A Report On

History Of Android

By Aryasheel Jadhav (12ET7001)

A report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the subject Business Communication and Ethics in semester V.

To be submitted to:Ms. Nisha Narwani-Electronics and Telecommunications Department19 September, 2014

PrefaceThe main objective of this report is to track the progress of Android from its early development stages to the dominant mobile operating system that it is today. We will look into the decisions and events that made the OS what it is today, from the earlier models that relied on hardware buttons to adopting the touchscreen interface. We will also consider how other events in the tech world and Googles own ideas and ambitions shaped up the OS. Some important technical and design philosophies that were adopted through out the course of Android are also included to give an in-depth knowledge of the platform.

AcknowledgementI would like to thank my teacher Ms. Nisha Narwani for giving me this opportunity to write the report, our HOD Mr. Dongre for granting permission to use college facilities for making the report, my friends and classmates and group members for assisting me throughout and last but not the least my parents for lending me support to create this report.

Table of Contents Android 0.5 Milestone 3the first public build Android 0.5 Milestone 5the land of scrapped interfaces Android 0.9 Betahey, this looks familiar! Android 1.0introducingGoogle Apps and actual hardware Android 1.1the first truly incremental update Android 1.5 Cupcakea virtual keyboard opens up device design Android 1.6 DonutCDMA support brings Android to any carrier Android 2.0 clairblowing up the GPS industry The Nexus Oneenter the Google Phone Android 2.1the discovery (and abuse) of animations Android 2.2 Froyofaster and Flash-ier Android 2.3 Gingerbreadthe first major UI overhaul Android 3.0 Honeycombtablets and a design renaissance Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwichthe modern era Android 4.1 Jelly BeanGoogle Now points toward the future Android 4.2 Jelly Beannew Nexus devices, new tablet interface Android 4.3 Jelly Beangetting wearable support out early Android 4.4 KitKatmore polish; less memory usage Today - Android everywhere

Abstract

HISTORY OF ANDROID

Android has been with us in one form or another for more than six years. During that time, we've seen an absolutely breathtaking rate of change unlike any other development cycle that has ever existed. When it came time for Google to dive in to the smartphone wars, the company took its rapid-iteration, Web-style update cycle and applied it to an operating system, and the result has been an onslaught of continual improvement. Lately, Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that's slower than it used to be. For the first year of Androids commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version every two-and-a-half months.

The rest of the industry, by comparison, moves at a snail's pace. Microsoft updates its desktop OS every three to five years, and Apple is on a yearly update cycle for OS X and iOS. Not every update is created equal, either. iOS has one major design revision in seven years, and the newest version of Windows Phone 8 looks very similar to Windows Phone 7. On Android, however, users are lucky if anything looks the same this year as it did last year. The Play Store, for instance, has had five major redesigns in five years. For Android, that's normal.

Before we go diving into Android on real hardware, we're going to start with the early, early days of Android. While 1.0 was the first version to ship on hardware, there were several beta versions only released in emulator form with the SDK. The emulators were meant for development purposes only, so they dont include any of the Google Apps, or even many core OS apps. Still, theyre our best look into the pre-release days of Android.

Before whimsical candy code names and cross-promotional deals with multinational food corporations, the first public release of Android was labeled "m3-rc20a""m3" standing for "Milestone 3." While Google may not have publicized the version numberand this build didn't even have a settings app to checkthe browser user agent identifies this as "Android 0.5."In November 2007, two years after Google acquired Android and five months after the launch of the iPhone, Android was announced, and the first emulator was released. Back then, the OSwas still getting its feet under it. It was easily dismissed as "just a BlackBerry clone." The emulator used a qwerty-bar skin with a 320x240 display,replicating an actual prototype device. The device was built by HTC, and it seems to be the device that was codenamed "Sooner" according to many early Android accounts. But the Sooner was never released to market.According to accounts of the early development days of Android, when Apple finally showed off its revolutionary smartphone in January 2007, Google had to "start over" with Androidincluding scrapping the Sooner. Considering the Milestone 3 emulator came out almost a year after Apple's iPhone unveiling, it's surprising to see the device interface still closely mimicked the Blackberry model instead. While work had no doubt been done on the underlying system during that year of post-iPhone development, the emulator still launched with whatwas perceived as an"old school" interface. It didn't make a good first impression.

In November 2007, two years after Google acquired Android and five months after the launch of the iPhone, Android was announced, and the first emulator was released. Back then, the OSwas still getting its feet under it. It was easily dismissed as "just a BlackBerry clone." The emulator used a qwerty-bar skin with a 320x240 display,replicating an actual prototype device. The device was built by HTC, and it seems to be the device that was codenamed "Sooner" according to many early Android accounts. But the Sooner was never released to market.According to accounts of the early development days of Android, when Apple finally showed off its revolutionary smartphone in January 2007, Google had to "start over" with Androidincluding scrapping the Sooner. Considering the Milestone 3 emulator came out almost a year after Apple's iPhone unveiling, it's surprising to see the device interface still closely mimicked the Blackberry model instead. While work had no doubt been done on the underlying system during that year of post-iPhone development, the emulator still launched with whatwas perceived as an"old school" interface. It didn't make a good first impression.At this early stage, it seems like the Android button layout had not been finalized yet. While the first commercial Android devices would use Home," Back," Menu," and Search" as the standard set of buttons, the emulator had a blank space marked as an "X" where you would expect the search button to be. The Sooner" hardware prototype was even strangerit had a star symbol as the fourth button.In November 2007, two years after Google acquired Android and five months after the launch of the iPhone, Android was announced, and the first emulator was released. Back then, the OSwas still getting its feet under it. It was easily dismissed as "just a BlackBerry clone." The emulator used a qwerty-bar skin with a 320x240 display,replicating an actual prototype device. The device was built by HTC, and it seems to be the device that was codenamed "Sooner" according to many early Android accounts. But the Sooner was never released to market.According to accounts of the early development days of Android, when Apple finally showed off its revolutionary smartphone in January 2007, Google had to "start over" with Androidincluding scrapping the Sooner. Considering the Milestone 3 emulator came out almost a year after Apple's iPhone unveiling, it's surprising to see the device interface still closely mimicked the Blackberry model instead. While work had no doubt been done on the underlying system during that year of post-iPhone development, the emulator still launched with whatwas perceived as an"old school" interface. It didn't make a good first impression.At this early stage, it seems like the Android button layout had not been finalized yet. While the first commercial Android devices would use Home," Back," Menu," and Search" as the standard set of buttons, the emulator had a blank space marked as an "X" where you would expect the search button to be. The Sooner" hardware prototype was even strangerit had a star symbol as the fourth button.

