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 Department
19 September, 2014
Preface
The 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.
Acknowledgement
I 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 1.0introducing Google 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
ndroid . clair blowing 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 ndroids
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 OS was 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 what was 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 OS was 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 what was 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 OS was 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 what was 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. ndroid
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 became dark 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
users had options to swap or merge calls.
Swapping calls triggered a nice little card
shuffle animation.
The browser ran Webkit 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. That version of Google Maps
was the 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 lacked any 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 were no photo management options
either. It was essentially a test of a scrolling
picture view
There was also no settings app, but we can
look at the original time and date pickers,
thanks to the API Demos. This demonstrates
how raw a lot of Android was: kerning
issues all over the place, a huge 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 Microsoft was trying to
sell Windows Vista to the world for almost a
year, and Apple just released OS X 10.5
Leopard.
Android 0.5, Milestone 5
the land of scrapped
interfaces
The first major Android change came three
months after the first emulator release: the
"m5-rc14" build. Released in February
8, 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
like it 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
in a list. The first version of the notification
panel was an opaque white sheet with a
ribbed handle" on the bottom and an 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 was gone 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
indicator with no apparent purpose. The tiny
list view from earlier builds really
wasn't usable 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 during a 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't work, but the little
UI we accessed saw significant updates.
You could pick 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't hide 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 iPhone
the iPhone 3Ga month prior. The second-
gen iPhone brought a 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
that looked 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 were additional
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 MLMO," 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
brought up 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 needed to 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. It dumped 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's extremely 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 rose up to 525.10, but it
didn't seem 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 prime business was, even in its
OS.
Dialer and Contacts in Android 0.9
were actually 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 still for 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 was important, 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 nswer" and
Decline" buttons present in ndroid .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 key was redin the rest
of Android 0.9, the on-press highlight
was usually orange. In fact, everything used
in the calculator was 100 percent custom
artwork limited to only the calculator.
Android 0.9 also gave us 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 was the message list,
a stark black void of nothingness that looked
like it was built on top of the settings
interface. fter 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 only a 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 1.0
introducing Google Apps
and actual hardware
By 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 went on 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 by any 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 while Android
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 watch has 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 ever invented. 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 for the first time, people saw Android
running on actual hardware instead of
a frustratingly 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 apps also 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 funny graphic, 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't here 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 update
Four 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 has been shut down
by now. Google Voice Search was Android's
first foray into cloud-powered voice search,
and it had its own icon in the app drawer.
While the app 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 design
In 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 resembled a 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 was actually 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
ndroids 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, Donut
CDMA support brings
Android to any carrier
The 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 highlights
the 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 shows one of the first
examples of designers reducing dependence
on the menu button, which the Android team
slowly started to realize functioned terribly
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 its own 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.)

blowing up the GPS
industry
Forty-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 would pretty 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 displays the dd 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
4 percent during the week of ndroid .s
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
ndroids 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. ndroids 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
grew into 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, thus a 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's biggest 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
Phone
In 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
$53 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 animations
Android 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 felt more 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 was replaced 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
a case 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 was all
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 was swipeable 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 war
Google was a major launch partner for the
first iPhonethe company provided Google
Maps, Search, and YouTube for pples
mobile operating system. At the time,
Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a member of
pples 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
ppleGoo."
While Google was developing Android, the
relationship between the two companies
slowly became contentious. 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
was released. 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 stayed clear 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 brought to court, and some of them
are still in court. Schmidt resigned from
pples 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 that were
almost "AppleGoo" compete in
smartphones, tablets, laptops, movies,
TV shows, 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-ier
Android 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 was the 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 response
Android 3.0 Honeycomb and the Motorola
Xoomwould not arrive for nine months.
The biggest change on the Froyo
homescreen was the 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 were not 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 1, this
meant pages heavy with Flash navigation
and video. Flash was one of Android's big
differentiators compared to the iPhone.
Steve Jobs started 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
having a 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 ndroid . didnt feature much in
the way of user-facing features, a major UI
overhaul was coming in the next
two versions. Before all the UI work,
though, Google wanted to revamp the core
of Android. Android 2.2 accomplished that.
