#Android os versions update

Android wasn’t very popular in the early days, and until Android 4.0, screenshots could only be taken with the developer kit. Almost a billion total devices have been sold, and 1.5 million devices are activated per day-but how did Google get here? With this level of scale and success, you would think there would be tons of coverage of Android’s rise from zero to hero.

It's now a historically big operating system. Looking back, Android's existence has been a blur. Google's original introduction of Android, from way back in November 2007. For the first year of Android’s commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version every two-and-a-half months. Lately, Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that's slower than it used to be.

#Android os versions update

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. During that time, we've seen an absolutely breathtaking rate of change unlike any other development cycle that has ever existed. If you'd like to jump directly to the new section, click right here (or, if you're a subscriber in single-page view, use this link instead).Īndroid has been with us in one form or another for more than eight years. Ron has updated the piece with almost 11,000 additional words, bringing the history up to date with info on Kit-Kat, Lollipop, Marshmallow, Nougat, and Android Wear. It's been more than two years since we originally ran Ron's epic 40,000-word history of the Android operating system, and in that time Android has continued to evolve and add version numbers.