Surprisingly, multitasking and background applications already worked in Milestone 3. Leaving an app didn't close itapps would save state, even down to text left in a text box. This was a feature iOS wouldnt get around to matching until the release of iOS 4 in 2010, and it really showed the difference between the two platforms. iOS was originally meant to be a closed platform with no third-party apps, so the platform robustness wasnt a huge focus. Android was built from the ground up to be a powerful app platform, and ease of app development was one of the driving forces behind its creation. Googles platform strategy eventually won out, and iOS ended up slowly adding many of these app-centric featuresmultitasking, cross-app sharing, and an app switcherlater on.Incoming calls were displayed as an almost-full-screen popup with a sweet transparent background. Once inside a call, the background becamedark gray, and Milestone 3 presented the user with a surprisingly advanced feature set: mute, speakerphone, hold, and call conferencing buttons. Multiple calls were presented as overlapping, semi-transparent cards, and usershadoptions to swap or merge calls. Swapping calls triggered a nice little card shuffle animation.The browser ranWebkit 419.3, which put it in the same era as Mac OS X 10.4's Safari 2. The homepage was not Google.com, but a hard-coded home.html file included with Android. It looked like Google.com from a thousand years ago. The browser's OS X heritage was still visible, rendering browser buttons with a glossy, Aqua-style search button.From the beginning, Google knew maps would be important on mobile, even shipping a Maps client on the Milestone 5 emulator. Thatversion of Google Maps wasthe first thing we came across that died from cloud rot. The client can't load information from Googles servers, so the map displayed as a blank, gray grid. Nothing works.Hidden behind the menu were options for search, directions, and satellite and traffic layers. The middle screenshot is of the directions UI, where you could even pick a contact address as a start or end address. Maps lackedany kind of GPS integration, however; you can't find a"my location" button anywhere.While there was no proper gallery, on the right is a test view for a gallery, which was hidden in the "API Demos" app. The pictures scrolled left and right, but there was no way to open photos to a full screen view. There wereno photo management options either. It was essentiallya test of a scrolling picture viewThere was also no settings app, but we can look at the original time and date pickers, thanks to the API Demos. This demonstrates howraw a lot of Android was: kerning issues all over the place, ahuge gap in between the minute digits, and unevenly spaced days of the week on the calendar. While the time picker let you change each digit independently, there was no way to change months or years other than moving the day block out of the current month and on to the next or previous month.Keep in mind that while this may seem like dinosaur remnants from some forgotten era, this was only released six years ago. We tend to get used to the pace of technology. It's easy to look back on stuff like this and think that it was from 20 years ago. Compare this late-2007 timeframe to desktop OSes, and Microsoftwastrying to sell Windows Vista to the world for almost a year, and Apple just released OS X 10.5 Leopard.Android 0.5, Milestone 5the land of scrapped interfacesThe first major Android change came three months after the first emulator release: the "m5-rc14" build. Released in February 2008, Milestone 5" dumped the stretched-out BlackBerry interface and went with a totally revamped designGoogle's first attempt at a finger-friendly interface.This build was still identified as "Android 0.5" in the browser user agent string, but Milestone 5 couldn't be more different from the first release of Android. Several core Android features can directly trace their lineage back to this version. The layout and functionality of the notification panel was almost ready to ship, and, other than a style change, the menu was present in its final form, too. Android 1.0 was only eight months away from shipping, and the basics of an OS were starting to form.One thing that was definitely not in its final form was the home screen. It was an unconfigurable, single-screen wallpaper with an app drawer and dock. App icons were bubbly, three-color affairs, surrounded by a square, white background with rounded corners. The app drawer consisted of an "All" button in the lower-right corner, and tapping on it expanded the list of apps out to the left. Above the "All" button was a two icon dock where "Contacts" and "Dialer" were given permanent home screen real estate. The four blocks above that were an early version of Recent Apps, showing the last apps accessed. With no left or right screens and a whole column taken up by the dock and recent apps, this layout only allowed for 21 app squares before the screen would be filled. The emulator still only sported the bare-minimum app selection, but in an actual device, this design didn't appear likeit would work well.Holding down the "end call" button brought up a super early version of the power menu, which you can see in the rightmost picture. Google didn't have the normal smartphone nomenclature down yet: "Turn Off Screen" would best be described as "Lock screen" (although there was no lock screen) and "Turn Off Radio" would be called "Airplane mode"today.All the way back in Milestone 5, Google had the basics of the notification panel nailed down. It pulled down from the top of the screen just like it does on any modern smartphone.Current notifications displayed ina list. The first version of the notification panel was an opaque white sheet with a ribbed handle" on the bottom andan orange dot in the center. Notifications were pressable, opening the appropriate app for that notification. No one bothered to vertically align the app icons in this list, but that's OK. This wasgone in the next update.The artwork in Milestone 5 was all new. The app icons were redrawn, and the menu switched from a boring BlackBerry-style text list to full-color, cartoony icons on a large grid. The notification panel icons switched from simple, sharp, white icons to a bubbly green design. There was now a strange black line under the signal bar indicatorwith no apparentpurpose. The tiny list view from earlier builds really wasn'tusable with a finger, so Milestone 5 came with an overall beefier layout.The in-call interface looked normal but made zero sense in practice. Today, to stop your face from pressing buttons while on a call, phones have proximity sensors that turn the screen off when the sensor detects something. Milestone 5 didnt support proximity sensors, though. Googles haphazard solution was to disable the entire touch screen duringa call. At the same time, the in-call screen was clearly overhauled for touch. There were big, finger-friendly buttons;you just couldn't touch anything.Google Maps still didn'twork, but thelittle UI we accessed sawsignificant updates. You couldpick map layers, although there were only two to choose from: Satellite and Traffic. The top-aligned search interface strangely hid the status bar, while the bottom-aligned directions didn'thide the status bar. Direction's enter button was labeled with "Go," and Search's enter button was labeled with a weird curvy arrow. The list goes on and demonstrates old school Android at its worst: two functions in the same app that should look and work similarly, but these were implemented as complete opposites.Android 0.9, Betahey, this looks familiar!Six months after Milestone 5, in August 2008, Android 0.9 was released. While the Android 0.5 milestone builds were "early looks," by now 1.0 was only two months away. Thus, Android 0.9 was labeled "beta." On the other side of the aisle, Apple already released its second version of the iPhonethe iPhone 3Ga month prior. The second-gen iPhone broughta second-gen iPhone OS. Apple also launched the App Store and was already taking app submissions. Google had a lot of catching up to do.Google threw out a lot of the UI introduced in Milestone 5. All the artwork was redone again in full-color, and the white square icon backgrounds were tossed. While still an emulator build, 0.9 offered something thatlooked familiar when compared to a released version of Android. Android 0.9 had a working desktop-style home screen, a proper app drawer, multiple home screens, a lot more apps, and fully functional (first-party only) widgets.Milestone 5 seemingly had no plan for someone installing more than 21 apps, but Android 0.9 had a vertically scrolling app drawer accessible via a gray tab at the bottom of the screen. Back then, the app drawer was actually a drawer. Besides acting as a button, the gray tab could be pulled up the screen and would follow your finger, just like how the notification panel can be pulled down. There wereadditional apps like Alarm Clock, Calculator, Music, Pictures, Messaging, and Camera.0.9 is a reminder that Google was not the design powerhouse it is today. In fact,some of the design work for Android was farmed out to other companies at the time. You can see one sign of this in the clock widget, which contains the text MALMO," the home town of design firm The Astonishing Tribe.0.9 was also the first Android version to have OS-level copy/paste support. Long pressing on any text box would bring up a dialog allowing you to save or recall text from the clipboard. iOS didn't support copy/paste until almost two years later, so for a while, this was one of Android's big differentiatorsand the source of many Internet arguments.Android 0.9 was really starting to show its maturity. The home screen had a full set of menu items, including a settings option (although it didn't work yet) and a search button (because Google likes it when you search). The menu design was already in the final form that would last until Android 2.3 swapped it to black.Long pressing on the hardware home button broughtup a 3x2 grid of recent apps, a design that would stick around until the release of Android 3.0.Android 0.9 featured a lock screen, albeit a very basic one. The black and gray lock screen had no on-screen method of unlockingyou neededto hit the hardware menu button.While it's hard to separate emulator and OS functionality, Android 0.9 was the first version to show off horizontal support. Surprisingly, almost everything supported horizontal mode, and 0.9 even outperforms KitKat in some respects. In KitKat, the home screen and dialer are locked to portrait mode and cannot rotate. Here, though, horizontal support wasn't a problem for either app. (Anyone know how to upgrade a Nexus 5 from KitKat to 0.9?)This screenshot also shows off the new volume design used in 0.9. Itdumped the old bell-style control that debuted in Milestone 3. It was a massive, screen-filling interface. Eventually,the redesign in Android 4.0 made it a bit smaller, but it remained an issue. (It'sextremely annoying to not be able to see a video just because you want to bump up the volume.)In just about every Android version, the notification panel gets tweaked, and 0.9 was no exception. The battery indicator was redrawn and changed to a darker shade of green, and the other status bar icons switched to black, white, and gray. The left area of the status bar was brilliantly repurposed to show the date when the panel was open.A new top section was added to the notification panel that would display