a visual history of android

7/30/2019 A Visual History of Android

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ANDROID: A VISUAL HISTORY

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TABLEO

FCONTENTS

Table of contents

Where it all began (Android 1.0)

Android 1.1

1.5 "Cupcake"

1.6 "Donut"

2.0 /2.1"Eclair"

2.2 "Froyo"

2.3 "Gingerbread"

3.x "Honeycomb"

4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich"

4.1 "Jelly Bean"


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WHEREIT

ALLBEGAN

The Android era officially began on October 22nd,

2008, when the T-Mobile G1 launched in the United

StatesThe Android era officially began on October 22nd,2008, when the T-Mobile G1 launched in the UnitedStates. Initially, many features that we couldn't livewithout today were missing an on-screen keyboard,multitouch capability, and paid apps, for instance but

the foundation was in place, and a few lastingtrademarks of the platform debuted on those very firstG1s to roll off the assembly line:

The pull-down notification window. Though theseearly phones clearly weren't without their flaws, it wasalmost universally acknowledged that Android nailedthe notification system on day one it would take iOSanother three years before launching a design aseffective at triaging messages and alerts coming fromusers' ever-growing collection of mobile apps. Thesecret was in the G1's unique status bar, which couldbe dragged downward to reveal every notification in asingle list: text messages, voicemails, alarms, and so on.The fundamental concept lives on (in a refined form)even in version 4.0 today.

Home screen widgets. If you had to pick an enduringdifferentiator for Android as a phone platform adifferentiator it can still claim against iOS 5 and, tosome extent, Windows Phone 7.5 it'd be rich support

for widgets on the home screen. Google had big plansfor widgets from the very beginning, but there was onebig hang-up at launch: developers couldn't create theirown widgets.

Deep, rich Gmail integration. By the time the G1 wasreleased, Gmail had long since supported POP andIMAP for integration with mobile email clients butthe problem is that neither one of those protocols arewell-suited for supporting some of Gmail's more unique

features like archival and labeling. Android 1.0 fixedthat in a big way, shipping with by far the best mobileGmail experience on the market.


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ANDROID

1.0

The Android Market. It's hard to imagine asmartphone without a centralized app store now,but when Android first shipped, it did so at the verystart of the mobile app revolution. Indeed, theAndroid Market on those first G1s bore littleresemblance to the Android Market of today: itlaunched with just a handful of apps (as you'dexpect of an entirely new ecosystem), and didn'thave the rich, multifaceted curation that has beenadded over the last couple versions instead, it

just had a single row of handpicked selections atthe top of the app's home screen. Perhaps moreimportantly, it lacked support for any sort ofpayment system, a problem that wouldn't get fixed

until the following year.Notably, Google developed Android 1.0's UI withhelp from The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedishinteraction design firm responsible for some trulyamazing interface concepts over the years. If youlook closely, you can see where TAT left its mark onthe platform: the analog clock widget included inAndroid versions 1.0 through 2.2 read "Malmo" in

small, light gray type near the bottom of the face, atribute to TAT's hometown of Malm, Sweden. Thecompany would later go on to be acquired by RIMto focus solely on advancement of its BlackBerryand BBX platforms so needless to say, Google'scollaboration with TAT has come to an end.


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ANDROID

1.1

It's no coincidence that Danger's Hiptop platform,

which gave birth to the Sidekick, had been offering

painless, phased over-the-air OS updates for years

The first upgrade to the Android platform came in

February of 2009, a little over three months afterthe launch of the G1. Version 1.1 wasn't a

revolution by any stretch of the imagination it

patched a fairly lengthy list of bugs, primarily but

if nothing else, it validated Android's ability to roll

out updates over the air and make them nearly

effortless for users to install. At the time, that was a

big deal, and it was something that no other major

smartphone platform was doing. (It's nocoincidence that Danger's Hiptop platform, which

gave birth to the Sidekick, had been offering

painless, phased over-the-air OS updates for years.

Android's Andy Rubin had previously founded

Danger.)


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ANDROID

1.5"CUPCAKE"

Android 1.5 perhaps better known by its codename, Cupcakemarked much more of a milestone. It wasn't justabout the fact that it added several hotly-anticipated features that were critical to keeping the platform competitive,it was also the first version to use Google's "sweet" naming convention: every major release since Cupcake has beennamed after a confection in alphabetical order. Apart from a couple tricky letters like "X," we'd expect the trend tocontinue for a while.