Android 2.3 Gingerbread
the first major UI overhaul
Gingerbread 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
ndroid 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 now down 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
was actually 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 saw a
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
would show 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
displayed an empty box when an option is
turned offwhich made much 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
made the 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 ndroids
systems requirements, cutting off the low-
end of the market. Google is hoping to 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 Honeycomb
tablets and a design
renaissance
Despite all the changes made in
Gingerbread, Android was still the ugly
duckling of the mobile world. Compared to
the iPhone, its level 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, Honeycomb
released 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 feel pressured 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 in its 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 was flexibility. 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
was that they could change orientation with
the device. Other than the power and volume
buttons, the Xoom's orientation really
wasn't important. The system bar always
sat on the "bottom" of the device from the
user's perspective. The trade off was that 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 side
there 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
was for 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
was much nicer ergonomically than forcing
your finger to follow a perfectly straight
path.
The strip of thumbnails in the second picture
was the 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 had blue outlines and an
eerie glow around them. This screenshot
also shows a benefit of software buttons
context. The back button closed the list of
thumbnails, so instead of the normal arrow,
this pointed down.
Almost every app icon was new. 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
made sense 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 was hugely
important as it came really close to Google's
"cards" interface. By displaying Apps or
other content in little blocks, Google
could seamlessly 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 saw more blocks of content,
and smaller screens only saw a 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 was selling 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 era
Released in October 2011, Android 4.0, Ice
Cream Sandwich, got the OS back 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 Tron aesthetic 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 moved anywhere
outside the larger circle to unlock the device.
In Ice Cream Sandwich, you had to 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 was now 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, and the "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 was called 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 were shown 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
was previously 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 was that, 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 toned the Tron look way 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,
but in landscape mode where vertical space
was at a premium, the dual bars merged into
a single top bar.
Data Usage allowed users to easily keep
track of and control their data usage. The
main page showed a graph of this month's
data usage, and users could set thresholds to
be warned about data consumption or even
set a hard usage limit to avoid overage
charges. All of this was done easily by
dragging the horizontal orange and red
threshold lines higher or lower on the chart.
The vertical white bars allowed users to
select a slice of time in the graph. At the
bottom of the page, the data usage for the
selected time was broken down by app, so
users could select a spike and easily see
what app was sucking up all their data.
When times got really tough, in the overflow
button was an option to restrict all
background data. Then, only apps running in
the foreground could have access to the
Internet connection.
The Developer Options typically only
housed a tiny handful of settings, but in Ice
Cream Sandwich the section received a huge
expansion. Google added all sorts of on-
screen diagnostic overlays to help app
developers understand what was happening
inside their app. You could view CPU
usage, pointer location, and view screen
updates. There were also options to change
the way the system functioned, like control
over animation speed, background
processing, and GPU rendering.
One of the biggest differences between
Android and the iOS is Android's app
drawer interface. In Ice Cream Sandwich's
quest to be more user-friendly, the initial
startup launched a small tutorial showing
users where the app drawer was and how to
drag icons out of the drawer and onto the
homescreen. With the removal of the off-
screen menu button and changes like this,
Android 4.0 made a big push to be more
inviting to new smartphone users and
switchers.
In Android, users are not allowed to
uninstall system apps, which are often
integral to the function of the device.
Carriers and OEMs took advantage of this
and started putting crapware in the system
partition, which they would often stick with
software they didn't want. Android 4.0
allowed users to disable any app that
couldn't be uninstalled, meaning the app
remained on the system but didn't show up
in the app drawer and couldn't be run. If
users were willing to dig through the
settings, this gave them an easy way to take
control of their phone.
Android 4.0 can be thought of as the start of
the modern Android era. Most of the Google
apps released around this time only worked
on Android 4.0 and above. There were so
many new APIs that Google wanted to take
advantage of thatinitially at least
support for versions below 4.0 was limited.
After Ice Cream Sandwich and Honeycomb,
Google was really starting to get serious
about software design. In January 2012, the
company finally launched Android Design, a
design guideline site that taught Android app
developers how to create apps to match the
look and feel of Android. This was
something iOS not only had from the start of
third-party app support, but Apple enforced
design so seriously that apps that did not
meet the guidelines were blocked from the
App Store. The fact that Android went three
years without any kind of public design
documents from Google shows just how bad
things used to be. But with Duarte in charge
of Android's design revolution, the company
was finally addressing basic design needs.
Google Play and the return of
direct-to-consumer device sales
On March 6, 2012, Google unified all of its
content offerings under the banner of
"Google Play." The Android Market became
the Google Play Store, Google Books
became Google Play Books, Google Music
became Google Play Music, and Android
Market Movies became Google Play Movies
& TV. While the app interfaces didn't
change much, all four content apps got new
names and icons. Content purchased in the
Play Store would be downloaded to the
appropriate app, and the Play Store and Play
content apps all worked together to provide
a fairly organized content experience.