the carrier name ("Android" in the case of the emulator) and a huge button labeled "Clear notifications," which allowed you to finally remove a notification without having to open it.The browser now loaded an actual website for the home page instead of the locally stored faux-Google of Milestone 5. The WebKit version roseup to 525.10, but it didn'tseem to render the modern Google.com search button correctly. All throughout Android 0.9, the menu art from Milestone 5 was trashed and redrawn as gray icons. The difference between these screens is pretty significant, as all the color has been sucked out.The "more" list-style menu grew a little taller, and it was now just a plain list with no icons. Android 0.9 gained yet another search method, this time in the browser menu. Along with the home screen widget, home screen menu button, and browser homepage, that made four search boxes.Google never hid what its primebusiness was, even in its OS.Dialer and Contacts in Android 0.9 wereactually the same appthe two icons just opened different tabs. Attaching contacts to the dialer like this suggested the primary purpose of a smartphone contact was stillfor calls, not to text, e-mail, IM, or look up an address. Eventually Google would fully embrace alternative smartphone communications and split up contacts and dialer into separate apps.Tapping on the number display in Android 0.9 would start a call. This wasimportant, as it was a big step in getting rid of the hardware "Call" and "End" keys on Android devices. The incoming call screen, on the other hand, went in the complete opposite direction and removed the on-screen Answer" and Decline" buttons present in Android 0.5. Google would spend the next few versions fumbling around between needing and not needing hardware call buttons on certain screens. With Android 2.0 and the Motorola Droid, though, call buttons were finally made optional.All of the options for the in-call screen were hidden under the menu button. Milestone 5 didn't support a proximity sensor, so it took the brute force route of disabling the touch screen during a call. 0.9 was developed for the G1, which had a proximity sensor. Finally, Google didn't have to kill the touch sensor during a call.Android 0.9 gave us the first look at the Alarm and Calculator apps. The alarm app featured a plain analog clock with a scrolling list of alarms on the bottom.The calculator was an all-black app with glossy, round buttons. Through the menu, it was possible to bring up an additional panel with advanced functions. Again consistency was not Googles strong suit. The on-press highlight on the pi keywasredin the rest of Android 0.9, the on-press highlight wasusually orange. In fact, everything used in the calculator was100 percent custom artwork limited to only the calculator.Android 0.9 also gaveus our first look at the texting app, called "Messaging." Like many early Android designs, Messaging wasn't sure if it should be a dark app or a light app. The first visible screen wasthe message list, a stark black void of nothingness that looked like it was built on top of the settings interface. After tapping on New Message" or one of the existing conversations, though, you were taken to a white and blue scrolling list of text messages. The two connected screens couldnt be more different.Android 0.9 was the first to bring a music app to Android. The primary screen was mostly just four big, chunky navigation buttons that would take you to each music view. At the bottom of the app was a "now playing" bar that only contained the track name, artist, and a play/pause button. The song list had onlya bare minimum interface, only showing the song name, artist, album and runtime. Album art was the only hope of seeing any color in this app. It was displayed as a tiny thumbnail in the album view and as a big, quarter-screen image in the Now Playing view.Android 0.9 came out a mere two months before the first commercial release of Android. That was just enough time for app developers to make sure their apps workedand for Google to do some testing and bug squashing before the big release.Android 1.0introducingGoogle Apps and actual hardwareBy October 2008, Android 1.0 was ready for launch, and the OS debuted on the T-Mobile G1 (AKA the HTC Dream). The G1 was released into a market dominated by the iPhone 3G and the Nokia 1680 classic.(Both of those phones wenton to tie for the best selling phone of 2008, selling 35 million units each.) Hard numbers of G1 sales are tough to come by, but T-Mobile announced the device broke the one million units sold barrier in April 2009. It was way behind the competition byany measure.The G1 was packing a single-core 528Mhz ARM 11 processor, an Adreno 130 GPU, 192MB of RAM, and a whopping 256MB of storage for the OS and Apps. It had a 3.2-inch, 320x480 display, which was mounted to a sliding mechanism that revealed a full hardware keyboard. So whileAndroid software has certainly come a long way, the hardware has, too. Today, we can get much better specs than this in a watch form factor: the latest Samsung smart watchhas 512MB of RAM and a 1GHz dual-core processor.While the iPhone had a minimal amount of buttons, the G1 was the complete opposite, sporting almost every hardware control that was everinvented. It had call and end call buttons, home, back, and menu buttons, a shutter button for the camera, a volume rocker, a trackball, and, of course, about 50 keyboard buttons. Future Android devices would slowly back away from thousand-button interfaces, with nearly every new flagship lessening the number of buttons.But forthe first time, people sawAndroid running on actual hardware instead of afrustratingly slow emulator. Android 1.0 didn't have the smoothness, flare, or press coverage of the iPhone. It wasn't even as capable as Windows Mobile 6.5. Still, it was a good start.The core of Android 1.0 didn't look significantly different from the beta version released two months earlier, but the consumer product brought a ton more apps, including the full suite of Google apps. Calendar, Email, Gmail, IM, Market, Settings, Voice Dialer, and YouTube were all new. At the time, music was the dominant media type on smartphones, the king of which was the iTunes music store. Google didn't have an in-house music service of its own, so it tapped Amazon and bundled the Amazon MP3 store.The most important addition to Android 1.0 was the debut of Google's store, called "Android Market Beta." While most companies were content with calling their app catalog some variant of "app store"meaning a store that sold apps and only appsGoogle had much wider ambitions. It went with the much more general name of "Android Market." The idea was that the Android Market would not just house apps, but everything you needed for your Android device.At the time, the Android Market only offered apps and games, and developers weren't even able to charge for them. Apple's App Store had a four-month head start on the Android Market, but Google's big differentiator was that Android's store was almost completely open. On the iPhone, apps were subject to review by Apple and had to meet design and technical guidelines. Potential appsalso weren't allowed to duplicate the stock functionality. On the Android Market, developers were free to do whatever they wanted, including replacing the stock apps. The lack of control would turn out to be a blessing and a curse. It allowed developers to innovate on the existing functionality, but it also meant even the trashiest applications were allowed in.Right out of the gate, the Android Market showed permissions that an app required before installing. This is something Apple wouldn't get around to implementing until 2012, after an iOS app was caught uploading entire address books to the cloud without the user's knowledge. The permissions display gave a full rundown of what permissions an app was using, although this version railroaded users into agreeing. There was an OK" button, but no way to cancel other than the back button.The next most important app was probably Gmail. Most of the base functionality was here already. Unviewed messages showed up in bold, and labels displayed as colored tags. Individual messages in the Inbox showed the subject, author(s), and number of replies in a conversation. The trademark Gmail star was herea quick tap would star or unstar something. As usual for early versions of Android, the Menu housed all the buttons on the main inbox view. Once inside a message, though, things got a little more modern, with "reply" and "forward" buttons as permanent fixtures at the bottom of the screen. Individual replies could be expanded and collapsed just by tapping on them.Before Google Hangouts and even before Google Talk, there was "IM"the only instant messaging client that shipped on Android 1.0. Surprisingly, multiple IM services were supported: users could pick from AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo. Remember when OS creators cared about interoperability?The friends list was a black background with white speech bubbles for open chats. Presence was indicated with colored circles, and a little Android on the right hand side would indicate that a person was mobile. It's amazing how much more communicative the IM app was than Google Hangouts. Green means the person is using a device they are signed into, yellow means they are signed in but idle, red means they have manually set busy and don't want to be bothered, and gray is offline. Today, Hangouts only shows when a user has the app open or closed.YouTube might not have been the mobile sensation it is today with the 320p screen and 3G data speeds of the G1, but Google's video service was present and accounted for on Android 1.0. The main screen looked like a tweaked version of the Android Market, with a horizontally scrolling featured section along the top and vertically scrolling categories along the bottom.Android 1.0 finally brought a settings screen to the party. It was a black and white wall of text that was roughly broken down into sections. Down arrows next to each list item confusingly look like they would expand line-in to show more of something, but touching anywhere on the list item would just load the next screen. All the screens were pretty boring and samey looking, but hey, it's a settings screen. We did finally get an"About" page, though. Android 1.0 ran Linux kernel 2.6.25.As for a final note, low battery popup would occur when the battery dropped below 15 percent. It was a funnygraphic, depicting plugging the wrong end of the power cord into the phone. That wasn't (and still isn't)how phones work, Google.Android 1.0 was a great first start, but there were still so many gaps in functionality. Physical keyboards and tons of hardware buttons were mandatory, as Android devices were still not allowed to be sold without a d-pad or trackball. Base smartphone functionality like auto-rotate wasn'there yet, either. Updates for built-in apps weren't possible through the Android Market the way they were today. All the Google Apps were interwoven with the operating system. If Google wanted to update a single app, an update for the entire operating system needed to be pushed out through the carriers. There was still a lot of work to do.Android 1.1the first truly incremental updateFour and a half months after Android 1.0, in February 2009, Android got its first public update in Android 1.1. Not much changed in the OS, and just about every new thing Google added with 1.1 hasbeen shut down by now.Google Voice Search was