Five things you didn’t know about Android

Android co-founder Andy Rubin in 2013 revealed that Android was originally made for digital cameras.

The initial plan was to create a camera platform with cloud storage, this would make users able to access their photos and videos from multiple devices.

The problem was that the camera market wasn’t big enough and investors were really not interested. It was then that the team decided to shift to smartphones. The idea was to make a free platform for selling other products such as applications and games.

Also read; The list of banned apps

In July 2005, Google acquired Android for $50 million with plans to reach 9% of the market share in United states in five years. By the end of 2010, Android held around 24% of the United States market.

Fast forward to 2021, the operating system powers over 80% of smartphones in the world.

• Android is a free and open source software, its code is known as Android Open Source project (AOSP).

It is developed by a group of individuals known as  Open Handset Alliance and is sponsored by Google.

• Android Open Source Project is licensed under Apache License , this basically means that users are allowed to use the software for any purpose, modify it and distribute it without concern about royalties.
• The source code has been used to develop other Android products apart from smartphones. These include TVs, TV boxes, gaming consoles, smart watches, PCs and even digital cameras.
• Android has been the best selling Operating System for over seven years now, not only in smartphones but also in Tablets. Over two billion people in the world use gadgets which run on Android operating system and currently there are over 3 million apps developed for AOS in the Google PlayStore.

The current version is Android 11, here are the previous ones;