Android, Inc: The History made by Google
August 17, 2010 | Android News
Android, Inc was originally a small start-up company located in Palo Alto, California. The company was developing software for mobile phones, and wasn’t really known to the outside world. When Google acquired it in July 2005, the Android Inc. was a mere 22 months old. Fast forward to the future, and this unassuming company has now become the basis for one of the fastest growing and most dominant mobile operating systems in the world. According to one leading market research company, for instance, the sales of the Android OS smartphones dominated the smartphone market in the US with 33% of all sales in second quarter of 2010, followed by the Blackberry OS with 28% and Apple’s iOS with 22% – a remarkable achievement.
Now, who are the people behind this upstart mobile OS you might ask? Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger), Chris White (headed design and interface development at WebTV), Nick Sears (once VP at T-Mobile) and Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Inc.) all went to work at Google after Android, Inc was acquired. The Linux kernel powered mobile device platform was developed by the team lead by Andy Rubin and Google marketed to various smartphone manufacturers and mobile carriers with the agreement of providing a flexible, upgradeable system. Within a year and half of Google acquiring Android, Inc, rumors broke-out that Google would enter the mobile-phone market and was working hard to deliver a Google branded mobile device to bring its search and applications to mobile phones.
On the 5th of November 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, lead by Google with 34 members including application developers, chip manufacturers, mobile handset manufacturers and mobile carriers, unveiled their goal to develop open standards for mobile devices and launched their first build on the Linux kernel version 2.6 “Android”. It was announced that 14 new members would be joining the Android project on 9th December 2008. Since 21 October 2008 Android is available as open source. There are over 70,000 applications for Android Operating System with an estimated 100,000 submissions. It sure has come a long way and we predict will continue to progress to, in our estimation, the world’s most popular mobile platform.
Comments (1)
[...] the reputation of having two Android OS installed 4G phones, one should say that Sprint is the luckiest wireless carriers in the USA. [...]