configurations (such as different strings for different languages 

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