In many ways, Cupcake was about refinement, polishing some rough edges on the user interface that had originally

launched. Some of these changes were nearly imperceptible if you weren't looking for them. For instance, thestandard Google search widget a staple on many users' home screens gained a hint of transparency, and theapp drawer was decorated with a subtle weave pattern beneath the icons.

Hover over the image below to get a sense of just how subtle these changes were. If you used a device running 1.1and 1.5 in succession, you might never notice anything; in reality, though, everything from text alignment to shadingon the status bar had gone under the knife.

Most G1 users probably flew past those UI tweaks without noticing them, though, because the extensive list of newfeatures Google had thrown in was far more exciting, noticeable, and immediately relevant in day-to-day use:

An on-screen keyboard. In retrospect, it's amazing to think that Google could've shipped Android without any sort ofsoft keyboard, but that's exactly what it did. It helps explain why the first Android device at retail was a landscapeQWERTY slider, and it also explains why it wasn't until Cupcake was released (in April 2009, some half a year afterthe G1 shipped) that we saw the first touchscreen-only phone on the market, the HTC Magic.

In conjunction with the soft keyboard support, Google took a bold step: it integrated the hooks necessary for third-party developers to create their own replacement keyboards, which is a capability that continues to differentiateAndroid from competing platforms even today neither iOS nor Windows Phone support it. At the time ofCupcake's release, the official Android soft keyboard was considered by many to lag iOS for accuracy and speed,which ultimately led OEMs like HTC to quickly develop replacements on their own devices. Indeed, it was one of the

first forms of "skinning" Android would see.Extensible widgets. While Android 1.0 and 1.1 technically included widgets, their full potential had yet to be realizedbecause Google hadn't exposed the SDK to developers the only widgets you had available were the few includedin the box. That changed in 1.5, and today, many (if not most) of the third-party applications on the platform shipwith one or more widgets available to the user. It's a big deal for Android, which continues to enjoy the mostflexible, extensible home screen of any mobile platform and that title traces its roots to the addition of thisfeature in Cupcake.


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Clipboard improvements. Android had a rather roughroad to gaining "full" support for copy and paste. Theplatform technically supported it from day one but itwas largely limited to text fields and links. That meantthat text couldn't be copied out of browser windows orGmail, two places where you're very likely to want to

do it. Though full clipboard capability wouldn't come toGmail for several more versions, Cupcake addedsupport to the browser, allowing you to copy plain textout of a page.

Video capture and playback. It's difficult to imagine asmartphone shipping without any support for shootingvideo now, but that's the situation that T-Mobile G1buyers originally found themselves in. Cupcake wouldfix the problem, but like Android's built-in soft

keyboard, the operating system's built-in camerainterface became one of the more reviled parts of theplatform and it's a part that OEMs quickly replacedwith their own improved interfaces, frequently addingsupport for additional scenes, modes, options, andconveniences like touch-to-focus.

And a lot more. Miscellaneous updates included batchoperations in Gmail (you couldn't delete or archivemultiple emails at once prior to 1.5), upload support forYouTube and Picasa, and ubiquitous access to contacts'Google Talk status throughout the platform in placeslike the Contacts screen, the Messaging application,and from Gmail. (In a way, this featuresynchronization of rich contact information acrossmultiple apps and screens would foretell thedirection that Android was moving, particularly in 2.0.)


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ANDROID

1.6"DONUT"

Android 1.6 Donut was a far bigger deal than its

"0.1" increment would let on

Though it wasn't as big of an upgrade as Cupcake, Android 1.6

Donut was still a far bigger deal than its "0.1" increment would let

on. It made another pass of minor visual refinements throughout

the platform and added a handful of new and updated, but much

of the big news was under the hood. CDMA support was firstoffered in Donut, for instance, opening the door to American

carriers like Verizon and potentially hundreds of millions of

subscribers across Asia.

But perhaps none of the "under the hood" changes had a more

profound effect on the platform than resolution independence.

