Android

In October 2003, in Palo Alto, Andy Rubin — a former Apple engineer and co-founder of Danger — founded with Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White the company Android Inc., initially intended to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras. For lack of a market, the team reoriented the project towards mobile phones. Google, convinced by Rubin's vision of an open mobile platform based on the Linux kernel, acquired the company in August 2005 for around 50 million dollars, and appointed Rubin vice president of mobile engineering. Development continued in utmost secrecy for more than two years. On 5 November 2007, Google announced the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium bringing together 34 players — manufacturers (HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola), carriers (T-Mobile, China Mobile), chip makers (Qualcomm, Intel) — and unveiled the Android SDK. The first commercial phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1), was released on 22 October 2008 in the United States with Android 1.0. The system combined a Linux kernel, a Dalvik virtual machine executing bytecode derived from Java, a rich API and a touch interface. The whole was distributed under the Apache 2.0 licence, freeing manufacturers from any platform royalties. The versions followed in rapid succession: Cupcake 1.5 (2009), Eclair 2.0, Froyo 2.2, Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, all the way to Android 15 in 2024. Within five years Android became the dominant mobile operating system and by 2024 ran on about 70% of active smartphones in the world, totalling more than three billion devices. Its open model allowed the emergence of major manufacturers in China (Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo) and in India. The Play Store, launched in 2012 to replace the Android Market of 2008, distributes several million applications. Android also powers tablets, televisions (Android TV), cars (Android Auto), watches (Wear OS) and virtual-reality headsets. Opposite Apple's iPhone, it embodies the second pillar of the global mobile ecosystem and one of the most spectacular successes of the mobile-cloud era.