The Google Play update was Google's first
big out-of-cycle update. Four packed-in apps
were all changed without having to issue a
system updatethey were all updated
through the Android Market/Play Store.
Enabling out-of-cycle updates to individual
apps was a big focus for Google, and being
able to do an update like this was the
culmination of an engineering effort that
started in the Gingerbread era. Google had
been working on "decoupling" the apps from
the operating system and making everything
portable enough to be distributed through
the Android Market/Play Store.
The design of the Google Play apps was still
all over the place. Each app looked and
functioned differently, but for now, a
cohesive brand was a good start. And
removing "Android" from the branding was
necessary because many services were
available in the browser and could be used
without touching an Android device at all.
In April 2012, Google started selling devices
though the Play Store again, reviving the
direct-to-customer model it had
experimented with for the launch of the
Nexus One. While it was only two years
after ending the Nexus One sales, Internet
shopping was now more common place, and
buying something before you could hold it
didn't seem as crazy as it did in 2010.
Google also saw how price-conscious
consumers became when faced with the
Nexus One's $530 price tag. The first device
for sale was an unlocked, GSM version of
the Galaxy Nexus for $399. From there,
price would go even lower. $350 has been
the entry-level price for the last two Nexus
smartphones, and 7-inch Nexus tablets
would come in at only $200 to $220.
Android 4.1, Jelly Bean
Google Now points toward
the future
With the release of Android 4.1, Jelly Bean
in July 2012, Google settled into an Android
release cadence of about every six months.
The platform matured to the point where a
release every three months was unnecessary,
and the slower release cycle gave OEMs a
chance to catch their breath. Unlike
Honeycomb, point releases were now fairly
major updates, with 4.1 bringing major UI
and framework changes.
One of the biggest changes in Jelly Bean
that you won't be able to see in screenshots
is "Project Butter," the name for a concerted
effort by Google's engineers to make
Android animations run smoothly at 30FPS.
Core changes were made, like Vsync and
triple buffering, and individual animations
were optimized so they could be drawn
smoothly. Animation and scrolling
smoothness had always been a weak point of
Android when compared to iOS. After some
work on both the core animation framework
and on individual apps, Jelly Bean brought
Android a lot closer to iOS' smoothness.
Along with Jelly Bean came the Nexus 7, a
7-inch tablet manufactured by Asus. Unlike
the primarily horizontal Xoom, the Nexus 7
was meant to be used in portrait mode, like a
large phone. The Nexus 7 showed that, after
almost a year-and-a-half of ecosystem
building, Google was ready to commit to the
tablet market with a flagship device. Like
the Nexus One and GSM Galaxy Nexus, the
Nexus 7 was sold online directly by Google.
While those earlier devices had shockingly
high prices for consumers that were used to
carrier subsidies, the Nexus 7 hit a mass
market price point of only $200. The price
bought you a device with a 7-inch,
1280x800 display, a quad core, 1.2 GHz
Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB
of storage. The Nexus 7 was such a good
value that many wondered if Google was
making any money at all on its flagship
tablet.
This smaller, lighter, 7-inch form factor
would be a huge success for Google, and it
put the company in the rare position of being
an industry trendsetter. Apple, which started
with a 10-inch iPad, was eventually forced
to answer the Nexus 7 and tablets like it
with the iPad Mini.
The Tron look introduced in Honeycomb
was toned down a little in Ice Cream
Sandwich, and Jelly Bean took things a step
further. It started removing blue from large
chunks of the operating system. The hint
was the on-press highlights on the system
buttons, which changed from blue to gray.
The Notification panel was completely
revamped, and we've finally arrived at the
design used today in KitKat. The new panel
extended to the top of the screen and
covered the usual status icons, meaning the
status bar was no longer visible when the
panel was open. The time was prominently
displayed in the top left corner, along with
the date and a settings shortcut. The clear all
notions button, which was represented by an
"X" in Ice Cream Sandwich, changed to a
stairstep icon, symbolizing the staggered
sliding animation that cleared the
notification panel. The bottom handle
changed from a circle to a single line that
ran the length of the notification panel. All
the typography was changedthe
notification panel now used bigger, thinner
fonts for everything. This was another
screen where the blue introduced in Ice
Cream Sandwich and Honeycomb was
removed. The notification panel was entirely
gray now except for on-touch highlights.