Donut marked the first time that Android was capable of running

on a variety of screen resolutions and aspect ratios, which opened

the door for phones that featured displays of something other

than 320 x 480 in a portrait orientation. If you look at any carrier'sAndroid lineup today, you're liable to see phones of QVGA, HVGA,

WVGA, FWVGA, qHD, and 720p resolution and maybe even a

portrait QWERTY model or two and that scaling capability

traces its roots directly to 1.6.

Perhaps none of the "under the hood" changes had

a more profound effect on the platform than

resolution independence

Donut also introduced the notion of the Quick Search Box, a

concept more generally known in the mobile world as "universal

search." Prior to Donut, pressing the Search button on an Android

phone's keypad while on the home screen would take you to a

Google search box for searching the internet, no different than

navigating to google.com and typing your search there. With

Donut's enhancements, you could search a variety of local content

applications, contacts, and so on plus the internet all at once

from a single box. What's more, Donut exposed functions for

developers that allowed them to plug in so that their applications

could be searched as well.

What other features debuted in Android 1.6? A redesigned

Android Market

designed in the white and green accents soclosely associated with Android's mascot included some

additional curation to expose lists of top free and paid apps,

particularly important at a time when the platform's third-party

app catalog was starting to explode. A redesigned camera

interface was also included with better gallery integration and

significantly reduced shutter lag, although it didn't garner any

more critical acclaim than the one it replaced; Google would

continue to make small changes to it through 2.3, though most

users would never see it since manufacturers typically replaced it

in their skins.


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ANDROID

2.0"ECLAIR"

"Big" would be an accurate description allaround

In early November of 2009 about a year after theG1's premiere Android 2.0 launched right on Donut'sheels. "Big" would be an accurate description all

around: it was a big deal, made big promises, and wasdeployed on big phones offered by big carriers. Eclair,as it was known, was initially offered exclusively onVerizon on none other than the Motorola Droid thephone that kicked off one of the most successful mobilefranchises in history. What made Eclair so important? Itrepresented the most fundamental refresh thatAndroid had seen since its debut, both visually andarchitecturally. Of course, with an unheard-of 854 x 480display, it didn't hurt that the Droid was by far the most

powerful Android handset the world had seen at thatpoint

but the significantly improved nuts and bolts ofthe platform played a big role in the device's retailsuccess, too:

Multiple account support. For the first time, multipleGoogle accounts could be added to the same deviceseparate work and personal accounts, for instance with access to email and contacts from each. Supportfor Exchange accounts was added, too.

Eclair also gave third parties the tools they needed to

plug their own services into this account framework,which would then permit them to be automaticallysynchronized on an ongoing basis. One key advantage isthat shared information between your account typescan be automatically synchronized into a single contacton the phone, a one-stop shop for all the informationabout the individuals in your address book. Facebookwas an early adopter of this functionality in fact, itshipped on the Droid but a spat with Google overwhere Facebook's synchronized contact information

was ultimately stored ended with its account syncprivileges being revoked.


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Google Maps Navigation. This was a big one that continues to have an impact on the market even today. Released in conjunction

with Android 2.0, Google Maps Navigation was a totally free turn-by-turn automotive navigation product using Google's own

mapping data for guidance, and it included many of the features you'd expect to find on a typical in -car navigation system: a

forward-looking 3D view, voice guidance (including street names), and traffic information. Considering that drivers had previously

needed to choose between paying a significant amount of money for a turn-by-turn app, a monthly fee, or a dedicated navigation

unit, Google's move was disruptive, to say the least. Early versions had some flaws that still made alternatives quite appeal ing -

they required continuous internet access, for instance, and couldn't cache - but the system has been closing the gap ever since.

Quick Contact. Just as Cupcake had added contacts' Google Talk statuses throughout the platform, Eclair added the Quick Contactbar, which amounted to a pop-up toolbar that you could use to interact with contacts in a variety of ways email, text, call, and so

on. Wherever in the platform a contact's picture appeared, you could press and hold it to pull up the bar, which would spring into

place with a neatly-designed row of icons. The bar was designed from the outset to be extensible, too, so as different types of

information got synchronized to your contacts Twitter handles, for instance - they could be added to the bar.

