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The history of AndroidFollow the endless iterations from Android 0.5 to Android 4.4.

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by Ron Amadeo- June 15 2014, 9:00pm EDT 184
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Android has been with us in one form or another for more than six years. During that time, we've seen an

absolutely breathtaking rate of change unlike any other development cycle that has ever existed. 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. Lately,

Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that's slower

than it used to be. For the first year of Androids commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version

every two-and-a-half months.

Enlarge/ Android's home screen over the years.

Ron Amadeo
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http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/how-we-found-and-installed-every-version-of-android/


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WHY DOCUMENTING EVERY

ANDROID VERSION HAS BECOME A

LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE

7 phones, 700 screenshots: Behindthe scenes of our Android historyproject.

AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE

ANDROID INTERFACE

From 2007 to today, in living color.

FURTHER READING

longer able to communicate with Google. They either throw an error message and crash or

display blank screens. Some apps even worked one week and died the next, because

Google was actively shutting down servers during our writing!

To prevent any more of Android's past from being lost to the annals of history, we did what

needed to be done. This is 20+ versions of Android, seven devices, and lots and lots of

screenshots cobbled together in one space. This is The History of Android, from the very

first public builds to the newest version of KitKat.

Read it your way

In addition to seeing no ads, Ars Technica premier subscriberscan download a (free)

PDF version of any article or view any article as a single page.

> View Android History as a single page

> Download the Android History PDF

Table of ContentsAndroid 0.5 Milestone 3the first public build

Android 0.5 Milestone 5the land of scrapped interfaces

Android 0.9 Betahey, this looks familiar!

Android 1.0introducing Google Apps and actual hardware

Android 1.1the first truly incremental update

Android 1.5 Cupcakea virtual keyboard opens up device design

Google Maps is the first built-in app to hit the Android Market

Android 1.6 DonutCDMA support brings Android to any carr ier

Android 2.0 clair

blowing up the GPS industryThe Nexus Oneenter the Google Phone

Android 2.1the discovery (and abuse) of animations

Android 2.1, update 1the beginning of an endless war

Android 2.2 Froyofaster and F lash-ier

Voice Actionsa supercomputer in your pocket

Android 2.3 Gingerbreadthe first major UI overhaul

Android 3.0 Honeycombtablets and a design renaissance

Google Music Betacloud storage in lieu of a content store
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Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwichthe modern era

Google Play and the return of direct-to-consumer device sales

Android 4.1 Jelly BeanGoogle Now points toward the future

Google Play Servicesfragmentation and making OS versions (nearly) obsolete

Android 4.2 Jelly Beannew Nexus devices, new tablet interface

Out-of-cycle updateswho needs a new OS?

Android 4.3 Jelly Beangetting wearable support out early

Android 4.4 KitKatmore polish; less memory usage

Today - Android everywhere

Android 0.5, Milestone 3the first public build

Before we go diving into Android on real hardware, we're going to start with the early, earlydays of Android.

While 1.0 was the first version to ship on hardware, there were several beta versions only released in emulator

form with the SDK. The emulators were meant for development purposes only, so they dont include any of the

Google Apps, or even many core OS apps. Still, theyre our best look into the pre-release days of Android.
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Enlarge/ The em ulators default qwerty-bar layout running the Milestone 3 build.

Ron Amadeo

Before whimsical candy code names and cross-promotional deals with multinational food corporations, the first

public release of Android was labeled "m3-rc20a""m3" standing for "Milestone 3." While Google may not have

publicized the version numberand this build didn't even have a settings app to checkthe browser user

agent identifies this as "Android 0.5."

In November 2007, two years after Google acquired Android and five months after the launch of the iPhone,Android was announced, and the first emulator was released. Back then, the OS was still getting its feet under

it. It was easily dismissed as " just a BlackBerry clone." The emulator used a qwerty-bar skin with a 320x240

display, replicating an actual prototype device.The device was built by HTC, and it seems to be the device that

was codenamed "Sooner" according to many early Android accounts. But the Sooner was never released to

market.

According to accountsof the early development days of Android, when Apple finally showed off its revolutionary

smartphone in January 2007, Google had to "start over" with Androidincluding scrapping the Sooner.

Considering the Milestone 3 emulator came out almost a year after Apple's iPhone unveiling, it's surpr ising to

see the device interface still closely mimicked the Blackberry model instead. While work had no doubt been

done on the underlying system during that year of post-iPhone development, the emulator still launched with

what was perceived as an "old school" interface. It didn't make a good first impression.

