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The Android Operating System

It feels pretty strange to know that the Android operating system is no
older than 7 years given its popularity and advancement today. Within such a
short period of time, the Android OS has introduced hundreds of features in
smartphones revolutionizing the entire mobile phone industry. Its popularity
is further enhanced by its open source nature, providing a larger community
of developers and users. In other words, Android is a fully open and
comprehensive platform for mobile device that provides an operating
system, middleware, user interface and applications that provide both users
and developers with a flexibility to design and develop applications and
programs. With such flexibility and an evidently large support community,
the Android operating system has greatly evolved in these seven years
proving to be a much more advanced and powerful operating system with
hundreds of features.
Although it is widely known that the Android OS was introduced by
Google in 2007, this fact is entirely wrong. In fact, Android was created in
2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, Chris White, the founders of
Android Inc. with an intention to create software for digital cameras.
However, when they realized that the market for digital cameras was not big
enough, they drifted their idea towards producing a smartphone operation
system. However, this face was kept secret from the public by publicizing a
false fact that they were only developing software for mobile phones. Their

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Android OS was designed to be a simple and functional open source

platform (based on the Linux kernel), equipped with a series of tools
designed to make life easier for developers. This means that the Android
OS was basically designed as a mobile version of Linux such that its open
source platform would ultimately make it system free for anyone who wanted
to use it. It was this feature that then enticed Google towards the Android
OS project. This interest convinced Google to finally acquire Android Inc. on
2005 which was when the Google Mobile Division was born.
Although Google bought Android with an intention of creating a new
mobile device, it ended up developing Android as a software ecosystem, a
flexible and adaptable operating system different than Apple iOS. For the
first two years, Google tried to develop their own mobile phone with the
Android OS until 2007 when they made a strategic move to offer a good sum
of money to the developer community to build best applications for their
operating system. It was when Google made its intention clear which was to
build an operating system platform as independent as possible and open to
all the developers.
One of the major milestone on the Android evolution happened on
November 5th 2007. On this date, Google unveiled the Open Handset
Alliance (OHA), a consortium of technology manufacturers that would work
together to create open mobile device standards which included wireless
telecommunications providers (T-Mobil), mobile handset makers (Motorola,

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HTC) and chipset makers (Texas Instruments, Qualcomm). This

announcement indicated Googles attempt to be different that Apple based
on the fact that Android was not going to be limited simply within one device
from a single manufacturer. After this revelation, Google commercially
released it first Android smartphone, HTC Dream, also called as T-Mobile G1
on October 2008.
The first Android OS was name Android 1.0. It offered multitasking
features, GPS, Bluetooth services. The Android applications market was at its
beginning and had 35 applications. The phone had Google features available
in it. The OS used YAFFS2 as its file system which was changed after the
release of Android 2.4 to ext4 as the earlier one was single threaded. Google
released the first OS update in April 2009 naming it Cupcake. Since then, 10
new Android OS have been released named in order- Donut, clair, Froyo,
Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice-cream Sandwich, Jellybean, Kit-Kat, Lollipop
and Marshmallow being the latest.
Although the first android phone came into market in 2007 it didnt get
a good market until November 2009 when Google launched the Motorola
Droid. This phone came with the new Android OS, version 2.0. This version
came with a new UI with support for CDMA phones, Motion event class for
multi-touch functions, support for HTML 5 and various other features. As this
version of Android distinguished itself greatly from iOS with its new features,
Android now started to gain popularity.

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The next major update for Android was version 2.2 which was named
as Froyo. This version came with various new optimizations like higher speed
and performance optimizations. This version integrated Chromes V8
JavaScript engine into its browser. It also allowed US tethering and WIFI
hotspot services. It also allowed installing applications to the expandable
memory.
The next significant update was Android 2.3, named GingerBread. The
major update in this one was the change of the filesystem from YAFFS to
ext4. It also allowed concurrent garbage collection for increased performance
and also optimized power management. In the next update for the
GingerBread version, Google also switched the default encryption for SSL
from AES856-SHA to RC4-MD5.
Similarly, along with all the other multimedia updates, The Android 3.0,
Honeycomb was the first platform designed to run on either single or
multicore processor architectures. It also introduced File System in
Userspace(FUSE) mechanism such that the non-privileged users could create
their own file systems without editing kernel code. Similarly, the Android 4.2,
Jellybean introduced the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) mode and
various other significant updates came in every new versions after that.
When talking about the technical detail of the Android OS, it
architecture is basically divided into four layers, the kernel being the first
one. The bottom layer of the Android OS is the Linux kernel; this means that