Soft keyboard improvements. Like the G1, the Droid launched with a full physical QWERTY arrangement, but Google still saw fit to

use it as an opportunity to showcase a revised virtual keyboard. Although multitouch still wasn't fully supported throughout the

platform the Browser and Maps apps both lacked pinch-to-zoom, for instance Eclair used multitouch data on the keyboard to

detect secondary presses while typing rapidly, which can make a big difference in accuracy for fast typists.

Revamped browser. As mentioned earlier, Eclair's browser still didn't feature support for multitouch zooming, but it advanced in a

number of other critical ways. Considering that Android 2.0 launched on a device with a capacious (for the time) WVGA display, it

was critical that the Browser app be up to the task of displaying complex, desktop-optimized sites. To that end, Google added

HTML5 support, including video (albeit only in full-screen mode). This was also the first time that Android's browser had a proper

address bar, which Google had designed to mimic Chrome by doubling as a search bar. And to help alleviate the lack of multito uch,

the new version added double-tap zooming a convenient alternative to the zoom-in / zoom-out buttons.

There were countless other changes that touched nearly every screen in Eclair, too. Google continued its trend of warming over the

UI in the latest version, but the changes generally felt more cohesive in 2.0 with cleaner, simpler icons and widgets designed to

work well at the Droid's crisper resolution. Android 2.0 was essentially a lone wolf

outside of the Droid and its Europeanequivalent, the Milestone, virtually every phone to launch after Eclair's release came with Android 2.1 instead, which did little more

than fix a few bugs and add a small number of API capabilities. The telltale sign that it wasn't a big release? Google didn't grant it a

new name - both 2.0 and 2.1 were known as Eclair. There were, however, a couple additions in 2.1 worth noting:

Live wallpapers. One of Android's quirkier features, live wallpapers first made an appearance in Android 2.1. The concept is simple

enough: instead of a static image, the home screen's background is an actual application that can be animated and have some

limited interaction with the user. Google itself demonstrated the power of the feature when it added a live wallpaper to a Google

Maps update, which turned the home screen into an overhead map of the phone's current location - not particularly easy on

battery drain, but a great conversation piece.


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Speech-to-text. Google had been pushing the power of text-to-speech (TTS) since it added a developer framework for TTS engines in

Donut, and now it was going the other direction - users could talk into their phones as a replacement for traditional keyboard input. To

facilitate that, Android 2.1 replaced the comma key on the soft keyboard with a microphone; tap it, talk, and whichever text box you had

highlighted would receive the dictation. And by all appearances, the capability isn't going anywhere - Apple added a similar feature to the

keyboard in iOS 5.

A new lock screen. Android 2.0 had actually included a new lock screen of its own that featured the ability to swipe the screen to unlockand change the phone's mute mode, but it was tweaked a second time in 2.1. The functionality remained largely the same this time, but

Google changed the clock typeface from a standard sans serif to a distinctly more Android-esque, high-tech font and modified the unlock

and mute functions to require a straight swipe rather than a curved one.


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ANDROID

2.1"ECLAIR"

Though it wasn't a huge update, Android 2.1

marked a strategic shift for Google

Though it wasn't a huge update, Android 2.1 marked a

strategic shift for Google. Possibly concerned about its

hardware partners' trend toward skinning and

significantly altering the "stock" Android experience,Google chose to work directly with HTC to make its own

flagship device a phone that would showcase pure

Android 2.1 without any modifications. Android the

way Google intended, as it were. That's how the Nexus

One was born, a slim, keyboardless device with one of

the first 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processors on

the market and an advanced AMOLED display at WVGA

resolution. It was well ahead of its time, and it has sincegone down as one of the most well-regarded Android

phones ever produced.

Google had actually started down this path in Android

2.0 with the Motorola Droid. Google and Moto had

worked very closely together in the development of the

phone, and the Droid received Eclair well before

anyone else did, but it wasn't quite "pure" the Droid

made some user interface tweaks that don't appear inthe stock builds of the platform and Google never

sold the Droid to users directly. That changed with the

Nexus One.


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ANDROID

2.2"FROYO"

What did Google have to showcase in Froyo? Plenty

Android 2.2 was released in mid-2010, and the advantage of the Nexus program was starting to become clear: the

Nexus One was the first to get updated. What did Google have to showcase in Froyo? Plenty. From the first power-

on, the redesigned home screen was instantly recognizable: gone was the old three-panel view (which dated back to

Android 1.0), replaced by a five-panel one with a new group of dedicated, translucent shortcuts at the bottom for

the phone, web browser, and app launcher. Additionally, dots on either side of the shortcuts gave the user anindication of what panel they were currently viewing. In some ways, Google was playing catch-up here third-party

skins like HTC's Sense had already done all of these things.

