Android (operating system)

• 1. Introduction

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  Android runs on more than three billion phones every month, yet it began as software for digital cameras. In October 2003, in Palo Alto, California, Andy Rubin and Chris White started a company to build an operating system called FotoFrame. Rich Miner and Nick Sears joined later. The plan failed to win over investors. So in April 2004, at Nick Sears's suggestion, the team pivoted to phones. How does a four-person startup, once nearly evicted from its office, become the most widely used operating system on Earth? Why are its versions named after desserts? And why, despite all that openness, do most Android phones quietly send data back to Google? The answers run through subway-station press conferences, a $10,000 envelope of cash, intelligence-agency leaks, and a kernel that engineers still argue is not really Linux.

• 2. The $50 Million Bet

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  Steve Perlman walked into the office with $10,000 in cash in an envelope. Rubin, a close friend, was running short on money and facing eviction from the office space. Perlman handed over the cash, then wired an undisclosed amount as seed funding. He refused any stake in the company. "I did it because I believed in the thing, and I wanted to help Andy," he later said. Rubin had a track record before this. He created the T-Mobile Sidekick under his earlier company, Danger, Inc. He also already owned the domain android.com, which is how the company got its name after the FotoFrame idea was dropped. In 2005, Rubin tried to negotiate deals with Samsung and HTC. Then Google stepped in. In July of that year, Google acquired Android Inc. for at least $50 million. Years later, in 2010, Google's then-vice president of corporate development, David Lawee, called it Google's "best deal ever." The key employees, including Rubin, Miner, Sears, and White, joined Google with the acquisition. At the time, almost nothing was known publicly about the secretive startup. It had said only that it was building software for mobile phones.

• 3. Back To The Drawing Board

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  An early Android prototype looked a lot like a BlackBerry. It had a physical QWERTY keyboard and no touchscreen at all. Rubin had pitched the project as having "tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences." Apple's iPhone arrived in 2007 and forced a rethink. Android, in the words of the source, "had to go back to the drawing board." Google later revised its Android specification documents to say that "Touchscreens will be supported." Even so, the documents added a caveat: the product was designed assuming discrete physical buttons, so a touchscreen could not completely replace them. By 2008, both Nokia and BlackBerry announced touch-based phones to rival the iPhone 3G. Android's focus eventually switched to touchscreens alone. On the 5th of November 2007, the Open Handset Alliance unveiled itself. This consortium pulled together Google, manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung, carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile, and chipset makers like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. Their stated goal was to build "the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices." Within a year, two rival open-source efforts appeared: the Symbian Foundation and the LiMo Foundation.

• 4. A Subway Station Debut

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  On the 23rd of September 2008, Android was introduced inside a New York City subway station. The press conference featured Andy Rubin, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Cole Brodman, Christopher Schlaeffer and Peter Chou. The same day, the first commercially available Android phone was announced: the HTC Dream, also known as the T-Mobile G1. The first two Android versions carried internal codenames Astro Boy and Bender. Licensing issues ended that scheme. After that, releases were named after desserts or sugary treats in alphabetical order, starting with "Petit Four," "Cupcake," "Donut," "Eclair," and "Froyo." When Google announced Android KitKat in 2013, it explained that "Since these devices make our lives so sweet, each Android version is named after a dessert." A Google spokesperson was less forthcoming with the rest. "It's kind of like an internal team thing, and we prefer to be a little bit, how should I say, a bit inscrutable in the matter, I'll say," the spokesperson told an interviewer. That tradition ran until the 22nd of August 2019, when Android "Q" was branded simply as Android 10. Google said the dessert names were not "inclusive" to international users, being either unknown abroad or hard to pronounce in some languages. On the same day, Google reportedly commissioned a giant number "10" statue for the lobby of its developers' new office.