Android's first foray into cloud-powered voice search, and ithad its own icon in the app drawer. While theapp can't communicate with Google's servers anymore, you can check out how it used to work on the iPhone. It wasn't yet Voice Actions, but you could speak and the results would go to a simple Google Search.Given that system updates come quickly in the Android worldor at least, that was the plan before carriers and OEMs got in the wayGoogle also added a button to the "About Phone" screen to check for system updates.Android 1.5, Cupcakea virtual keyboard opens up device designIn April 2009, almost three months after the release of 1.1, Android 1.5 was released. It was the first Android version to have a public, marketed code name: Cupcake. From here on out, Android releases would have alphabetical, snack-themed names.The most important Cupcake addition was easily the on-screen keyboard. For the first time, it was possible for OEMs to build a slate-style Android device without a thousand hardware keyboard keys and a complicated slide mechanism.New icons were added for the new "Camcorder" functionality, and Google Talk was broken out from IM into its own separate app. The Amazon MP3 and Browser icons were redesigned, too. The Amazon MP3 icon was changed primarily because Amazon was planning on launching other Android apps soon, and the "A" icon was far too generic. The browser icon was easily the worst in Android 1.1, so it was changed and no longer resembleda desktop OS dialog box. The last app drawer change was to "Pictures," which was renamed to "Gallery."Video recording was added to Android in 1.5. The two icons, camera and camcorder, were actually the same app, and you could jump between the two of them with an option in the menu labeled "Switch to camera" and "Switch to camcorder."This interface wasactually much closer to the Android 4.2 design than many of the subsequent camera apps. While later designs would add silly leather textures and more controls to the camera, Android went back to basics with later designs, and that 4.2 redesign shares a lot in common with this. What was a primitive layout in Android 1.5 became a minimal, full-screen viewfinder in Android 4.2.The calendar dumped the ugly white squares on a black background and changed to an all-light app. The background of everything became white, and day-of-the-week headers were changed to blue. The individual appointment blocks switched from a small color strip to entirely colored, and the text changed to white. This will be the last time the calendar is touched for a long time.Android 1.5 changed the zoom controls system-wide. Instead of two big circles, the zoom controls became two halves of a rectangle with rounded corners. These new controls applied to the browser, Google Maps, and the gallery.Android 1.5 gave the YouTube app the ability to upload videos to the site. Uploading was accomplished by sharing a video from the Gallery to the YouTube app, or by opening a video directly from the YouTube app. This would bring up an upload screen, where the user would set things like the video title, tags, and access rights. Photos could be uploaded to Picasa, Google's original photo site, in a similar fashion.Cupcake did a great job of improving Android, particularly in terms of hardware options. The on-screen keyboard meant a hardware keyboard was no longer necessary. Auto rotate brought the OS a little closer to the iPhone, and an on-screen camera shutter button meant that hardware camera buttons were now optional, too. Shortly after the release of 1.5, a second Android device came out that would show the future direction of the platform: the HTC Magic. The Magic (right) didnt have a hardware keyboard or a camera button. It was a solid, slider-less slate device that relied on Androids on-screen buttons to get the job done.Android flagships started with the most buttons possiblea hardware qwerty phoneand slowly began whittling the button count down over time. While the Magic was a big step, eliminating an entire keyboard and a camera button, it still used start and end call buttons, four system buttons, and a trackball.Android 1.6, DonutCDMA support brings Android to any carrierThe fourth version of Android1.6, Donutlaunched in September 2009, five months after Cupcake hit the market. Despite the myriad of updates, Google was still adding basic functionality to Android. Donut brought support for different screen sizes, CDMA support, and a text-to-speech engine.Android 1.6 is a great example of an update that, today, would have little reason to exist as a separate point update. The major improvements basically boiled down to new versions of the Android Market, camera, and YouTube. In the years since, apps like this have been broken out of the OS and can be updated by Google at any time. Before all this modularization work, though, even seemingly minor app updates like this required a full OS update.The other big improvementCDMA supportdemonstrated that, despite the version number, Google was still busy getting basic functionality into Android.The Android Market was christened as version "1.6" and got a complete overhaul. The original all-black design was tossed in favor of a white app with green highlightsthe Android designers were clearly using the Android mascot for inspiration.While the new Market definitely looked better than the old market, cohesion across apps was getting worse and worse. It seemed like each app was made by a different group with no communication about how all Android apps should look.For instance, the camera app was changed from a full-screen, minimal design to a boxed viewfinder with controls on the side. With the new camera app, Google tried its hand at skeuomorphism, wrapping the whole app in a leather texture roughly replicating the exterior of a classic camera. Switching between the camera and camcorder was done with a literal switch, and below that was the on-screen shutter button.This second picture showsone of the first examples of designers reducing dependence on the menu button, which the Android team slowly started to realize functionedterribly for discoverability. Many app designers (including those within Google) used the menu as a dumping ground for all sorts of controls and navigational elements. Most users didn't think to hit the menu button, though, and never saw the commands.A common theme for future versions of Android would be moving things out of the menu and on to the main screen, making the whole OS more user-friendly. The menu button was completely killed in Android 4.0, and it's only supported in Android for legacy apps.Donut was the first Android version to keep track of battery usage. Buried in the "About phone" menu was an option called "Battery use," which would display battery usage by app and hardware function as a percentage. Tapping on an item would bring up a separate page with relevant stats. Hardware items had buttons to jump directly to their settings, so for instance, you could change the display timeout if you felt the display battery usage was too high.Android 1.6 was also the first version to support text-to-speech (TTS) engines, meaning the OS and apps would be able to talk back to you in a robot voice. The Speech synthesizer controls" would allow you to set the language, choose the speech rate, and (critically) install the voice data from the Android market. Today, Google has itsown TTS engine that ships with Android, but it seems Donut was hard coded to accept one specific TTS engine made by SVOX. But SVOXs engine didnt ship with Donut, so tapping on install voice data" linked to an app in the Android Market. (In the years since Donuts heyday, the app has been taken down. It seems Android 1.6 will never speak again.)Android 2.0, clairblowing up the GPS industryForty-one daysthat was how much time passed between Android 1.6 and 2.0. The first big version number bump for Android launched in October 2009 on the Motorola Droid, the first "second generation" Android device. The Droid offered huge hardware upgrades over the G1, starting with the massive (at the time) 3.7 inch, 854480 LCD. It brought a lot more power, too: a (still single-core) 600Mhz TI OMAP Cortex A8 with 256MB of RAM.The most important part of the Droid, though, was the large advertising campaign around it. The Droid was the flagship device for Verizon Wireless in the US, and with that title came a ton of ad money from America's biggest carrier. Verizon licensed the word "droid" from Lucasfilm and started up the "Droid Does" campaigna shouty, explosion-filled set of commercials that positioned the device (and by extension, Android) as the violent, ass-kicking alternative to the iPhone. The press frequently declared the T-Mobile G1 as trying to be an iPhone Killer," but the Droid came out and owned it. The Droid was the best-looking Android phone yet due to some heavy streamlining with the hardware buttons.Android was developed at such a breakneck pace in the early days that the Android Team could never really plan for future devices when making interface art. The Motorola Droidwith its 854480 LCDwas a huge bump up in resolution over the 320480 G1-era devices. Nearly everything needed to be redrawn. Starting from scratch with interface art wouldpretty much be the main theme of Android 2.0.Google took this opportunity to redesign almost every icon in Android, going from a cartoony look with an isometric perspective to straight-on icons done in a more serious style. The only set of icons that weren't redrawn were the status bar icons, which now look very out of place compared to the rest of the OS. These icons would hang around from Android 0.9 until 2.3.There were a few changes to the app lineup as well. Camcorder was merged into the camera, the IM app was killed, and two new Google-made apps were added: Car Home, a launcher with big buttons designed for use while driving, and Corporate Calendar, which is identical to the regular calendar except it supports Exchange instead of Google Calendar. Weirdly, Google also included two third-party apps out of the box: Facebook and Verizon's Visual VM app. (Neither works today.) The second set of pictures displaysthe Add to Home screen" menu, and it received all new art, too.Beyond a redesign, the clear headline feature of Android 2.0 was Google Maps Navigation. Google updated Maps to allow for free turn-by-turn navigation, complete with a point of interest search and text to speech, which could read the names of streets aloud just like a standalone GPS unit. Turning GPS navigation from a separate product into a free smartphone feature pretty much destroyed the standalone GPS market overnight. TomToms stock dropped almost 40 percent during the week of Android 2.0s launch.But navigation was pretty hard to get to at first. You had to open the search box, type in a place or address, and tap on the search result. Next, after tapping on the "Navigate" button, Google showed a warning stating that Navigation was in beta and should not be trusted. After tapping on "accept," you could jump in a car, and a harsh-sounding robot voice would guide you to your destination. Hidden behind the menu button was an option to check out the traffic and accidents for the entire route. This design of Navigation hung around forever. Even when the main Google Maps interface was updated in Android 4.0, the Android 2.0 stylings in the Navigation section hung around until almost Android 4.3.The rounded tabs in the contacts/dialer app were changed to a sharper, more mature-looking design. The dialer changed