At this early stage, it seems like the Android button layout had not been finalized yet. While the first commercial

Android devices would use Home," Back," Menu," and Search" as the standard set of buttons, the emulator

had a blank space marked as an "X" where you would expect the search button to be. The Sooner" hardware

prototype was even strangerit had a star symbol as the fourth button.

Enlarge/ From left to right: the home s creen, an open notification, and the apps" folder.
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Ron Amadeo

There was no configurable home screen or widgets, just a simple dock of icons at the bottom that could be

cycled through or tapped on. While touch screen support worked for some features, Milestone 3 was primarily

controlled with a five-way d-padan anachronism that Android still supports to this day. Even this early version

of Android could do animations. Icons would grow and shrink as they entered and exited the docks center

window.

There was no notification panel yet, either. Notification icons showed up in the status bar (shown above as a

smiley face), and the only way to open them was to press "up" on the d-pad while on the home screen. You

couldn't tap on the icon to open it, nor could you access notifications from any screen other than home. When

a notification was opened, the status bar expanded slightly, and the text of the notification appeared in a

speech bubble. Once you had a notification, there was no manual way to clear itapps were responsible for

clearing their own notifications.

App drawer duties were handled by a simple "Applications" folder on the left of the dock. Despite having a

significant amount of functions, the Milestone 3 emulator was not very forthcoming with app icons. "Browser,"

"Contacts," and "Maps" were the only real apps here. Oddly, "recent calls" was elevated to a standalone icon.

Because this was just an emulator, icons for core smartphone functionality were missing, like alarm, calendar,dialer, calculator, camera, gallery, and settings. Hardware prototypes demoed to the press had many of these,

and there was a suite of Google Apps up and running by this point. Sadly, theres no way for us to look at them.

Theyre so old they can't connect to Googles servers now anyway.

Enlarge/ Milestone 3's menu system in the brows er, the wallpaper interface, and the volume control.

Ron Amadeo

The now-deprecated menu system was up and running in Milestone 3. Hitting the hardware menu button

brought up a gray list with a blue gradient highlight, complete with hardware keyboard shortcuts. In the
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screenshot above, you can see the menu open in the browser. Going to a second level, like the zoom menu,

turned the first level of the menu oddly transparent.

Surprisingly, multitasking and background applications already worked in Milestone 3. Leaving an app didn't

close itapps would save state, even down to text left in a text box. This was a feature iOS wouldnt get around

to matching until the release of iOS 4 in 2010, and it really showed the difference between the two platforms.

iOS was originally meant to be a closed platform with no third-party apps, so the platform robustness wasnt a

huge focus. Android was built from the ground up to be a powerful app platform, and ease of app development

was one of the driving forces behind its creation.

Before Android, Google was already making moves into mobile with WAP sitesand J2ME flip phone apps, which

made it acutely aware of how difficult mobile development was. According to The Atlantic, Larry Page once said

of the companys mobile efforts We had a closet full of over 100 phones, and we were building our software

pretty much one device at a time. Developers often complain about Android fragmentation now, but the

problem was much, much worse before the OS came along.

Googles platform strategy eventually won out, and iOS ended up slowly adding many of these app-centric

featuresmultitasking, cross-app sharing, and an app switcherlater on.

Enlarge/ The dialer screen that pops up when you press numbers on the home s creen, an incoming call, and thecall conferencing interface.

Ron Amadeo

Despite not having a dialer icon, Milestone 3 emulator was equipped with a way to make phone calls. Pressing

anything on the keyboard would bring up the screen on the left, which was a hybrid dialer/contact search.

Entering only numbers and hitting the green phone hardware button would start a phone call, and letters would

search contacts. Contacts were not searchable by number, however. Even a direct hit on a phone number

would not bring up a contact.
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df d mi b PRO i Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

Incoming calls were displayed as an almost-full-screen popup with a sweettransparent background. Once

inside a call, the background became dark gray, and Milestone 3 presented the user with a surprisingly

advanced feature set: mute, speakerphone, hold, and call conferencing buttons. Multiple calls were presented

as overlapping, semi-transparent cards, and users had options to swap or merge calls. Swapping calls

triggered a nice little card shuffle animation.

Enlarge/ The contacts lis t, an individual contact, editing a contact, and the recent calls s creen.

Ron Amadeo

Contacts was a stark, black and blue list of names. Contact cards had a spot for a contact picture but couldn't

assign one to the space (at least in the emulator). The only frill in this area was XMPP presence dots to the left

of each name in Contacts. An always-on XMPP connection has traditionally been at the heart of Android, andthat deep integration already started in Milestone 3.Android used XMPPto power a 24/7 connection to

Googles servers, powering Google Talk, cloud-to-device push messaging, and app install and uninstall

messages.

