What Is Android?

Some History: What Is Android? 

Android was originally created by Andy Rubin as an operating system for mobile phones, around the dawn of this twenty-first century. In 2005, 

Google acquired Android Inc. and made Andy Rubin the Director of Mobile Platforms for Google.
Many think the acquisition was largely in response to the emergence of the Apple iPhone around that time; however, there were enough other large players, such as Nokia Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile, that it seemed like a salient business decision for Google to purchase the talent and intellectual property necessary to assert the company into this emerging space, which has become known as Internet 2.0. Internet 2.0 allows users of consumer electronics to access content via widely varied data networks through highly portable consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones, touchscreen tablets, and e-books,
and even though not so portable devices, such as ITV's, home media centers, and set-top boxes.
This puts new media content such as games, 3D animation, digital video, digital audio, and high-definition imagery into our lives at every turn.
Android is one of the vehicles that digital artists will leverage to develop media creations that users have never before experienced.
Over the past decade, Android has matured and evolved into an extremely reliable, bulletproof, embedded operating system platform, has gone from version 1.0 to stable versions at 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, So on, recently, 8.0.
An embedded operating system is like having an entire computer on a chip small enough to fit into handheld consumer electronics, but powerful enough to run applications (commonly known as apps).
Android has the power of a full-blown computer operating system. It is based on the Linux open-source platform and Oracle’s (formerly Sun Microsystems’s) Java, one of the world’s most popular programming languages. 

NOTE: The term open source refers to software that has often been developed collaboratively by an open community of individuals, is freely available for commercial use, and comes with all of the source code so that it can be further modified if necessary. Android is open source, though Google develops it internally before releasing the source code; from that point on, it is freely available for commercial use.
It is not uncommon for an Android product to have a 1GHz processor and 1GB of fast, computer-grade DDR2 memory. This rivals desktop computers of just a few years ago and netbooks that are still currently available. You will see a further convergence of handheld operating systems and desktop operating systems as time goes on. Some examples are Windows Mobile 7 and iPhone 4 mobile platforms. Once it became evident that Android and open-source were forces to be reckoned with, a number of major companies—including HTC, Samsung, LG Electronics, and TMobile—formed and joined the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). This was done in order to put some momentum behind Google’s open-source Android platform, and it worked.