There was new functionality in the panel,
too. Notifications were now expandable and
could show much more information than the
previous two-line design. It now showed up
to eight lines of text and could even show
buttons at the bottom of the notification. The
screenshot notification had a share button at
the bottom, and you could call directly from
a missed call notification, or you could
snooze a ringing alarm all from the
notification panel. New notifications were
expanded by default, but as they piled up
they would collapse back to the traditional
size. Dragging down on a notification with
two fingers would expand it.
The biggest feature addition to Jelly Bean
for not only Android, but for Google as a
whole, was the new version of the Google
Search application. This introduced "Google
Now," a predictive search feature. Google
Now was displayed as several cards that sit
below the search box, and it would offer
results to searches Google thinks you care
about. These were things like Google Maps
searches for places you've recently looked at
on your desktop computer or calendar
appointment locations, the weather, and time
at home while traveling.
The new Google Search app could, of
course, be launched with the Google icon,
but it could also be accessed from any
screen with a swipe up from the system bar.
Long pressing on the system bar brought up
a ring that worked similarly to the lock
screen ring. The card section scrolled
vertically, and cards could be a swipe away
if you didn't want to see them. Voice Search
was a big part of the updates. Questions
weren't just blindly entered into Google; if
Google knew the answer, it would also talk
back using a text-To-Speech engine. And
old-school text searches were, of course, still
supported. Just tap on the bar and start
typing.
Google frequently called Google Now "the
future of Google Search." Telling Google
what you wanted wasn't good enough.
Google wanted to know what you
wanted before you did. Google Now put all
of Google's data mining knowledge about
you to work for you, and it was the
company's biggest advantage against rival
search services like Bing. Smartphones
knew more about you than any other device
you own, so the service debuted on Android.
But Google slowly worked Google Now into
Chrome, and eventually it will likely end up
on Google.com.
While the functionality was important, it
became clear that Google Now was the most
important design work to ever come out of
the company, too. The white card aesthetic
that this app introduced would become the
foundation for Google's design of just about
everything. Today, this card style is used in
the Google Play Store and in all of the Play
content apps, YouTube, Google Maps,
Drive, Keep, Gmail, Google+, and many
others. It's not just Android apps, either.
Many of Google's desktop sites and iOS
apps are inspired by this design. Design
was historically one of Google's weak areas,
but Google Now was the point where the
company finally got its act together with a
cohesive, company-wide design language.
YouTube was one of the first apps to add a
sliding drawer to the left side of an app, a
feature which would become a standard
design style across Google's apps. The
drawer has links for your account and
channel subscriptions, which allowed
Google to kill the tabs-on-top design.
Android 4.2, Jelly Bean
new Nexus devices, new
tablet interface
The Android Platform was rapidly maturing,
and with Google hosting more and more
apps in the Play Store, there was less and
less that needed to go out in the OS update.
Still, the relentless march of updates must
continue, and in November 2012 Android
4.2 was released. 4.2 was still called "Jelly
Bean," a nod to the relatively small amount
of changes that were present in this release.
Along with Android 4.2 came two flagship
devices, the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 10, both
of which were sold direct by Google on the
Play Store. The Nexus 4 applied the Nexus 7
strategy of a quality device at a shockingly
low price and sold for $300 unlocked. The
Nexus 4 had a quad-core 1.5 GHz
Snapdragon S4 Pro, 2GB of RAM and a 4.7-
inch 1280768 LCD. Google's new flagship
phone was manufactured by LG, and with
the manufacturer switch came a focus on
materials and build quality. The Nexus 4 had
a glass front and back, and while you
couldn't drop it, it was one of the nicest-
feeling Android phones to date. The biggest
downside to the Nexus 4 was the lack of
LTE at a time when most phones, including
the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, came with the
faster modem. Still, demand for the Nexus 4
greatly exceeded Google's expectationsthe
launch rush crashed the Play Store Web site
on launch day. The device sold out in under
an hour.
The Nexus 10 was Google's first 10-inch
Nexus tablet. The highlight of the device
was the 25601600 display, which was the
highest resolution in its class. All those
pixels were powered by a dual core, 1.7GHz
Cortex A15 processor and 2GB of RAM.
