Android Cupcake is the third major release of the

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

operating system, developed by Google, being the successor to

Android 1.1 The version history of the Android mobile operating system began with the public release of the Android beta on November 5, 2007. The first commercial version, Android 1.0, was released on September 23, 2008. Android is developed by Google in wh ...

. It was released on April 27, 2009 and succeeded by Android Donut on September 15, 2009. Android Cupcake introduces a new virtual keyboard, marking a departure from the physical keyboard present on the HTC Dream and support for stereo Bluetooth. Cupcake improved features to its in-built apps; videos can be directly uploaded to YouTube, as can photos to Picasa, the Gmail app supports batch actions, and the web browser was updated to include a new JavaScript engine and copy and pasting. Android Cupcake was the first major release of Android to use a confectionary-themed naming scheme, a scheme that continued until the release of

Android 10 Android 10 ( codenamed Android Q during development) is the tenth major release and the 17th version of the Android mobile operating system. It was first released as a developer preview on March 13, 2019, and was released publicly on Septembe ...

in 2019. By July 2010, Android Cupcake constituted less than a quarter of active devices running Android. User adoption of Android Cupcake began to decrease in the following months, with 4.7% of devices using Android Cupcake by January 2011. On June 30, 2017, Google ceased support for

Android Market Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sys ...

on Cupcake.

History

In December 2008, the Android source was updated, making the "cupcake" branch public. The branch included support for stereo Bluetooth and fixed various issues with Android's email client. Around this time, reports emerged that the HTC Dream would receive an update for Android Cupcake. The cupcake branch was continuously updated in the months following its release, with an on-screen keyboard and notepad app being added in January 2009. The HTC Magic was unveiled in February as the first device to launch with Cupcake, notably lacking a physical keyboard. Android Cupcake was officially released on April 27, 2009. In the days following Cupcake's release, select HTC Dreams began receiving an over-the-air update for Android Cupcake.

System features

Bluetooth

Stereo Bluetooth was added, and Bluetooth support for in-car kits was fixed. Auto-pairing was added in Android Cupcake. The Advanced Audio Distribution and Audio/Video Remote Control Bluetooth profiles were also added.

Keyboard

A virtual keyboard was added, similar to the iPhone. The virtual keyboard feature is necessary for devices lacking a physical keyboard, such as the HTC Magic. The virtual keyboard supports autocorrect, predictive text, custom dictionaries, and third-party keyboard layouts.

User interface

Slight adjustments to Android Cupcake's user interface were made, including the inclusion of transparency.

Widgets

Widgets can now be added to the home screen. Built-in widgets include a calendar and music player, although developers can create their own widgets.

Other features

Other features added in Android Cupcake include the saving of MMS attachments, support for pausing and resuming of downloads, support for

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related tec ...

and

3GP 3GP (3GPP file format) is a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 3G UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phones but can also be played on some 2G and 4G phones. 3G2 (3GPP2 ...

videos, and SD card filesystem checking. The underlying kernel of the Android operating system, the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

, was updated to 2.6.27.

App features

Android Market

Browsing categories and filters were added to

, Android Cupcake's app store.

Camera

Users can upload videos from the camera directly to YouTube. Photos can also be directly uploaded to Picasa. Startup times for the camera app were improved.

Contacts

User pictures can now be added to contacts.

Google Talk Google Talk was an Instant messaging, instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication. The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users. Google Talk was ...

integration was added to the contacts app. Similarly, the call log shows specific date and time stamps for events.

Gmail

The Gmail app was updated to allow batch operations, such as deleting or archiving multiple emails at once.

Web browser

Android Cupcake's web browser uses the Squirrelfish JavaScript engine, and supports searching within a page and copy and pasting. Other features added include tabbed bookmarks and history features.

Developer APIs

Android Cupcake provides APIs for developers to use. Between Android 1.1 and Cupcake, there were over 1,000 changes to the Android API between Android 1.1 and Cupcake. Developers can: * Create home screen widgets * Use APIs for recording and playing back audio and video. * Create replacement keyboards. Android Cupcake also added support for the

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

graphics API.

References

External links

* * Android (operating system) 2009 software {{Google-stub