its name to "Phone" and the dial pad buttons changed from circles to rounded rectangles. Buttons for voicemail, call, and delete were placed at the bottom. This screen is a great example of Androids lack of design consistency in the pre-3.0 days. Just on this screen, the tabs used sharp-cornered rectangles, the dial pad used rounded rectangles, and the sides of the bottom buttons were complete circles. It was a grab bag of UI widgets where no one ever tried to make anything match anything else. Android 2.0 was finally equipped with all the on-screen buttons needed to answer and hang up a call without needing a hardware button, and the Droid took advantage of this and removed the now-redundant buttons from its design. Androids solution to accept or reject calls was these left and right pull tabs. They work a lot like slide-to-unlock (and would later be used for slide-to-unlock)a slide from the green button to the right would answer, and a slide from the red button to the left would reject the call. Once inside a call, it looked a lot like Android 1.6. All the options were still hidden behind the menu button. The calculator was revamped for the first time since its introduction in Android 0.9. The black glass balls were replaced with gradiented blue and black buttons. The crazy red on-press highlight of the old calculator was replaced with a more normal looking white outline.The browser's tiny website name bar grewinto a full, functional address bar, along with a button for bookmarks. To save on screen real estate, the address bar was attached to the page, so the bar scrolled up with the rest of the page and left you with a full screen for reading. Android 1.6's unique magnifying rectangle zoom control and its associated buttons were tossed in favor of a much simpler double-tab-to-zoom gesture, and the browser could once again render arstechnica.com without crashing. There still wasn't pinch zoom.The e-mail app got a big functionality boost. The most important of which is that it finally supported Microsoft Exchange. The Android 2.0 version of Email finally separated the inbox and folder views instead of using the messy mashed-together view introduced in Android 1.0. Email even had a unified inbox that would weave all your messages together from different accounts.The bundled Facebook app had an awesome account sync feature, which would download contact pictures and information from the social network and seamlessly integrate it into the contacts app. Later down the road when Facebook and Google stopped being friends, Google removed this feature. The company said it didn't like the idea of sharing information with Facebook when Facebook wouldn't share information back, thusa better user experience lost out to company politics. The last picture shows the auto brightness control, which Android 2.0 was the first version to support. The Droid was equipped with an ambient light sensor, and tapping on the checkbox would make the brightness slider disappear and allow the device to automatically control the screen brightness.As the name would imply, Android 2.0 was Google'sbiggest update to date. Motorola and Verizon brought Android a slick-looking device with tons of ad dollars behind it, and for a time, Droid" became a household name.The Nexus Oneenter the Google PhoneIn January 2010, the first Nexus device launched, appropriately called the "Nexus One". The device was a huge milestone for Google. It was the first phone designed and branded by the company, and Google planned to sell the device directly to consumers. The HTC-manufactured Nexus One had a 1GHz, single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 SoC, 512MB of RAM, 512MB of storage, and a 3.7-inch AMOLED display.The Nexus One was meant to be a pure Android experience free of carrier meddling and crapware. Google directly controlled the updates. It was able to push software out to users as soon as it was done, rather than having to be approved by carriers, who slowed the process down and were not always eager to improve a phone customers already paid for.Google sold the Nexus One directly over the Web, unlocked, contract-free, and at the full retail price of $529.99. While the Nexus One was also sold at T-Mobile stores on-contract for $179.99, Google wanted to change the way the cell phone industry worked in America with its online store. The idea was to pick the phone first and the carrier second, breaking the control the wireless oligarchy had over hardware in the United States.Google's retail revolution didn't work out though, and six months after the opening on the online phone store, Google shut the service down. Google cited the primary problem as low sales. In 2010, Internet shopping wasn't the commonplace thing it is today, and consumers weren't ready to spend $530 on a device they couldnt first hold in their hands. The high price was also a limiting factor; smartphone shoppers were more used to paying $200 up front for devices and agreeing to a two-year contract. There was also the issue of the Motorola Droid, which came out only three months earlier and was not significantly slower. With the Droids huge marketing campaign and "iPhone Killer" hype, it already captured much of the same Android enthusiast market that the Nexus One was gunning for.While the Nexus One online sales experiment could be considered a failure, Google learned a lot. In 2012, it relaunched its online store as the "Devices" section on Google Play.Android 2.1the discovery (and abuse) of animationsAndroid 2.1 came out with the launch of the Nexus One, which was only three months after the release of 2.0. The new OS wasn't a huge release, so it still kept the codename "clair." Android development was chugging along at an unheard-of pace, with Google averaging a new OS release every two-and-a-half months over the last 15 months.Thanks mostly to the marketing efforts of Verizon and the "Droid" line of phones, Android was gaining in popularity. The OS was still considered ugly, though, and while the Android engineers at the time seemed to have almost no formal design training, in Android 2.1 they tried to spruce things up a bit by slathering on heavy-handed animation effects wherever they could. The result was an OS that seemed to be desperately trying to prove that it could do animation effects. Many of the new additions feltmore like tech demos than user-experience improvements.One of the biggest features in Android 2.1 was "Live Wallpapers"interactive or moving images that could be set as the wallpaper. The default Live Wallpaper was a grid of squares with blue, red, yellow, and green lights continually streaking across it. Tapping on the screen would send lights firing out in all four directions from the center of your tap. While Live Wallpapers looked neat (and was a unique feature over the iPhone), the animated backgrounds sucked up battery power and CPU cycles. It seemed to make the whole phone run a little slower. On the home screen, the default Google Search widget was given a lot more padding and now sits centered in its row. Page indicators now lived in the bottom left and right corners of the screen, and the number of home screen pages jumped from three to five. The app drawer tab at the bottom wasreplaced with an icon showing a grid of squares, a metaphor that Google still uses today. With the new app drawer icon came a totally new app drawer. Instead of a tabbed container that lifted up from the bottom of the screen, the app drawer displayed as a full-screen interface. The carbon fiber weave was removed, and the background switched to a plain black backgrounda decision that would stick around all the way up to KitKat.Google decided to add a floating, semi-transparent home icon to the bottom of the app drawer to give people an easy way out of the full-screen tab interface. This could be seen as a precursor to the on-screen home button that was introduced in Android 4.0.The app drawer was given a tacky graphics effect, too. While scrolling, the icons at the top and bottom of the list would bend inward and appear to move deeper into the phone, sort of like the opening scroll in Star Wars.There were a few changes to the icons. "Amazon MP3" and "Alarm Clock" both lost their first names, along with their premium alphabetical real-estate at the top of the app drawer. Two new apps showed up: News and Weather, and Google Voice, which was Google's telecommunication service. Since the Nexus One was not a Verizon phone, Verizon's Visual Voicemail app was dumped.Google's desire to improve the look of Android was most evident in the 2.1 Gallery, which was all about heavy-handed animation effects and transparencies. When the app opened, individual pictures flew in from the top of the screen and shuffled into little piles that made up an album. When opening an album, the picture stack separated, and the photos slid into a grid formation. Everything you touched would pop open, squish, and stretch like a spring-loaded piece of Jell-o.No Android app before or since had looked like the gallery. There was good reason for thatit wasnt made by Google! The app was farmed out to Cooliris, who didn't bother following a single existing Android UI paradigm. While the app was usable, all the animations and effects made it seem like acase of style over substance. Compare the Gallery to the other new Android 2.1 app: News And Weather. While the Gallery was a transparency-filled animation fest, News And Weather wasall about dark gradients and contrasting colors. This app powered the weather display on the desk clock app, and it even came with a home screen widget.The big innovation in this app wasswipeable tabs, an idea that would eventually become a standard Android UI convention.Widgets in 2.1 were all redesigned, with almost everything receiving a black gradient, and made better use of the available space. The clock changed back to a circle, and the calendar got a blue top, which matched the app a little more closely. Google Voice will start up, but the sign-in is brokenthis is as far as you can get.The oft-neglected Music app got a minor update. The four-button home screen was removed completely, and tabs for each music display mode were added to the top of the screen. This meant when opening the app, you were immediately presented with a list of music, instead of a navigational page. Unlike the News and Weather app, these newly installed tabs here could not be swiped between.Android 2.1, update 1the start of an endless warGoogle was a major launch partner for the first iPhonethe company provided Google Maps, Search, and YouTube for Apples mobile operating system. At the time, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a member of Apples board of directors. In fact, during the original iPhone presentation,Schmidt was the first person on stage after Steve Jobs, and he joked that the two companies were so close they could merge into AppleGoo."While Google was developing Android, the relationship between the two companies slowly becamecontentious. Still, Google largely kept Apple happy by keeping key iPhone features, like pinch zoom, out of Android. The Nexus One, though, was the first slate-style Android flagship without a keyboard, which gave the device the same form factor as the iPhone. Combined with the newer software and Google branding, this was the last straw for Apple. According to Walter Isaacsons biography on Steve Jobs, after seeing the Nexus One in January 2010, the Apple CEO was furious, saying "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong... I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."All