Froyo also included a completely redesigned Gallery app that showcased the platform's 3D chops for the very first

time: tilting the phone would cause the images to tilt on the screen, for instance, and it included a variety of high-

quality animates when moving between individual galleries and photos. Really, though, the app was little more than

a one-off, not an indication of Android's direction as a platform (Google had actually outsourced its development to

an outside firm).

Other big features included mobile hotspot support

which many carriers would disable or provision at extra cost

when selling their own Froyo devices and better support for copy / paste in Gmail, patching one of the platform's

bigger clipboard shortcomings. Google also added a traditional password / PIN lock screen for users who didn't like

Android's unique pattern lock or required something more secure as part of their corporate policy. More generally, it

was around the launch of 2.2 that it appeared Google intended to start taking Android seriously in enterprise

environments where BlackBerry traditionally held an unbreakable stronghold, and a handful of Exchange-specific

enhancements here helped drive that point home.


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ANDROID

2.3"GINGERBRE

AD"

About a half year after the launch of Froyo on the Nexus

One, Google came back for another round of the Nexus

program to support the release of Android 2.3. This time,

it had selected Samsung to produce the Nexus S, a

derivative of the company's wildly successful Galaxy S

line. Though it actually wasn't much more advanced than

the Nexus One it replaced, the two phones couldn't havelooked much more different thanks largely to a new

curved-glass display and a glossy, all-black shell. Gone

also was the ubiquitous trackball beneath the display

with the Nexus S, it appeared that Google was finally

ready to bid adieu to hardware navigation of the user

interface. For Andy Rubin, the transition might have

been a tough call to make: the trackball had always been

a marquee feature in Danger's line of devices, and he'dbrought it over for the G1.

Gingerbread was, in many ways, a relatively minor

release but there were enough "minor" changes to

collectively make for a fairly large improvement in the

platform. For one thing, it was the most significant

reskinning of the platform since Eclair: stock widgets

were refreshed (including the ubiquitous "Malmo"analog clock), the home screen's UI elements gained a

hint of green, and the status bar was inverted so it had a

black background with white text. This seemingly trivial

change actually had a pretty big effect on the

appearance of the platform it instantly looked cleaner

and more modern but in reality, Google probably did

it primarily to reduce battery drain and the effects of

burn-in on AMOLED displays.
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Google used the launch of Gingerbread as an oppor-

tunity to gain some footing in the mobile gaming market

Android 2.3 included a good mix of new functionality,

too:

More granular control over copy and paste. Android'ssupport for clipboard operations had been lagging iOS

since Apple released version 3.0 in mid-2009, which

offered a fantastic level of character-by-character

highlight control using a magnifying glass to make the

cursor easier to operate with a finger. Prior to

Gingerbread, stock Android only offered the ability to

copy the contents of entire text boxes, which was

frequently (usually, even) not what you wanted to do.

Gingerbread fixed this, adding word-by-word

highlighting with finger-draggable anchors on either

end to facilitate adjusting the highlight. As with the

home screen improvements in Froyo, this was another

area where Google was catching up to the innovations

that some of its OEMs had already been including in

their skins for some time HTC had already grafted

similar functionality into prior releases.

An improved keyboard. Google once again tweaked its

stock keyboard for 2.3, and this time it was noticeable

to the naked eye the design and coloration of the

keys changed significantly for the first time since the

keyboard's introduction in Cupcake. Multitouch support

also improved with "chording," allowing users to press

multi-key combinations to quickly access the secondary

symbol keyboard.

Better battery and app management tools. Android hadbeen dinged by some for being too effective in supportingmultitasking by letting software run free in thebackground, battery life was always at risk of taking a big hit,particularly if a user had loaded poorly-designed apps.Gingerbread helped make that a little easier to fix with anew bundled utility for graphically viewing battery drain overtime and seeing exactly what apps and system functions areeating the most power (of course, the onus was still on theuser to uninstall offending apps or adjust their usage).

