The history of Android: The endless iterations of Google’s mobile OS

Unlike some of Ars&#x27; other epic history articles, this one didn&#x27;t really get me too excited. It seemed pretty screenshot-heavy, thin on technical details (especially the &#x27;why&#x27;s behind version-to-version changes, the &#x27;who&#x27;s behind the original and ongoing development, etc.).<p>Most of the information is nice to know, but the <i>story</i> really remains to be told. This article is far from a Sircusa Mac OS X review (which I usually spend at least an hour reading every year).<p>In the end, the article reminded me more of a journal of someone&#x27;s spelunking adventure rather than a personal story with an interesting slant, so I felt less inclined to power through the last few pages.

I got a massive nostalgy rush out of the 0.5 screenshots.<p>When I was summer intern at Nokia back in 2007 we installed android beta version into N800 (the small Linux tablet by Nokia). And for maximum amount of trolling we even taped the text &quot;gPhone&quot; in it (iPhone had just been released).<p>This was absolutely non official but hey. It was fun! The actual port was made by someone at maemo forums so we didn&#x27;t even waste too much work hours on it.

I really hope Android 5.0 is coming out at I&#x2F;O. It&#x27;s a bit overdue. Google usually pushes major .0 revisions every 2 years. 2.0 in 2009. 4.0 in 2011, and 5.0 in 2013...NOT.<p>It&#x27;s 2014 and no 5.0 in sight, except for a very weak rumor about the date on a Nexus phone being 5:00. If they wait until fall this year, it would be 3 years for the 5.0 release, just as much as for a typical Windows release, which I find pretty ridiculous considering Android isn&#x27;t even trying to work on <i>all devices out there</i> before it&#x27;s released.<p>Hopefully Google will release it soon, otherwise I&#x27;ll be very disappointed.

One thing that you have to respect about Google and Android, like a constantly changing (dare we say gentrifying and revitalizing) urban neighborhood - they aren&#x27;t afraid to try new things, tear down old things, invest, and divest.<p>John Gruber had a much favorited tweet during WWDC that he revisited in his blog.<p>&quot;Microsoft: one OS for all devices.<p>Apple: one continuous experience across all devices.<p>That tweet was massively popular,1 but I missed a word: across all Apple devices. Microsoft and Google are the ones who are more similarly focused. Microsoft wants you to run Windows on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs. Google wants you signed into Google services on all your devices, from phones to tablets to PCs.&quot;<p><a href="http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/only_apple" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;only_apple</a>

Very great article, and yet quite sad and scary. You can grab an old apple ][ and run programs from 30years ago! If you can get access to a PDP computer, you can run programs from 40 years ago on it! Or even the emulator. You are not going to be able to run your favorite andorid programs 10-20years from now.<p>Just the other day, a link was posted on here about how to get a Lisp machine running in your Linux. I downloaded the binary and some source and got one up and running about 2 years ago. To be able to time travel to the past and explore what has been done without just reading about it is a great experience. With the mobile eco system, we are going to miss out on this. There are going to be great programs that will be written and then rot away with time never to be recovered.<p>Quite sad if you ask me.

&quot;I&#x27;d like to tell you about something I&#x27;m really excited about. It&#x27;s called Android.&quot;<p>My first reaction was, &quot;Haha, no shit.&quot; And then it gave me goosebumps to realize how it&#x27;s just seven years ago but so much has happened.

&gt; The Play Store, for instance, has had five major redesigns in five years.<p>Is that a good thing?

I strongly believe Google will replace ChromeOS with Android some day. ChromeOS compared to Android &quot;Just Works™&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m usually an iPhone user but I am very curious about Android so often make the switch. Last time I switched to Galaxy Nexus my experience was not so good. Battery life and UI smoothness was far from iPhone. I switched back to iPhone.<p>This time I switched to Android via a Nexus 5. Battery life is still not acceptable and many times I experienced things not working. Having to kill an app or cleaning their local cache are things I don&#x27;t want to do on my phone. Specially when I&#x27;m trying to get around or find a very urgent information. I&#x27;m going to switch to iPhone with next release and wait for an operation system from Google that work as good as Chrome or iPhone.