of this happened behind closed doors, only coming out years after the Nexus One wasreleased. The public first caught wind of this growing rift between Google and Apple when, a month after the release of Android 2.1, an update shipped for the Nexus One called 2.1 update 1." The updated added one feature, something iOS long held over the head of Android: pinch-zoom.While Android supported multi-touch APIs since version 2.0, the default operating system apps stayedclear of this useful feature at the behest of Jobs. After reconciliation meetings over the Nexus One failed, there was no longer a reason to keep pinch zoom out of Android. Google pushed all their chips into the middle of the table, hit the update button, and was finally all-in" with Android.With pinch zoom enabled in Google Maps, the Browser, and the Gallery, the Google-Apple smartphone war was on. In the coming years, the two companies would become bitter enemies. A month after the pinch zoom update, Apple went on the warpath, suing everyone and everything that used Android. HTC, Motorola, and Samsung were all broughtto court, and some of them are still in court. Schmidt resigned from Apples board of directors. Google Maps and YouTube were kicked off of the iPhone, and Apple even started a rival mapping service. Today, the two players thatwere almost "AppleGoo" compete in smartphones, tablets, laptops, movies, TVshows, music, books, apps, e-mail, productivity software, browsers, personal assistants, cloud storage, mobile advertising, instant messaging, mapping, and set-top-boxes... and soon the two will be competing in car computers, wearables, mobile payments, and living room gaming.Android 2.2 Froyofaster and Flash-ierAndroid 2.2 came out four months after the release of 2.1, in May 2010. Froyo featured major under-the-hood improvements for Android, all made in the name of speed. The biggest addition was just-in-time (JIT) compilation. JIT automatically converted java bytecode into native code at runtime, which led to drastic performance improvements across the board.The Browser got a performance boost, too, thanks to the integration of the V8 javascript engine from Chrome. This wasthe first of many features the Android browser would borrow from Chrome, and eventually the stock browser would be completely replaced by a mobile version of Chrome. Until that day came, though, the Android team needed to ship a browser. Pulling in Chrome parts was an easy way to upgrade.While Google was focusing on making its platform faster, Apple was making its platform bigger. Google's rival released the 10-inch iPad a month earlier, ushering in the modern era of tablets. While some large Froyo and Gingerbread tablets were released, Google's official responseAndroid 3.0 Honeycomb and the Motorola Xoomwould not arrive fornine months.The biggest change on the Froyo homescreen wasthe new dock at the bottom, which filled the previously empty space to the left and right of the app drawer with phone and browser icons. Both of these icons were custom-designed white versions of the stock icons, and they werenot user-configurable.The second picture shows Adobe Flash Player, which was exclusive to Froyo. The app plugged in to the browser and allowed for a full Web" experience. In 2010, this meant pages heavy with Flash navigation and video. Flash was one of Android's big differentiators compared to the iPhone. Steve Jobsstarted a holy war against Flash, declaring it an obsolete, buggy piece of software, and Apple would not allow it on iOS. So Android picked up the Flash ball and ran with it, giving users the option of havinga semi-workable implementation on Android.At the time, Flash could bring even a desktop computer to its knees, so keeping it on all the time on a mobile phone delivered terrible performance. To fix this, Flash on Android's browser could be set to "on-demand"Flash content would not load until users clicked on the Flash placeholder icon. Flash support would last on Android until 4.1, when Adobe gave up and killed the project. Ultimately Flash never really worked well on Android. The lack of Flash on the iPhone, the most popular mobile device, pushed the Internet to eventually dump the platform.Froyo included the first Android Twitter app, which was actually a collaboration between Google and Twitter. At the time, a Twitter app was one of the big holes in Android's app lineup. Developers favored the iPhone, and with Apple's head start and stringent design requirements, the App Store's app selection was far superior to Android's. But Google needed a Twitter app, so it teamed up with the company to get the first version out the door.The Twitter app actually featured an early precursor to the Action Bar, a persistent strip of top-aligned controls that was introduced in Android 3.0 . Along the top of every screen was a blue bar containing the Twitter logo and buttons like search, refresh, and compose tweet. The big difference between this and the later action bars was that the Twitter/Google design lacks an "Up" button in the top right corner, and it actually uses an entire second bar to show your current location within the app. In the second picture above, you can see a whole bar dedicated to the location label "Tweets" (and, of course, the continuously scrolling clouds). The Twitter logo in the second bar acted as another navigational element, sometimes showing additional drill down areas within the current section and sometimes showing the entire top-level shortcut group.While Android 2.2 didnt feature much in the way of user-facing features, a major UI overhaul was coming in the next twoversions. Before all the UI work, though, Google wanted to revamp the core of Android. Android 2.2 accomplished that.Android 2.3 Gingerbreadthe first major UI overhaulGingerbread was released in December 2010, a whopping seven months after the release of 2.2. The wait was worth it, though, as Android 2.3 changed just about every screen in the OS. It was the first major overhaul since the initial formation of Android in version 0.9. 2.3 would kick off a series of continual revamps in an attempt to turn Android from an ugly duckling into something that was capable of holding its ownaestheticallyagainst the iPhone.And speaking of Apple, six months earlier, the company released the iPhone 4 and iOS 4, which added multitasking and Facetime video chat. Microsoft was finally back in the game, too. The company jumped into the modern smartphone era with the launch of Windows Phone 7 in November 2010.Android 2.3 focused a lot on the interface design, but with no direction or design documents, many apps ended up getting a new bespoke theme. Some apps went with a flatter, darker theme, some used a gradient-filled, bubbly dark theme, and others went with a high-contrast white and green look. While it wasn't cohesive, Gingerbread accomplished the goal of modernizing nearly every part of the OS. It was a good thing, too, because the next phone version of Android wouldnt arrive until nearly a year later.Gingerbreads launch device was the Nexus S, Googles second flagship device and the first Nexus manufactured by Samsung. While today we are used to new CPU models every year, back then that wasn't the case. The Nexus S had a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, just like the Nexus One. The GPU was slightly faster, and that was it in the speed department. It was a little bigger than the Nexus One, with a 4-inch, 800480 AMOLED display.Spec wise, the Nexus S might seem like a tame upgrade, but it was actually home to a lot of firsts for Android. The Nexus S was Googles first flagship to shun a MicroSD slot, shipping with 16GB on-board memory. The Nexus One had only 512MB of storage, but it had a MicroSD slot. Removing the SD slot simplified storage management for usersthere was just one pool nowbut hurt expandability for power users. It was also Google's first phone to have NFC, a special chip in the back of the phone that could transfer information when touched to another NFC chip. For now, the Nexus S could only read NFC tagsit couldn't send data.Thanks to some upgrades in Gingerbread, the Nexus S was one of the first Android phones to ship without a hardware D-Pad or trackball. The Nexus S was nowdown to just the power, volume, and the four navigation buttons. The Nexus S was also a precursor to the crazy curved-screen phones of today, as Samsung outfitted the Nexus S with a piece of slightly curved glass.The status bar was finally overhauled from the version that first debuted in 0.9. The bar was changed from a white gradient to flat black, and all the icons were redrawn in gray and green. Just about everything looked crisper and more modern thanks to the sharp-angled icon design and higher resolution. The strangest decisions were probably the removal of the time period from the status bar clock and the confusing shade of gray that was used for the signal bars. Despite gray being used for many status bar icons, and there being four gray bars in the above screenshot, Android wasactually indicating no cellular signal. Green bars would indicate a signal, gray bars indicated empty" signal slots.The green status bar icons in Gingerbread also doubled as a status indicator of network connectivity. If you had a working connection to Google's servers, the icons would be green, if there was no connection to Google, the icons turned white. This let you easily identify the connectivity status of your connection while you were out and about.The notification panel was changed from the aging Android 1.5 design. Again, we sawa UI piece that changed from a light theme to a dark theme, getting a dark gray header, black background, and black-on-gray text.The menu was darkened too, changing from a white background to a black one with a slight transparency. The contrast between the menu icons and the background wasnt as strong as it should be, because the gray icons are the same color as they were on the white background. Requiring a color change would mean every developer would have to make new icons, so Google went with the preexisting gray color on black. This was a change at the system level, so this new menu wouldshow up in every app.One of the most important additions to Android 2.3 was the system-wide text selection interface, which you can see in the Google search bar in the left screenshot. Long pressing a word would highlight it in orange and make draggable handles appear on either side of the highlight. You could then adjust the highlight using the handles and long press on the highlight to bring up options for cut, copy, and paste. Previous methods used tiny controls that relied on a trackball or D-Pad, but with this first finger-driven text selection method, the Nexus S didnt need the extra hardware controls.The right set of images shows the new checkbox design and overscroll effect. The Froyo checkbox worked like a light bulbit would show a green check when on and a gray check when off. Gingerbread now displayedan empty box when an option is turned offwhich mademuch more sense. Gingerbread was the first version to have an overscroll effect. An orange glow appeared when you hit the end of a list and grew larger as you pulled more against the dead end. Bounce scrolling would probably have madethe most sense, but that was patented by Apple.All the dialog box titles were changed from gray to black, every dialog box, dropdown, and button corner was sharpened up, and everything was a little bit darker. All these system-wide changes