A Brief Overview Of The Google Android Operating System

Today, Google is one of the most powerful companies in the software development industry. There is nearly no place that Google doesn’t want to enter and compete in. One of the platforms that Google developed is the Android Operating System. So what exactly is Android and how does it function?

The Android operating system was developed initially as a mobile operating system by a company called Android, Inc. After Google purchased this company, they decided to develop an open source platform for mobiles which they called Android; this open source platform was based on the Linux Kernel. Today it’s currently available for a wide variety of smartphones.

In the middle of 2010, Google scored the highest sales among other mobile operating systems with a market share of more than 40%. Now it’s becoming one of the most powerful and customizable mobile operating systems available.

As an open source project, Google released the Android code under the Apache license as a free software and open source license. Now it has more than 100,000 applications which can be downloaded from the Google app store, or from third party websites.

Considered as one of the best customizable operating systems available, all the smartphones that use it are touch-screen devices, and all have a certain number of screens that you can customize to your liking. In screen customization, Android is considered as the best one among its competitors.

Most people consider this platform as a geeky one, because of its high capabilities, but Google has made accessing menus and files even easier than before. Others emphasize that it takes more time and practice to learn Android than Apple’s iPhone OS. While it looks different from one handset to another because of its open source nature, the same manipulation principles apply to every smartphone running it.

This operating system is a result of many programming languages put together and that’s the secret of its power. Its open nature allows anyone to create and run applications in Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries. The other interesting thing about this operating system is that you can run many applications on it at the same time (multitask).

As some people suggest that Android lacks the elegance of Apple’s iPhone OS and Palm’s webOS, it is still considered as a very powerful mobile operating system that has a compilation of countless useful applications and features that no other operating system has. So if it’s powerful, who needs elegance?