With each passing month, it's looking more
and more like the Nexus 10 is the first and
last 10-inch Nexus tablet. Usually these
devices are upgraded every year, but the
Nexus 10 is now 16 months old, and there's
no sign of the new model on the horizon.
Google is doing well with smaller-sized 7-
inch tablets, and it seems content to let
partners like Samsung explore the larger end
of the tablet spectrum.
4.2 brought lots of changes to the lock
screen. The lock screen was now paginated
and could be customized with widgets.
Rather than a simple clock on the lock
screen, users could replace it with another
widget or add extra pages to the lock screen
for more widgets.
One of the biggest additions to 4.2 was the
new "Quick Settings" panel. Android 3.0
brought a way to quickly change power
settings to tablets, and 4.2 finally brought
that ability to phones. A new icon was added
to the top right corner of the notification
panel that would switch between the normal
list of notifications and the new quick
settings screen. Quick Settings offered
faster access to screen brightness, network
connections, and battery and data usage
without having to dig through the full
settings screen. The top level settings button
in Android 4.1 was removed, and a square
was added to the Quick Settings screen for
it.
4.2 replaced the stock browser with Google
Chrome and the stock calendar with Google
Calendar, both of which brought new icon
designs. The Clock and Camera apps were
revamped in 4.2, and new icons were part of
the deal. "Google Settings" was a new app
that offered shortcuts to all the existing
Google Account settings around the OS, and
it had a unified look with Google Search and
the new Google+ icon. Google Maps got a
new icon, and Google Latitude, which was
part of Google Maps, was retired in favor of
Google+ location.
The clock application was completely
revamped, going from a simple two-screen
alarm clock to a world clock, alarm, timer,
and stopwatch. The clock app design was
like nothing Google introduced before, with
an ultra-minimal aesthetic and red
highlights. It seemed to be an experiment for
Google. Even several versions later, this
design language seemed to be confined only
to this app.
The clock's time picker was particularly
well-designed. It showed a simple number
pad, and it would intelligently disable
numbers that would result in an invalid time.
It was also impossible to set an alarm time
without implicitly selecting AM or PM,
forever solving the problem of accidentally
setting an alarm for 9pm instead of 9am.
The most controversial change in Android
4.2 was made to the tablet UI, which
switched from a unified single bottom
system bar to a two-bar interface with a top
status bar and bottom system bar. The new
design unified the phone and tablet
interfaces, but critics said it was a waste of
space to stretch the phone interface to a 10-
inch landscape tablet. Since the navigation
buttons had the whole bottom bar to
themselves now, they were centered, just
like the phone interface.
On tablets, Android 4.2 brought support for
multiple users. In the settings, a "Users"
section was added, where you could manage
users on a device. Setup was done from
within each user account, where Android
would keep separate settings, home screens,
apps, and app data for each user.
4.2 also added a new keyboard with swiping
abilities. Rather than just tapping each
individual letter, users could now keep a
finger on the screen the whole time and just
slide from letter to letter to type.
Out-of-cycle updateswho
needs a new OS?
In between Android 4.2 and 4.3, Google
went on an out-of-cycle update tear and
showed just how much Android could be
improved without having to fire up the
arduous OTA update process. Thanks to the
Google Play Store and Play Services, all of
these updates were able to be delivered
without updating any core system
components.
In April 2013, Google released a major
redesign to the Google Play Store. Like most
redesigns from here on out, the new Play
Store fully adopted the Google Now
aesthetic, with white cards on a gray
background. The action bar changed color
based on the current content section, and
since the first screen featured content from
all sections of the store, the action bar was a
neutral gray. Buttons to navigate to the
content sections were now given top billing,
and below that was usually a promotional
block or rows of recommended apps.
The new Play Store showed off the real
power of Googles card design language,
which enabled a fully responsive layout
across all screen sizes. One large card could
be stuck next to several little cards, larger-
screened devices could show more cards,
and rather than stretch things in horizontal
mode, more cards could just be added to a
row. The Play Store content editors were
free to play with the layout of the cards, too;
a big release that needed to be highlighted
could get a larger card. This design would
eventually trickle down to the other Google
Play content apps, finally resulting in a
unified design.
Google I/O, the company's annual developer
conference, was usually where a new
Android version was announced. But at the
2013 edition, Google made just as many
improvements without having to update the
OS.
