ANDROID OS – The New Era of Smart Phones

Android is a special operating system developed for mobile and tablet computing by Google Inc. This was listed as the best selling smart phone platform in the year, 2010. 

 And it holds the highest market share for smart phone at the moment. With in a very short period of time, android OS has beaten the smart phone OS tycoons like Apple iOs, Windows mobile, RIM blackberry OS etc. Since the android is a free operating system, it is much cheaper than the other OS’s in the market. This may be the main reason for such a business growth.

Google released the most of the android code under the Apache license and free software license. Android OS is based on the linux kernel with some middleware libraries,  some API’s and application software running on an application framework.

Google released the most of the android code under the Apache license and free software license. Android OS is based on the linux kernel with some middleware libraries,  some API’s and application software running on an application framework.

Version No.	Code Name
1.5	Cupcake
1.6	Donut
2.1	Éclair
2.2	Froyo
2.3.x	Gingerbread
3.x.x	Honeycomb

One of the specialty of this OS is although the most of the applications are written in java, there is no Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in the platform. Therefore the java byte code is not natively executable. But there is a separate virtual machine called Dalvik Virtual Machine (DVM). First the java classes are compiled into dalvik executables and then run them on DVM. Since it uses such a technique there is no need of changing the android source code every time some thing changed in the JVM. This gives much stability to the application framework. But, J2ME support can be provided via some 3^rd party applications. Since there is a underlying linux kernel, there is no much need to worry about the security of the system. But there were some issues regarding the security as well. Like, android market had/have  some malicious apps contains the Trojans. And also there was a major issue on security that Android handsets are vulnerable to impersonation attacks. The security flow was discovered by the German researchers who demonstrated how certain Google account authentication tokens were being sent over-the-air unencrypted, potentially putting users at risk when transmitting data over public Wi-Fi networks. Google has already fixed this security flow on Gingerbread release i.e. Android 2.3.4.

One of the major features of android OS is that, every android user is been available for a vast amount of applications, Named as Android Market. At the moment there are more than 250 000 applications in the market (unofficially but estimated that there are more than 440 000 apps) and Google says that 4.5 billion downloads were made up to date. Most of these apps are free of charge or at very low cost.

 There are 6 major releases at the moment and several bug fixed versions. Generally all the code names of these versions were based on a desert item. And also all of them are in the alphabetical order (Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, Froyo etc.). And the upcoming version is the “Ice cream sandwich”. The honeycomb version is mainly targeted the tablets while the other versions are for both tablets and smart phones.

At the moment, the major competitors of Android, i.e. Apple and Microsoft are suing Google saying that Android OS is violating some of the patent licenses. They are on a mission to kill it. But Google hasn’t given up. David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer at Google, one of its leading lawyers, has posted a strong criticism of these companies and software patents in particular.

"Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents," Drummond says.

"We’re not naive; technology is a tough and ever-changing industry and we work very hard to stay focused on our own business and make better products," Drummond said.” We’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it. We’re looking intensely at a number of ways to do that," he added.

So far, there hasn’t been any slow down and Android stands out in the smart phone market like a giant. 

- By  Tharindu D. Mahavithana