Enlarge/ The browsers fake Google homepage, the address bar, and the his tory interface.

Ron Amadeo

The browser ran Webkit 419.3, which put it in the same era as Mac OS X 10.4's Safari 2. The homepage was

not Google.com, but a hard-coded home.html file included with Android. It looked like Google.com from a
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df di b PRO i Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

thousand years ago. The browser's OS X heritage was still visible, rendering browser buttons with a glossy,

Aqua-style search button.

The tiny BlackBerry-style screen necessitated a separate address bar, which was brought up by a "go to"

option in the browser's menu. While autocomplete didn't work, the address bar live searched your history as

you typed. The picture on the right was the History display, which used thumbnails to display each site. The

current thumbnail was in front of the other two, and scrolling through them triggered a swooping animation. But

at this early stage, the browser didnt support multiple tabs or windowsyou had the current website, and that

was it.

Enlarge/ A video-screengrab-derived Google Maps Photoshop, the directions interface, and the gallery test view.

Ron Amadeo

From the beginning, Google knew maps would be important on mobile, even shipping a Maps client on the

Milestone 5 emulator. That version of Google Maps was the first thing we came across that died from cloud rot.

The client can't load information from Googles servers, so the map displayed as a blank, gray grid. Nothing

works.

Luckily, for the first screenshot above, we were able to piece together an accurate representation from the

Android launch video. Old Google Maps seemed fully prepared for a non-touch device, listing hardware keyshortcuts along the bottom of the screen. Its unclear if places worked, or if Maps only ran on addresses at this

point.

Hidden behind the menu were options for search, directions, and satellite and traffic layers. The middle

screenshot is of the directions UI, where you could even pick a contact address as a start or end address.

Maps lacked any kind of GPS integration, however; you can't find a "my location" button anywhere.

While there was no proper gallery, on the right is a test view for a gallery, which was hidden in the "API Demos"
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df di b PRO i A d l ? T t th HTML t PDF API

app. The pictures scrolled left and right, but there was no way to open photos to a full screen view. There

were no photo management options either. It was essentially a test of a scrolling picture view.

Enlarge/ The time picker and calendar, with ridiculous kerning iss ues, and the vertical lis t test, featuring Ars.

Ron Amadeo

There was also no settings app, but we can look at the original time and date pickers, thanks to the API Demos.

This demonstrates how raw a lot of Android was: kerning issues all over the place, a huge gap in between the

minute digits, and unevenly spaced days of the week on the calendar. While the time picker let you change

each digit independently, there was no way to change months or years other than moving the day block out of

the current month and on to the next or previous month.

Keep in mind that while this may seem like dinosaur remnants from some forgotten era, this was only released

six years ago. We tend to get used to the pace of technology. It's easy to look back on stuff like this and think

that it was from 20 years ago. Compare this late-2007 timeframe to desktop OSes, and Microsoft was trying to

sell Windows Vista to the world for almost a year, and Apple just released OS X 10.5 Leopard.

One last Milestone 3 detail: Google gave Ars Technica a shoutout in the Milestone 3 emulator. Opening the

API Demos" app and going to "Views," "Focus," then "Vertical" revealed a test list headlined by this very

Website.
http://pdfcrowd.com/http://pdfcrowd.com/redirect/?url=http%3a%2f%2farstechnica.com%2fgadgets%2f2014%2f06%2fbuilding-android-a-40000-word-history-of-googles-mobile-os%2f&id=ma-141028030414-568f8a14http://pdfcrowd.com/customize/http://pdfcrowd.com/html-to-pdf-api/?ref=pdfhttp://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/datetimeshoutout.pnghttp://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/datetimeshoutout.pnghttp://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bigscreen.pnghttp://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bigscreen.png


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- - -Adverti sement

Enlarge/ The new emulator skin that comes wi th Milestone 3, RC37a, which uses a more modern, all-

touchscreen s tyle.

Ron Amadeo

Two months later, in December 2007, Google released an update for the Milestone 3 emulator that came with amuch roomier 480320 device configuration. This was tagged "m3-rc37a." The software was still identical to the

BlackBerry build, just with much more screen real estate available.

PAGE: 1 2 3 4 5 ... 25 26 NEXT

Ron Amadeo/ Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, w here he specializes in Android OS and Google products.

He is alw ays on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they w ork.

@RonAmadeo on Twitter

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