• 5. The Cast Behind The Curtain

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  Hugo Barra was Android's public face from 2008 to 2013. He served as product spokesperson, representing Android at press conferences and at Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference. In August 2013, he left Google to join the Chinese phone maker Xiaomi. Less than six months before that departure, leadership changed at the top. Google's then-CEO Larry Page announced in a blog post that Andy Rubin had moved off the Android division to take on new projects. Sundar Pichai became the new Android lead. Pichai did not stay there. In August 2015, following Google's restructure into the Alphabet conglomerate, he became Google's CEO. Hiroshi Lockheimer then took over as head of Android. Google also kept trying to control the hardware experience. The Nexus series launched in 2010, partnering with different manufacturers to debut new versions, and was praised for "bloat-free" software with timely updates. The Google Play edition program followed in 2013, starting with a special Samsung Galaxy S4 running "stock Android." By 2015, the last Google Play edition phones were listed as "no longer available for sale." The Pixel and Pixel XL arrived in October 2016, marketed as the first phones made by Google, and replaced the Nexus line.

• 6. The Update Problem

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  By 2015, Android held roughly 75 to 80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, according to Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. Yet that same openness created a chronic weakness. The huge variety of Android hardware meant every upgrade had to be tailored device by device, a slow and costly process. Outside the Nexus and Pixel brands, updates often arrived months late or never at all. Carriers added further delays by customizing and testing on their own networks. Critics were blunt about the incentives. Some noted the industry had a financial reason not to upgrade, since stale devices push people toward buying new ones, an attitude one account called "insulting." In 2011, Google announced an "Android Update Alliance," pledging timely updates for 18 months after a device's release. There was no further official word about it after the announcement. Hiroshi Lockheimer, the Android lead, admitted the situation was "not an ideal situation" and called the lack of updates "the weakest link on security on Android." Google's structural fixes came in stages. In May 2017, with Android 8.0, Project Treble re-architected the system to separate the vendor implementation from the OS framework through a new "vendor interface." In May 2019, with Android 10, Project Mainline let core OS components update through the Google Play Store, so security fixes could install as easily as an app.

• 7. Open In Name

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  The "Android" name and logo are trademarks of Google, even though the underlying code is free. At its core sits the Android Open Source Project, or AOSP, released under the Apache License. Most devices, though, run Google's proprietary version, shipping with Google Mobile Services, which includes Google Chrome and the Google Play store. AOSP's source code does not include the proprietary device drivers many components need, nor the source of Google Play Services. The openness still seeded a real community. CyanogenMod became the most widely used community firmware. After its abrupt discontinuation in 2016, a fork called LineageOS continued the project. The code has also been adapted far beyond phones, into Android TV, Wear OS, and Android Automotive, plus rivals like Amazon Fire OS. Then the door began to close. In March 2025, Google announced plans to consolidate Android development to internal sources. Public developers will no longer be able to contribute, though the source will still be published. The trade war added its own twist: in May 2019, Huawei became entangled in tensions between China and the United States. That summer Huawei announced its own alternative, Harmony OS, and filed for intellectual property rights across major markets.

• 8. Watched Devices

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  Only 0.5 percent of reported Android malware came from the Google Play store, according to a survey by F-Secure. Google engineers have argued the virus threat is exaggerated by security companies selling protection software. The bigger questions turned out to be about surveillance and privacy. In 2021, journalists and researchers reported Pegasus, spyware from a private company that could infect both iOS and Android phones, sometimes through zero-day exploits, with no user interaction. It could exfiltrate data, track locations, capture film through the camera, and switch on the microphone at any time. Government access surfaced earlier. As part of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures, it was revealed in September 2013 that the NSA and Britain's GCHQ could read almost all smartphone information on iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices, including SMS, location, emails, and notes. Leaked documents codenamed Vault 7, dated 2013 to 2016, detailed the CIA's ability to compromise most smartphones. Regulators have also pushed back. In 2019, France's CNIL fined Google 50 million euros for a lack of information regarding its users. Researcher Douglas Leith later showed that an Android phone sent communications data, including phone and text message details, to Google Play Services infrastructure even when the "Usage and Diag" feature was disabled. He found those records, marked with a device's unique identifier, did not comply with GDPR.