made all of Gingerbread look a lot less bubbly and more mature. The "all black everything" look wasn't necessarily the most welcoming color palette, but it certainly looked better than Android's previous gray-and-beige color scheme.While not exclusive to Gingerbread, with the launch of the new OS came "Android Market 2.0." Most of the list design was the same, but Google covered the top third of the screen with a massive green banner that was used for featured apps and navigation. The primary design inspiration here was probably the green Android mascotthe color is a perfect match. At a time when the OS was getting a darker design, the neon green banner and white list made the Market a lot brighter.One last update for Gingerbread came with Android 2.3.4, which brought a new version of Google Talk. Unlike the Nexus One, the Nexus S had a front-facing cameraand the redesigned version of Google Talk had voice and video calling. Gingerbread is the oldest version of Android still supported by Google. Firing up a Gingerbread device and letting it sit for a few minutes will result in a ton of upgrades. Gingerbread will pull down Google Play Services, resulting in a ton of new API support, and it will upgrade to the very newest version of the Play Store. Open the Play Store and hit the update button, and just about every single Google app will be replaced with a modern version. We tried to keep this article authentic to the time Gingerbread was released, but a real user stuck on Gingerbread today will be treated to a flood of anachronisms.Gingerbread is still supported because there are a good number of users still running the now ancient OS. Gingerbread's staying power is due to the extremely low system requirements, making it the go-to choice for slow, cheap phones. The next few versions of Android were much more exclusive and/or demanding on hardware. For instance, Android 3.0 Honeycomb is not open source, meaning it could only be ported to a device with Google's cooperation. It was also only for tablets, making Gingerbread the newest phone version of Android for a very long time. 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was the next phone release, but it significantly raised Androids systems requirements, cutting off the low-end of the market. Google is hopingto get cheaper phones back on the update track with 4.4 KitKat, which brings the system requirements back down to 512MB of RAM. The passage of time helps, tooby now, even cheap SoCs have caught up to the demands of a 4.0-era version of Android.Android 3.0 Honeycombtablets and a design renaissanceDespite all the changes made in Gingerbread, Android was still the ugly duckling of the mobile world. Compared to the iPhone, itslevel of polish and design just didn't hold up. On the other hand, one of the few operating systems that could stand up to iOS's aesthetic acumen was Palm's WebOS. WebOS was a cohesive, well-designed OS with several innovative features, and it was supposed to save the company from the relentless march of the iPhone.A year after launch though, Palm was running out of cash. The company never saw the iPhone coming, and by the time WebOS was ready, it was too late. In April 2010, Hewlett-Packard purchased Palm for $1 billion. While HP bought a product with a great user interface, the lead designer of that interface, a man by the name of Matias Duarte, did not join HP. In May 2010, just before HP took control of Palm, Duarte jumped ship to Google. HP bought the bread, but Google hired the baker.At Google, Duarte was named the Director of Android User Experience. This was the first time someone was publicly in charge of the way Android looked. Matias landed at Google during the launch of Android 2.2, and while he contributed to Gingerbread, the first version of Android to get a full, cohesive redesign was Android 3.0, Honeycomb.By Google's own admission, Honeycombreleased in February 2011was rushed out the door. Ten months prior, Apple modernized the tablet with the launch of the iPad, and Google wanted to respond as quickly as possible. Honeycomb was that response, a version of Android that ran on 10-inch touchscreens. Sadly, getting this OS to market was such a priority that corners were cut to save time.The new OS was for tablets onlyphones would not be updated to Honeycomb, which spared Google the difficult problem of making the OS work on wildly different screen sizes. But with phone support off the table, a Honeycomb source drop never happened. Previous Android versions were open source, enabling the hacking community to port the latest version to all sorts of different devices. Google didn't want app developers to feelpressured to support half-broken Honeycomb phone ports, so Google kept the source to itself and strictly controlled what could and couldn't have Honeycomb. The rushed development led to problems with the software, too. At launch, Honeycomb wasn't particularly stable, SD cards didn't work, and Adobe Flashone of Android's big differentiatorswasn't supported.One of the few devices that could have Honeycomb was the Motorola Xoom, the flagship product for the new OS. The Xoom was a 10-inch, 16:9 tablet with 1GB of RAM and a dual-core, 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. Despite being the launch device of a new version of Android where Google controlled the updates directly, the device wasn't called a "Nexus." The most likely reason for this was that Google didn't feel confident enough in the product to call it a flagship.Nevertheless, Honeycomb was a major milestone for Android. With an experienced designer in charge, the entire Android user interface was rebuilt, and most of the erratic app designs were brought to heel. Android's default apps finally looked like pieces of a cohesive whole with similar layouts and theming across the board. Redesigning Android would be a multi-version project thoughHoneycomb was just the start of getting Android whipped into shape. This first draft laid the groundwork for how future versions of Android would function, but it also used a heavy-handed sci-fi theme that Google would spend the next few versions toning down.While Gingerbread only experimented with a sci-fi look inits photon wallpaper, Honeycomb went full sci-fi with a Tron-inspired theme for the entire OS. Everything was made black, and if you needed a contrasting color, you could choose from a few different shades of blue. Everything that was made blue was also given a "glow" effect, making the entire OS look like it was powered by alien technology. The default background was a holographic grid of hexagons (a Honeycomb! get it?) that looked like it was the floor of a teleport pad on a spaceship.The most important change of Honeycomb was the addition of the system bar. The Motorola Xoom had no hardware buttons other than power and volume, so a large black bar was added along the bottom of the screen that housed the navigational buttons. This meant the default Android interface no longer needed specialized hardware buttons. Previously, Android couldn't function without hardware Back, Menu, and Home keys. Now, with the software supplying all the necessary buttons, anything with a touch screen was able to run Android.The biggest benefit of the new software buttons wasflexibility. The new app guidelines stated that apps should no longer require a hardware menu button, but for those that do, Honeycomb detects this and adds a fourth button to the system bar that allows these apps to work. The other flexibility attribute of software buttons wasthat they couldchange orientation with the device. Other than the power and volume buttons, the Xoom's orientation really wasn'timportant. The system bar always saton the "bottom" of the device from the user's perspective. The trade off wasthat a big bar along the bottom of the screen definitely sucked up some screen real estate. To save space on 10-inch tablets, the status bar was merged into the system bar. All the usual status duties lived on the right sidethere was battery and connectivity status, the time, and notification icons.The whole layout of the home screen changed, placing UI pieces in each of the four corners of the device. The bottom left housed the previously discussed navigational buttons, the bottom right wasfor status and notifications, the top left displayed text search and voice search, and the top right had buttons for the app drawer and adding widgets.The unlock screenafter switching from a menu button to a rotary dial to slide-to-unlockremoved any required accuracy from the unlock process by switching to a circle unlock. Swiping from the center outward in any direction would unlock the device. Like the rotary unlock, this wasmuch nicer ergonomically than forcing your finger to follow a perfectly straight path.The strip of thumbnails in the second picture wasthe interface brought up by the newly christened "Recent Apps" button, now living next to Back and Home. Rather than the group of icons brought up in Gingerbread by long-pressing on the home button, Honeycomb showed app icons and thumbnails on the screen, which made it a lot easier to switch between tasks. Recent Apps was clearly inspired by Duarte's "card" multitasking in WebOS, which used full-screen thumbnails to switch tasks. This design offered the same ease-of-recognition as WebOS's task switcher, but the smaller thumbnails allowed more apps to fit on screen at once.While this implementation of Recent Apps may look like what you get on a current device, this version was very early. The list didn't scroll, meaning it showed seven apps in portrait mode and only five apps in horizontal mode. Anything beyond that was bumped off the list. You also couldn't swipe away thumbnails to close appsthis was just a static list.Here we see the Tron influence in full effect: the thumbnails hadblue outlines and an eerie glow around them. This screenshot also shows a benefit of software buttonscontext. The back button closed the list of thumbnails, so instead of the normal arrow, this pointed down.Almost every app icon wasnew. Just like the switch from the G1 to the Motorola Droid, the biggest impetus for change was probably the bump in resolution. The Nexus S had an 800480 display, and Gingerbread came with art assets to match. The Xoom used a whopping 1280800 10-inch display, which meant nearly every piece of art had to go. But again, this time a real designer was in charge, and things were a lot more cohesive. Honeycomb marked the switch from a vertically scrolling app drawer to paginated horizontal drawer. This change madesense on a horizontal device, but on phones it was still much faster to navigate the app drawer with a flingable, vertical list.The second Honeycomb screenshot shows the new notification panel. The gray and black Gingerbread design was tossed for another straight-black panel that gave off a blue glow. At the top was a block showing the time, date, connection status, battery, and a shortcut to the notification quick settings, and below that were the actual notifications. Non-permanent notifications could now be dismissed by tapping on an "X" on the right side of the notification. Honeycomb was the first version to enable controls within a notification. The first (and at the launch of Honeycomb, only) app to take advantage of this was the new Google Music app, which placed previous, play/pause, and next buttons in its notification. These new controls could be accessed from any app and made controlling music a breeze.For the first time in Android's history, the calculator got a makeover