What is Android OS?

Mobile OS a very small history, they started making their mark as Desktop OS were taking the lead. World has seen the Mobile OS from the small mobile handsets to smart phone from Personal Digital assistance (PDA) to tablets. There are many such operating systems we see in the markets such as Symbian, windows, iOS, RIM, Ubuntu, Firefox OS and Android. It’s nothing wrong to say that Android is popular of all the mobile operating system which were listed. Android OS is a product of Android INC, Palo Alto, California US started in the year 2003, and later in 2005 it is acquired by Google.

Android is Linux based OS, we can say modified Linux. Linux kernel got device drivers(programs to communicate with hardware) compatible for Desktop PCs, where Android OS kernel got the device drivers modified for mobile devices. So Android is open source product, its source code is released by Google under open source license. It’s this nature of the android, which grabbed the attention of many developers around the world and it is adopted by the technology companies for their devices. There is no doubt that Android is the fastest grown mobile operating system since its inception because of its open source nature and rich community of developers, and enthusiast.

Android is preferable platform for developers, beginners, users when compared to other operating system. It’s not just the open source nature of Android that make it popular(as Firefox and Ubuntu belongs to same category), it’s the rich documents from Google, large community of developers and massive market of android devices and its rich app make which it a largest platform of all. Now you can find Android OS in most the electronics devices such as mobile, tablet, TV, watch etc. So this is the reason why developers should care about developing Android

The basic architecture of the android is very much similar to that of Unix, where the user application interact with the device hardware using kernel(device drivers) and rich such of libraries and runtime. Below figure shows the architecture of Linux. Basically it consists of 4 blocks such as Applicationsm Application framework, libraries & runtime and Linux kernel.