One of the biggest things announced at the
show was an update to Google Talk,
Google's instant messaging platform. For a
long time, Google shipped four text
communication apps for Android: Google
Talk, Google+ Messenger, Messaging (the
SMS app), and Google Voice. Having four
apps that accomplished the same task
sending a text message to someonewas
very confusing for users. At I/O, Google
killed Google Talk and started their
messaging product over from scratch,
creating Google Hangouts. While initially it
only replaced Google Talk, the plan for
Hangouts was to unify all of Google's
various messaging apps into a single
interface. And much like the change from
Browser to Google Chrome, core Android
functionality was passed off to a separate
teamthe Google+ teamas opposed to
being a side product of the very busy
Android engineers. With the Google+
takeover, Android's main IM client now
became a continually developed application.
It was placed into the Play Store and
received fairly regular updates.
Google also introduced a new design
element for the action bar: the navigation
drawer. This drawer was shown as a set of
three lines next to the app icon in the top-
right corner. By tapping on it or dragging
from the edge of the screen to the right, a
side-mounted menu would appear. As the
name implies, this was used to navigate
around the app, and it would show several
top-level locations within the app. This
allowed the first screen to show content, and
it gave users a consistent, easy-to-access
place for navigation elements. The nav
drawer was basically a super-sized version
of the normal menu, scrollable and docked
to the right side.
Another app update pushed out at I/O was a
new Google Music app. The app was
completely redesigned, finally doing away
with the blue-on-blue design introduced in
Honeycomb. Play Music's design was
unified with the new Play Store released a
few months earlier, with a responsive white
card layout. Music was also one of the first
major apps to take advantage of the new
navigation drawer style. Along with the new
app, Google launched Google Play Music
All Access, an all-you-can-eat subscription
service for $10 a month. Google Music now
had a subscription plan, la carte
purchasing, and a cloud music locker. This
version also introduced "Instant Mix," a
mode where Google would cloud-compute a
playlist of similar songs.
Google also introduced "Google Play
Games," a back-end service that developers
could plug into their games. The service
was basically an Android version of Xbox
Live or Apple's Game Center. Developers
could build Play Games support into their
game, which would easily let them integrate
achievements, leaderboards, multiplayer,
matchmaking, user accounts, and cloud
saves by using Google's back-end services.
Play Games was the start of Google's big
push into gaming. Just like standalone GPS
units, flip phones, and MP3 players,
smartphone makers were hoping standalone
gaming devices would be turned into
nothing more than a smartphone feature
bullet point. Why buy a Nintendo DS or PS
Vita when you had a smartphone with you?
An easy-to-use multiplayer service would
be a big part of this, and we've still yet to
see the final consequence of this move.
Today, Google and Apple are both rumored
to be planning living room gaming devices.
Android 4.3, Jelly Bean
getting wearable support
out early
Android 4.3 would have been an incredible
update if Google had done the traditional
thing and not released updates between 4.3
and 4.2 through the Play Store. If the new
Play Store, Gmail, Maps, Books, Music,
Hangouts, Keep, and Play Games
were bundled into a big brick as a new
version of Android, it would have been
hailed as the biggest release ever. Google
didn't need to do hold back features anymore
though. With very little left that required an
OS update, at the end of July 2013, Google
released the seemingly insignificant update
called "Android 4.3."
Google made no qualms about the low
importance of 4.3, calling the newest release
"Jelly Bean" (the third one in a row).
Android 4.3's feature list read like a laundry
list of things Google couldn't update from
the Play Store or through Google Play
Services, mostly consisting of low-level
framework changes for developers.
Many of the additions seemed to fit a
singular purpose, thoughAndroid 4.3 was
Google's trojan horse for wearable
computing support. 4.3 added support for
Bluetooth Low Energy, a way to wirelessly
connect Android to another device and pass
data back and forth while using a very small
amount of poweran integral feature to a
wearable device. Android 4.3 also added a
"Notification Access" API, which allowed
apps to completely replicate and control the
notification panel. Apps could display
notification text and pictures and interact
with the notification the same way users
donamely pressing action buttons and
dismissing notifications. Doing this from an
on-board app when you have the notification
panel is useless, but on a device that is
separate from your phone, replicating the
information in the notification panel
becomes much more useful. One of the few
apps that plugged into this was "Android
Wear Preview," which used the notification
API to power most of the interface for
Android Wear.
The "4.3 is for wearables" theory explained
the relatively low number of features in 4.3:
it was pushed out the door to give OEMs
time to update devices in time for the launch
of Android Wear. The plan seems to have
worked. Android Wear requires Android 4.3
and up, which has been out for so long now
that most major flagships have updated.