Support for front-facing cameras. Though it wouldn't beuntil mid-2010 that Google Talk would gain mobile videochat support, Gingerbread laid the groundwork for thatfunctionality by supporting multiple cameras on a singledevice. Indeed, Google had the foresight to specify a front-facing camera on the Nexus S, though you couldn't use it formuch other than taking pictures of yourself when the devicefirst launched.

Other new features of Gingerbread were targeted more atdevelopers than end users: NFC support, for one, which wasavailable on the Nexus S by way of a special antennaembedded in the battery cover. For many months, thiscapability was little more than a novelty you could scanGoogle Places signs in some cities to collect URLs with moreinformation on the location, for instance, much as youwould a QR code but Google later used Sprint's version ofthe Nexus S to launch Google Wallet, a major mobilepayment initiative. Many companies are betting the farm onthe future of NFC and mobile payments, and Gingerbread

was on the bleeding edge of that push.Google also used the launch of Gingerbread as anopportunity to gain some footing in the mobile gamingmarket, an area where it had lagged iOS significantly. Thenew version gave developers lower-level access to audio,device controls, graphics, and storage, which allowed themto write considerably faster native code absolutely key forcreating the rich, graphics-intensive 3D games that theplatform lacked.

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ANDROID

3.X"HONEYCOM

B"

Honeycomb was, to say the least, an oddity divergence in Google's hard-charging path toward smartphone dominance

Honeycomb was, to say the least, an oddity a divergence in Google's hard-charging path toward smartphone

dominance. In fact, Honeycomb wasn't for smartphones at all. Instead, Google returned to Motorola the company

that it had worked with to deliver Android 2.0 exclusively on the Droid to produce a device in the same vein as the

Nexus series that would showcase "stock" Android 3.0, a variant of Android targeted exclusively at tablets. That

device would become the Xoom.

Though Honeycomb hasn't seen the levels of market traction that Google was probably aiming for, it previewed a

fundamental redesign of Android's user interface that would be more thoroughly built out in Android 4.0:A move from green to blue accents. Green was, is, and likely forever will be associated with Android. The Android

logo is bright green, of course, and Google's official Android site is covered in green accents. On the actual platform,

though, green was shown the door with the release of Honeycomb. In its place, a light, desaturated blue was used

for the battery and signal indicators, the clock widget, and a variety of highlights and trim pieces throughout the

interface.

Redesigned home screen and widget placement. Rather than choosing home screen widgets from a list, sight

unseen, Honeycomb ratcheted up the user friendliness a couple notches by showing visible previews for each type of

widget available on the system

and once you choose your widget, you can place it on any of Honeycomb's five

home screen panels from a single, zoomed-out view showing all five at once. Though Android had always used a grid

for widget and icon placement on the home screen, Honeycomb did a better job of embracing it and exposing it to

the user below each widget preview, you can see exactly how many "grid squares" it'll consume once placed.


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The death of physical buttons. On a Honeycomb tablet, there's no need for dedicated, physical buttons for Back, Home, Menu, and Search

as there had been on phones running 2.3 and below instead, Back and Home have become virtual buttons that occupy a new "system

bar" at the bottom of the screen. Because they're virtual, the operating system has the flexibility to show, hide, or change them when it

makes sense to do so and for hardware manufacturers, less bezel space needs to be devoted to supporting hardware buttons.

Improved multitasking. Borrowing a page out of webOS's playbook (keep in mind that webOS design guru Matias Duarte was employed by

Google by the time Honeycomb was released), a new Recent Apps virtual button at the bottom of the screen produces a list of apps

recently used and more importantly, screen captures for each. On Gingerbread and prior, seeing recently-used apps involved a long-

press of the Home key something users would rarely think to do and you were presented only with each app's icon, not a helpful

thumbnail.

A new paradigm for app layout. Honeycomb introduced the concept of the "action bar," a permanently-placed bar at the top of each app

that developers can use to show frequently-accessed options, context menus, and so on

it's something of a dedicated status bar for eachindividual application. Additionally, Honeycomb introduced support for multi-column app layouts, a nod toward the version's tight focus on

tablets.

