The version history of the Android

mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typical laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on ...

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 Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

in which new major releases are announced at

Google I/O Google I/O (or simply I/O) is an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. "I/O" stands for Input/Output, as well as the slogan "Innovation in the Open". The event's format is similar to Google Developer Day. Hi ...

along with its first public beta to supported Google Pixel devices and its stable version released later in the year.

Overview

The development of Android started in 2003 by Android, Inc., which was purchased by Google in 2005. There were at least two internal releases of the software inside Google and the

Open Handset Alliance The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is a consortium of 84 firms to develop open standards for mobile devices. Member firms include HTC, Sony, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Google, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, T-Mobile, ...

(OHA) before the beta version was released. The beta was released on November 5, 2007, while the

software development kit A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific ...

(SDK) was released on November 12, 2007. Several public beta versions of the SDK were released. These releases were done through software emulation as physical devices did not exist to test the operating system. Both the operating system itself and the SDK were released along with their source code, as free software under the Apache License. The first public release of Android 1.0 occurred with the release of the T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream) in October 2008. Android 1.0 and 1.1 were not released under specific code names. The code names "Astro Boy" and "Bender" were tagged internally on some of the early pre-1.0 milestone builds and were never used as the actual code names of the 1.0 and 1.1 releases of the OS. The project manager, Ryan Gibson, conceived using a confectionery-themed naming scheme for public releases, starting with Android 1.5 Cupcake. Google announced in August 2019 they were ending the confectionery theming scheme to use numerical ordering for future versions. The first release under the numerical order format was Android 10, which was released September 2019. In 2017, Google announced that

Google Play 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 sy ...

would begin to require apps to target a recent Android version. Since then, a new major Android version has been released in the second half of each year, and apps must target it by August 1 of the following year for new apps, or November 1 for app updates.

Version history

The following tables show the release dates and key features of all Android operating system updates to date, listed chronologically by their official application programming interface (API) levels.

Android 1.0

Android 1.1

Android 1.5 Cupcake

Android 1.6 Donut

Android 2.0 Eclair

Android 2.0.1 Eclair

Android 2.1 Eclair

Android 2.2 Froyo

Android 2.3 Gingerbread

Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread

Android 3.0 Honeycomb

Android 3.1 Honeycomb

Android 3.2 Honeycomb

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

Android 4.2 Jelly Bean

Android 4.3 Jelly Bean

Android 4.4 KitKat

Android 4.4W KitKat, with wearable extensions

Android 5.0 Lollipop

Android 5.1 Lollipop

Android 6.0 Marshmallow

Android 7.0 Nougat

Android 7.1 Nougat

Android 8.0 Oreo

Android 8.1 Oreo

Android 9 Pie

Android 10

Android 11

Android 12

Android 12L

Android 13

Hardware requirements

The main hardware platform for Android is the

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A compu ...

ARM architecture (i.e.

ARMv8-A ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

; previously the 32-bit

ARMv7 ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

architecture was supported and first ARMv5), with

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

and MIPS architectures also officially supported in later versions of Android, but MIPS support has since been deprecated and support was removed in NDK r17. Android1.0 through 1.5 required a 2 megapixel camera with

autofocus An autofocus (or AF) optical system uses a sensor, a control system and a motor to focus on an automatically or manually selected point or area. An electronic rangefinder has a display instead of the motor; the adjustment of the optical system ...

camera. This was relaxed to a

fixed-focus A photographic lens for which the focus is not adjustable is called a fixed-focus lens or sometimes focus-free. The focus is set at the time of lens design, and remains fixed. It is usually set to the hyperfocal distance, so that the depth of fie ...

camera with Android1.6. In 2012, Android devices with

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

processors began to appear, including phones and tablets. While gaining support for 64-bit platforms, Android was first made to run on 64-bit x86 and then on

ARM64 AArch64 or ARM64 is the 64-bit extension of the ARM architecture family. It was first introduced with the Armv8-A architecture. Arm releases a new extension every year. ARMv8.x and ARMv9.x extensions and features Announced in October 2011, AR ...

. Since Android5.0 Lollipop, 64-bit variants of all platforms are supported in addition to the 32-bit variants. Requirements for the minimum amount of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

for devices running Android 7.1 depend on screen size and density and type of CPU, ranging from 816MB–1.8GB for 64-bit and 512MB–1.3GB for 32-bit meaning in practice 1GB for the most common type of display (while minimum for Android watch is 416MB). The recommendation for Android4.4 is to have at least 512MB of RAM, while for "low RAM" devices 340MB is the required minimum amount that does not include memory dedicated to various hardware components such as the

baseband processor A baseband processor (also known as baseband radio processor, BP, or BBP) is a device (a chip or part of a chip) in a network interface controller that manages all the radio functions (all functions that require an antenna); however, this term i ...

. Android 4.4 requires a 32-bit

, MIPS or

architecture processor, together with an

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accele ...

2.0 compatible

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, m ...

(GPU). Android supports OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.2 and since Android 7.0

Vulkan Vulkan is a low- overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Vulkan is intended to offer higher perfor ...

(and version 1.1 available for some devices). Some applications may explicitly require a certain version of the OpenGL ES, and suitable GPU hardware is required to run such applications. In 2021, Android was ported to

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five" where five refers to the number of generations of RISC architecture that were developed at the University of California, Berkeley since 1981) is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on estab ...

. In 2021, Qualcomm said it will support more updates.

Explanatory notes

References

External links

*
Android Open Source Project website
{{Google Inc.

Version history Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique ''version names'' or unique ''version numbers'' to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category (e.g., major or minor), these numbers are generally assig ...

Google operating systems Lists of operating systems Mobile operating systems Software version histories Smartphones Tablet operating systems