Android 4.4, KitKatmore
polish; less memory usage
Google got really cute with the launch of
Android 4.4. The company teamed up with
Nestl to name the OS "KitKat," and it
launched on Halloween, October 31, 2013.
Nestl produced limited-edition Android-
shaped KitKat bars, and KitKat packaging in
stores promoted the new OS while offering a
chance to win a Nexus 7.
KitKat launched with a new Nexus device,
the Nexus 5. The new flagship had the
biggest display yet: a five-inch, 1920x1080
LCD. Despite the bigger screen size, LG
again the manufacturer for the devicewas
able to fit the Nexus 5 into the same
dimensions as a Galaxy Nexus or Nexus 4.
The Nexus 5 was specced comparatively to
the highest-end phones at the time, with a
2.3Ghz Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB
of RAM. The phone was again sold
unlocked on the Play Store, but while most
phones with specs like this would go for
$600-$700, Google sold the Nexus 5 for
only $350.
One of the most important improvements in
KitKat was one you couldn't see:
significantly lower memory usage. For
KitKat, Google started a concerted effort to
lower memory usage across the OS and
bundled apps called "Project Svelte." After
tons of optimization work and a "low
memory" mode that disabled expensive
graphical effects, Android could now run on
as little as 340MB of RAM. Lower memory
requirements were a big deal, because
devices in the developing worldthe
biggest growth markets for smartphones
often ran on only 512MB of RAM. Ice
Cream Sandwich's more advanced UI
significantly raised the system requirements
of Android devices, which left many low-
end deviceseven newly released low-end
devicesstuck on Gingerbread. The lower
system requirements of KitKat meant to
bring these cheap devices back into the fold.
With KitKat, Google hoped to finally kill
Gingerbread (which, at the time of writing,
is around 20 percent of the market). Just in
case the lower system requirements weren't
enough, there have even been reports that
Google will no longer license the Google
apps to Gingerbread devices.
Besides bringing low-end phones to a
modern version of the OS, Project Svelte's
lower memory requirements were to be
a boon to wearable computers, too. Google
Glass announced it was also switching to the
slimmer OS, and Android Wear ran on
KitKat, too. The lower memory
requirements in Android 4.4 and the
notification API and Bluetooth LE support
in 4.3 came together nicely to support
wearable computing.
KitKat also featured a lot of polish to the
core OS interfaces that couldn't be updated
via the Play Store. The System UI, Dialer,
Clock, and Settings all saw updates.
In KitKat, apps had the ability to make the
system and status bars transparent, which
significantly changed the look of the OS.
The bars now blended into the wallpaper
and any other app that chose to enable
transparent bars. The bars could also be
completely hidden by any app via a new
feature called immersive" mode.
KitKat was the final nail in the Tron"
coffin, removing almost all traces of blue
from the operating system. The status bar
icons were changed from a blue to a neutral
white. The status and system bars on the
home screen werent completely transparent;
a dark gradient was added to the top and
bottom of the screen so that the white icons
would still be visible on a light background.
The new home screen was called the
"Google Now Launcher," and it was actually
the Google Search app. Yes, Google Search
grew from a simple search box to an entire
home screen, and in KitKat, it drew the
wallpaper, icons, app drawer, widgets, home
screen settings, Google Now, and, of course,
the search box. Thanks to Search now
running the entire home screen, any time the
home screen was open and the screen was
on, voice commands could be activated by
saying OK Google." This was pointed out
to the user with introductory Say 'OK
Google' text in the search bar, which would
fade away after a few uses.
Google Now was more integrated, too.
Besides the usual swipe up from the system
bar, Google Now was also the leftmost
home screen. The new version brought some
design tweaks as well. The Google logo was
moved into the search bar, and the whole top
area was compacted. A few card designs
were cleaned up, and a new set of buttons at
the bottom led to reminders, customization
options, and an overflow button with
settings, feedback, and help. Since Google
Now was part of the home screen, it got
transparent system and status bars, too.
Transparency and brightening up" certain
parts of the OS were design themes in
KitKat. Black was removed in the status and
system bars by switching to transparent, and
the black background of the folders was
switched to white.