with non-custom buttons, so it actually looked like part of the OS. The bigger screen made room for more buttons, enough that all the calculator functionality could fit on one screen. The calendar greatly benefited from the extra space, gaining much more room for appointment text and controls. The action bar at the top of the screen held buttons to switch views, along with showing the current time span and common controls. Appointment blocks switched to a white background with the calendar corner only showing in the top right corner. At the bottom (or side, in horizontal view) were boxes showing the month calendar and a list of displayed calendars.The scale of the calendar could be adjusted, too. By performing a pinch zoom gesture, portrait week and day views could show between five and 19 hours of appointments on a single screen. The background of the calendar was made up of an uneven blue splotch, which didn't look particularly great and was tossed on later versions.While music received a few minor additions during its life, this was really the first time since Android 0.9 that it received serious attention. The highlight of the redesign was a don't-call-it-coverflow scrolling 3D album art view, called "New and Recent." Instead of the tabs added in Android 2.1, navigation was handled by a Dropbox box in the Action Bar. While "New and Recent" had 3D scrolling album art, "Albums" used a flat grid of albums thumbnails. The other sections had totally different designs, too. "Songs" used a vertically scrolling list of text, and "Playlists," "Genres," and "Artists" used stacked album art.Google Maps received another redesign for the big screen. This one would stick around for a while and used a semi-transparent black action bar for all the controls. Search was again the primary function, given the first spot in the action bar, but this time it was an actual search bar you could type in, instead of a search bar-shaped button that launched a completely different interface. Google finally gave up on dedicating screen space to actual zoom buttons, relying on only gestures to control the map view. While the feature has since been ported to all old versions of Maps, Honeycomb was the first version to feature 3D building outlines on the map. Dragging two fingers down on the map would "tilt" the map view and show the sides of the buildings. You could freely rotate and the buildings would adjust, too.The Android Market released its fourth new design in Android's two-and-a-half years on the market. This new design washugely important as it camereally close to Google's "cards" interface. By displaying Apps or other content in little blocks, Google couldseamlessly transition its app design between screens of various sizes with minimal effort. Content could be displayed just like photos in a gallery appfeed the layout renderer a big list of content blocks, enable screen wrapping, and you were done. Bigger screens sawmore blocks of content, and smaller screens only sawa few at a time. With the content display out of the way, Google added a "Categories" fragment to the right side and a big featured app carousel at the top.This new market sold not only apps, but brought Books and Movies rentals into the fold as well. Google wasselling books since 2010; it was only ever through a Website. The new market unified all of Google's content sales in a single location and brought it one step closer to taking on Apple's iTunes juggernaut, though selling all of these items under the "Android Market" was a bit of a branding snafu, as much of the content didn't require Android to use.Later versions of Honeycomb would fix many of the early problems 3.0 had. Android 3.1 was released three months after the first version of Honeycomb, and it brought several improvements. Resizable widgets were one of the biggest features added. After long pressing on a widget, a blue outline with grabbable handles would pop up around it, and dragging the handles around would resize the widget. The Recent Apps panel could now scroll vertically and held many more apps. The only feature missing from it at this point was the ability to swipe away apps.Today, an 0.1 upgrade is a major release, but in Honeycomb, point releases were considerably smaller. Besides the few UI tweaks, 3.1 added support for gamepads, keyboards, mice, and other input devices over USB and Bluetooth. It also offered a few more developer APIs.Android 3.2 launched two months after 3.1, adding support for smaller sized tablets in the seven- to eight-inch range. It finally enabled SD card support, which the Xoom carried like a vestigial limb for the first five months of its life.Honeycomb was rushed out the door in order to be an ecosystem builder. No one will want an Android tablet if the tablet-specific apps aren't there, and Google knew it needed to get something in the hands of developers ASAP. At this early stage of Android's tablet ecosystem, the apps just weren't there. It was the biggest problem people had with the Xoom.3.2 added "Compatibility Zoom," which gave users a new option of stretching apps to the screen (as shown in the right picture) or zooming the normal app layout to fit the screen. Neither option was ideal, and without the app ecosystem to support it, Honeycomb devices sold pretty poorly. Google's tablet moves would eventually pay off though. Today, Android tablets have taken the market share crown from iOS.Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwichthe modern eraReleased in October 2011, Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, got the OSback on track with a release spanning phones and tablets, and it was once again open source. It was the first update to come to phones since Gingerbread, which meant the majority of Android's user base went almost a year without seeing an update. 4.0 was all about shrinking the Honeycomb design to smaller devices, bringing on-screen buttons, the action bar, and the new design language to phones.Ice Cream Sandwich debuted on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, one of the first Android phones with a 720p screen. Along with the higher resolution, the Galaxy Nexus pushed phones to even larger sizes with a 4.65-inch screenalmost a full inch larger than the original Nexus One. This was called "too big" by many critics, but today many Android phones are even bigger. (Five inches is "normal" now.) Ice Cream Sandwich required a lot more power than Gingerbread did, and the Galaxy Nexus delivered with a dual core, 1.2Ghz TI OMAP processor and 1GB of RAM.In the US, the Galaxy Nexus debuted on Verizon with an LTE modem. Unlike previous Nexus devices, the most popular modelthe Verizon versionwas under the control of a carrier, and Google's software and updates had to be approved by Verizon before the phone could be updated. This led to delays in updates and the removal of software Verizon didn't like, namely Google Wallet.Thanks to the software improvements in Ice Cream Sandwich, Google finally achieved peak button removal on a phone. With the on-screen navigation buttons, the capacitive buttons could be removed, leaving the Galaxy Nexus with only power and volume buttons.The Tronaesthetic in Honeycomb was a little much. Immediately in Ice Cream Sandwich, Google started turning down some of the more sci-fi aspects of the design. The sci-fi clock font changed from a folded over semi-transparent thing to a thin, elegant, normal-looking font. The water ripple touch effect on the unlock circle was removed, and the alien Honeycomb clock widget was scrapped in favor of a more minimal design. The system buttons were redesigned, too, changing from blue outlines with the occasional thick side to thin, even, white outlines. The default wallpaper changed from the blue Honeycomb spaceship interior to a streaky, broken rainbow, which added some much-needed color to the default layout.On the Honeycomb unlock screen, the small inner circle could be movedanywhere outside the larger circle to unlock the device. In Ice Cream Sandwich, you hadto actually hit the unlock icon with the inner circle. This new accuracy requirement allowed Google to add another option to the lock screen: a camera shortcut. Dragging the inner circle to the camera icon would directly launch the camera, skipping the home screen.The Notification panel got a big overhaul, especially when compared to the previous Gingerbread design. There wasnow a top header featuring the date, a settings shortcut, and a "clear all." While first Honeycomb allowed users to dismiss individual notifications by tapping on an "X" in the notification, Ice Cream Sandwich's implementation was much more elegant: just swipe the individual notifications to the left or right and they cleared. Honeycomb had blue highlights, but the blue tone was all over the place. Ice Cream Sandwich unified almost everything to a single blue (hex code #33B5E5, if you want to get specific). The background of the notification panel was made transparent, andthe "handle" at the bottom changed to a minimal blue circle with an opaque black background.These screenshots give us our first look at the refined version of the Action Bar in Ice Cream Sandwich. Almost every app got a bar at the top of the screen that housed the app icon, title of the screen, several function buttons, and a menu button on the right. The right-aligned menu button wascalled the "overflow" button, because it housed items that didn't fit on the main action bar. The overflow menu wasn't static, though, it gave the action bar more screen real-estatelike in horizontal mode or on a tabletand more of the overflow menu items wereshown on the action bar as actual buttons.New in Ice Cream Sandwich was this design style of "swipe tabs," which replaced the 23 interstitial navigation screen Google waspreviously pushing. A tab bar sat just under the Action Bar, with the center title showing the current tab and the left and right having labels for the pages to the left and right of this screen. A swipe in either direction would change tabs, or you could tap on a title to go to that tab.One really cool design touch on the individual app screen wasthat, after the pictures, it would dynamically rearrange the page based on your history with that app. If you never installed the app before, the description would be the first box. If you used the app before, the first section would be the reviews bar, which would either invite you to review the app or remind you what you thought of the app last time you installed it. The second section for a previously used app was Whats New," since an existing user would most likely be interested in changes.Recent apps tonedthe Tron lookway down. The blue outline around the thumbnails was removed, along with the eerie, uneven blue glow in the background. It now looked like a neutral UI piece that would be at home in any time period.The Browser showed off the flexibility of Google's Action Bar design, which, despite not having a top-left app icon, still functioned like any other top bar design.Gmail and Google Talk both looked like smaller versions of their Honeycomb designs, but with a few tweaks to work better on smaller screens. Gmail featured a dual Action Barone on the top of the screen and one on the bottom. The top of the bar showed your current folder, account, and number of unread messages, and tapping on the bar opened a navigation menu. The bottom featured all the normal buttons you would expect along with the overflow button. This dual layout was used in order display more buttons on the surface level,