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Android is just another distribution of Linux. The kernel is built on top of

Linux 2.6, changed to 3.x from Android 4.0 onwards, with some architectural
changes made by Google. This Linux kernel provides various OS features like
virtual memory, networking, drivers and power management.
The second layer consists of the Libraries and the Android Run Time.
This layer provides different libraries needed for well-functioning of the
Android OS. These libraries are JAVA libraries build specifically for Android.
These libraries include SQLIte for database management, SSL for internal
security, OpenGL for graphics rendering, media framework for media codecs
and WebKit for browser engine. This same layer also consists of the Android
Runtime. It provides the Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM) which is the
environment that powers the applications that run on the Android OS. DVM is
similar to JVM but is customized for Android. It uses core functions of Linux
such as memory management, multithreading and multiprocessing.
The next layer is the application framework. The primary function of
this layer is to directly interact with the Android applications. This layer
manages basic functions of android device such as managing activity life
cycle of applications, data sharing between two applications. Along with this,
it also manages voice calls, GPS and cell towers and different types of
resources used by the android applications
The last layer is the applications layer. This layer is where all the third
party applications are installed. These applications include the SMS client

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app, dialer, web browser, content manager etc. All the applications found on
the Google Play store will also be installed in this layer.
The next essential technical detail of any operating system is its file
system. In the Android OS, all the files, directories and operations involving
them flow through a kernel abstract layer called the Virtual File System(VFS).
Each file system has a different implementation of VFS; this means each file
system has a separate kernel module that registers the operations that it
supports with VFS. So, the file systems on different android devices may
vary. The common file systems used are F2FS, JFFS2 and YAFFS2. The FlashFriendly File System(F2FS) was the one introduced by Samsung as open
source Linux File System in 2012. The Yet Another Flash File System version
2(YAFFS2) was the android open source project for kernel version 2.6.32.
This, however, is not supported in newer kernel versions. Finally, the Journal
Flash File System Version 2(JFFS2) is the default file system in Android open
source project kernels since the Android version, Ice-cream Sandwich.
Another most important OS technicality is memory management.
Unlike other operating system, Android does not offer swap space for
memory management but does offer paging and memory mapping features.
This means that any memory you modify cannot be paged out and will be a
permanent resident in RAM. So, the only way to completely release a
memory from an app is by making the memory available to the garbage
collector. Since it doesnt have swap spaces, the Android OS caches every

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process when the user leaves instead of quitting it such that when the user
later returns to the app, the process is reused for faster app switching. Also,
Android OS shares the dynamic RAM across processes using explicitly
allocated shared memory regions to optimize the memory uses.
Within these six year, the Android OS has proved to be a great success.
With more and more versions of Android coming, there are indefinite amount
of updates and improvements made both on the OS side and the UI side. All
these improvements are significant signals that the Android is getting more
popular day by day and making our life more tech-savvy. After analyzing the
current rate of Androids progress, I can see that in upcoming future Android
OS is going to be as much popular as Windows is today.

References
Anderson, Bill. "Understanding the Android File HeirarchyBi."Understanding the
Android File HeirarchyBi. Android News for Costa Rica, 15 Jan. 2015. Web. 25
Oct. 2015.

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"Android OS Architecture - Android Tutorials - C4learn.com." Learn Programming
Language Step By Step. N.p., 02 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Oct. 2015.
"Android Architecture Guides for Beginners | Edureka." Edureka Blog RSS. N.p., 2
Jan. 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
"Managing Your App's Memory." Managing Your Apps's Memory. Android Developers,
n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
Kovach, Steve. "How Android Grew To Be More Popular Than The IPhone."Business
Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 13 Aug. 2013. Web. 23 Oct. 2015.
"Android: A Visual History." The Verge. The Verge, 07 Dec. 2011. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.