There was a new app called Photos"
really the Google+ appwhich took over
picture management duties. On the Nexus 5,
the Gallery and Google+ Photos were pretty
similar, but in newer builds of KitKat
present on Google Play Edition devices, the
Gallery was completely replaced by
Google+ photos. Play Games was an
interface for Googles back-end multiplayer
servicea Googly version of Xbox Live or
pples Game Center. Google Drive, which
existed for years as a Play Store app, was
finally made a default app. Google bought
Quickoffice back in June 2012, now finally
deeming the app acceptable for inclusion by
default. While Drive opened Google
Documents, Quickoffice opened Microsoft
Office Documents. If keeping track, that was
two document editing apps and two photo
editing apps included on most KitKat
loadouts.
KitKat was the end of the line for the Tron
design. In most parts of the OS, any
remaining blue highlights were removed in
favor of gray. In the People app, blue was
sucked out of the header and the letter
separators in the contact list. The pictures
swapped sides and the bottom bar was
changed to a light gray to match the top. The
Keyboard, which injected the color blue into
nearly every app, was changed to gray-on-
gray-on-gray. That wasn't a bad thing. Apps
should be allowed to have their own color
schemeforcing a potentially clashing color
on them via the keyboard wasnt good
design.
Google completely revamped the dialer in
KitKat, creating a wild new design that
changed the way users thought about a
phone. Actual numbers in the new dialer
were hidden as much as possiblethere
wasnt even a dial pad on the main screen.
The primary interface for making a phone
call was now a search bar! If you wanted to
call someone in your contacts, just type their
name in; if you wanted to call a business,
just type the business name in and the dialer
would search through Google Maps
extensive database of phone numbers. It
worked incredibly well and was something
only Google could pull off.
KitKat included an OS-level printing
framework. At the bottom of the settings
was a "Printing" screen, and any printer
OEM could make a plugin for it. Google
Cloud Print was, of course, one of the first
supporters. Once your printer was hooked
up to Cloud Print, either natively or through
a computer with Chrome installed, you
could print to it over the Internet. Apps
needed to support the printing framework,
too. Pressing the little "i" button on Google
Drive would show information about the
document and give you the option to print it.
Just like a desktop OS, a print dialog would
pop up with settings like copies, paper size,
and page selection.
TodayAndroid
everywhere
What started out as a curious BlackBerry
clone from a search engine company became
the most popular OS in the world from one
of the biggest titans in the tech industry.
Android has become Google's de-facto
consumer operating system, and it powers
phones, tablets, Google Glass, Google TV,
and more. Parts of it are even used in the
Chromecast. In the future, Google will be
bringing Android to watches and wearables
with Android Wear, and the Open
Automotive Alliance will be bringing
Android to cars. Google will be making a
renewed commitment to the living room
soon, too, with Android TV. The OS is such
a core pillar of Google, that events that are
supposed to cover company-wide products,
like Google I/O, end up becoming Android
launch parties.
What was once the ugly duckling of the
mobile industry has transformed so much it
now wins design awards for its user
interface. The design of things like Google
Now have affected everything the company
produces, with even the desktop sites like
Search, Google+, YouTube, and Maps
getting in on the card design unity. The
design keeps evolving as well. Google's next
plan is to unify design across not just
Android, but all of its products. The goal is
to take something like Gmail and make it
feel the same, whether you're using it on
Android, a desktop browser, or a watch.
Google outsourced so many pieces of
Android to the Play Store, that version
releases are becoming less and less
necessary. Google decided the best way to
beat carrier and OEM update issues was to
sidestep those roadblocks completely. From
here on out, there isn't much left to include
in an Android update other than core under-
the-hood changesbut even many APIs
have been pushed to Google Play Services.
If you just look at version releases, it seems
like Android development has slowed down
from the peak 2.5-month release cycle. But
the reality is Google can now continually
push out improvements to the Play Store in a
never-ending, somewhat subtler stream of
updates.
With 1.5 million activations per day,
Android has no where to go but up. In the
future, Android will be headed from phones
and tablets to cars and watches, and the
lower system requirements of KitKat will
drive phones to even lower prices in the
developing world. The bottom line? More
and more people will get online. And for
many of those people, Android will be not
just their phone but their primary computing
device. With Android leading the charge for
Google in so many areas, the OS that started
off as a tiny acquisition has become one of
Google's most important products.



Webliography
en.wikipedia.org
www.google.com/images
www.androidpolice.com
www.theverge.com
www.arstechnica.com
www.gsmarena.com
www.androidcentral.com