Android 3.1 and 3.2 were primarily maintenance releases (hence their continued use of the Honeycomb name), but they did produce a

couple important features that have been retroactively deployed to most Android 3.0 tablets on the market. 3.1 added support for

resizeable home screen widgets using anchors that appear when pressing and holding; a variety of third-party skins had supported widget

resizing previously, but Android 3.1 pulled the functionality into the core platform.


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ANDROID

4.0"ICECREAM

SANDWICH"

Ice Cream Sandwich is, without question, the biggest change for Android on phones yet

And that leads us to our current state of affairs with the recent release of Android 4.0 on the Galaxy Nexus, a return to the

Nexus program and a second visit to Samsung, which had provided last year's Nexus S for the launch of Gingerbread. Ice

Cream Sandwich is, without question, the biggest change for Android on phones yet but many of its new features and design

elements got their start in Honeycomb, including virtual buttons, the transition from green to blue accents, improved widget

support, multitasking with a scrollable list of thumbnails, and "action bars" within applications. Longtime Android users are well

acquainted with Droid, the custom-designed typeface that's been used since 1.0. Ice Cream Sandwich replaces it with another

bespoke font Roboto that is said to be designed to take better advantage of today's higher-resolution displays, and

Google has been keen to promote leading up to the version's release. Android design boss Matias Duarte noted that the old

font "struggled to achieve both the openness and information density we wanted in Ice Cream Sandwich," whereas Roboto is

said to avoid some anti-aliasing pitfalls ("grey mush," as he calls it) at any scale.

And one of Android's defining (and oldest) features saw a thorough refresh in 4.0, too. The aging notification screen is stil l one

of the best implementations available in a mobile platform, but ICS improves it by making individual notifications removable

simply by swiping them off the screen. In older versions, your only options were to clear them all not always the desired

behavior

or to acknowledge the notification in question by pressing it, which would usually send you into an application thatyou may not want to be in.

Google has quietly tweaked Android's soft keyboard in virtually every version since it launched in Cupcake, and ICS is no

exception in fact, it's as big of a leap forward as Gingerbread's was. The physical design and layout of the keys is largely

unchanged, but the correction intelligence driving it has been overhauled, and real-world suggests that the changes are

working wonders. Alongside, the platform gets an attractive implementation of inline spellcheck and replacement not unlike

iOSwith red underlining for misspelled words and on-the-spot dictionary adding. For the first time, text entry, clipboard

support, and soft keyboard quality feel as though they're as good as anything on the market.

And that's just the start:More home screen improvements. As we'd mentioned, ICS's home screen adopts many of the changes that Honeycomb

brought into the fold, but it adds a couple new tricks, too. Folders can now be created simply by dragging one icon onto

another, at which point they appear as a three-dimensional stack of icons rising out of a black circle a nice look. The home

screen also gets a "favorites tray," which mirrors the configurable dock functionality seen on third-party launchers and some

OEM skins over the last couple years. Unlike Froyo and Gingerbread which had the Phone and Browser apps permanently

docked to the bottom of the screen, the favorites tray lets the user decide what shortcuts should lie there (the defaults are

Phone, People, Messaging, and Browser, but you can have whatever you like).


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Android Beam. NFC support was heavily touted withthe release of Gingerbread and the Nexus S butapart from the limited rollout that Google Wallet hasseen so far, there's been virtually no practicalapplication to the capability whatsoever. ICS looks to

change that with a new feature called Android Beamthat allows two Beam-enabled phones to transfer datajust by touching them together, and it's opendevelopers can extend it and use it however they seefit.

Face unlock. In addition to the pattern and passwordlocks already supported, Android 4.0 adds a face unlockthat uses the phone's front-facing camera to look for amatch. It's arguably more of a novelty than anything

else since it can be defeated with a picture of theindividual who owns the phone but for situationswhere only low to medium security are required, it's aninteresting new option.

Data usage analysis. Just as Gingerbread improvedvisibility into battery usage by application, Android 4.0does the same thing for data usage. You can see overallusage broken down by any time period you like (and setalerts to prevent overage), but additionally, you candrive down on an application-by-application basis andsee what's eating your megabytes.

New calendar and mail apps. The Gmail and traditionalemail experiences on Android 4.0 have beenextensively overhauled with new, crisper designs and"action bar" support functionality carried over fromHoneycomb. The calendar app has a unified view forthe first time, convenient for those using multiple

accounts on their device.


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ANDROID

4.1"JELLYBEAN

"

After Honeycomb's failure, a revamped tablet strategy

Announced at 2012's Google I/O conference, Android 4.1

Jelly Bean is arguably a much bigger deal than its mere 0.1

increment over Ice Cream Sandwich would have you believe.

It represents both a reboot in Google's flagging tablet

strategy (having been introduced alongside the Asus-

sourced Nexus 7) and a big refinement in the completelyredesigned user experience that debuted in Android 4.0.

A quick glance at 4.1 starting with the home screen

doesn't give you much indication that anything has changed,

but a deeper look reveals a host of tweaks and new features.

And one of its most important features is under the hood,

away from view: "Project Butter." Google says that it set out

to significantly improve Android's visual and touch

performance with this version by triple-buffering graphics,

locking all drawing to a 16-millisecond refresh time, and

making a number of tweaks to the touch input subsystem.

Since Android's launch, the platform has always seemed to

lag iOS's touch responsiveness by a hair (particularly when

scrolling) and these changes help close the gap.

Google now is a very big deal

Of all the user-facing changes, Google Now is undoubtedly

the biggest, most important, and most ambitious. It's really

an entire platform for Google Jelly Bean just happens to

be the first product to get it and it seeks to do a lot of

your day-to-day thinking for you, predicting what you need

to know before you ask. Accessed with a screen swipe, Nowprocesses a variety of data your schedule, location, time

of day, and so on and presents a series of "cards" that

slide into view depending on what it perceives as the most

important information right this moment (it might give you a

drive time home if it detects that you're at your office, for

instance). It also integrates a revamped natural language

search function with perhaps the most realistic text-to-

speech system ever offered on a phone. With Jelly Bean,

voice dictation is also available offline for the first time,

meaning you don't need to be connected to a cellular or Wi-

Fi network to use it.


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Roboto refresh. Android's signature font, first seen in Android 4.0, has been reworked. New styles and weights are

used throughout the UI (italic is seen in Google Now, for instance) and the font renders a little differently than it did

before.

Expandable, "actionable" notifications. Android has long had the best and most flexible notification system in the

business (with webOS arguably the exception) and Android 4.1 takes it to the next level. Developers can now create

more dynamic notifications that can expand right inside the notification drowdown to reveal more information andcontrols without opening the app itself. Notifications can also now be toggled off on an app-by-app basis, a useful

feature first introduced by Apple with the debut of the Notification Center in iOS 5.

Widget flexibility. Resizable home screen widgets first came to the platform in Android 3.1, but Jelly Bean makes

them more useful - they can resize dynamically. The task of trying to fit all your widgets and icons on a single panel

is a notoriously frustrating one, but now, widgets will adjust to fit the available space. Icons will also move out of the

way to accommodate your drop target, much as they do in iOS.

Predictive text. Google has aggressively refreshed Android's stock keyboard with almost every new version of the

platform (an effort that is largely lost because OEMs almost universally choose to replace it with their own), and 4.1is no different. This time, focus has turned away from word correction and towards wordprediction, a capability

made famous by the widely popular SwiftKey and adopted by BlackBerry 10: the keyboard will now attempt to guess

the next word that you want to write and adapt to your writing style over time.

Usage share of the different versions as of October 2 2012


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Version Release date API level Distribution (October 2, 2012)

4.1.x Jelly Bean July 9, 2012 16 1.8%

4.0.x Ice Cream Sandwich October 19, 2011 14-15 23.7%

3.x.x Honeycomb February 22, 2011 11-13 1.9%

2.3.x Gingerbread December 6, 2010 9-10 55.8%

2.2 Froyo May 20, 2010 8 12.9%

2.0, 2.1 Eclair October 26, 2009 7 3.4%

1.6 Donut September 15, 2009 4 0.4%

1.5 Cupcake April 30, 2009 3 0.1%

Usage share of the different versions as of October 2, 2012

Distribution (02 August 2012)

4.1.x Jelly Bean

4.0.x Ice Cream

Sandwich3.x.x Honeycomb

2.3.x

Gingerbread2.2 Froyo

2.0, 2.1 Eclair


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a visual history of android

Documents