There are many popular operating systems in the world, but none is as widely used as Android. Billions of smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and other devices are supported by Android. Today we’ll take a look at the real story behind Android’s success.
Although Google is credited with developing Android, its existence was made possible by the ubiquitous but little-known Linux operating system, the early building blocks of the operating system. Today, Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and many others, supporting many desktops and servers, around the world.
The above-mentioned variants of Linux, including Android, have their origin to a post made on the 25th of August 1991. On that day, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who at that time was 21, told the world about a new OS he was developing. This project was something that would later provide the Linux kernel used to build the Android operating system you might be reading this on.
“Hello everybody out there using minix — I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat.“
Linus Torvalds — 25 Aug 1991 on the newsgroup comp.os.minix
The Journey from Linux to Android
Although the first publicly available Linux source code was released on September 17, 1991, Android’s modern journey began much later, in October 2003. Between these dates, Linux underwent a major overhaul to move from a simple operating system to a more modern operating system. computing environment. It is important to note that the Linux codebase is open source. This source helps to get input from developers around the world and provides multiple forks for operating systems for a variety of purposes, from desktops to supercomputers to smartphones.
The path to modern operating systems was gradual. The XFree86 graphical interface was introduced in 1994, and support for multiprocessor systems was introduced in 1996 with Linux 2.0. KDE introduced the first high-level graphical desktop interface to the operating system in 1998, and USB devices were finally supported in Linux 2.4 in 2001. Obviously, all of these developments were important for desktops, servers, and mobile devices. The original version of Android was based on Linux 2.6, released in 2003. As of this writing, Android smartphones will almost certainly run on Linux kernels 4 or higher.
In 2003, Android Incorporated was established. The Company decided to use Linux as the operating system for smartphones after the Google acquisition in 2005. The Open Handset Alliance was created after this. Then this 34-member group decided to use the open mobile standard, which culminated in the release of Android 1.0 on November 5, 2007.
What’s the point of basing Android on Linux?
What does the word “kernel” have to do with Android? Well, these are important building blocks that are part of the operating system, but don’t cover everything. The user interface or related software that can make up a large operating system is not part of the kernel. In contrast, the Linux kernel manages hardware resources such as CPU, memory, or Bluetooth.
This difference from PC-Linux is reflected in the fact that the Android code was removed from the kernel in 2010 (Linux 2.6.33), and they remained partially different. Instead, Google used an open source Linux kernel with the feature it needs to support Android APIs, from UI to power management, networking and security. Both were installed in 2012 and newer Android phones use the stable long core (LTS) branch. In 2017, Google helped the Linux community extend LTS support from two to six years to allow for longer update cycles. But if Android is very different from other current versions of Linux, why build an operating system on Android? There is a very good reason for this.
Building a kernel from scratch takes a long time. Linux was previously open source and provided many of the basic functionality needed to build devices, from supercomputers to mobile devices. Linux 2.6, the foundation of early Android, includes a driver layer that allows product vendors to abstract and optimise their own hardware, a powerful networking stack and tools, and, among other things, control the allocation of an application’s resources. Hence, no need to reinvent the wheel?
It’s important to note that many of the early benefits of Linux are still relevant to today’s Android smartphones. For example, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) allows manufacturers to innovate in the hardware side of devices and allows Google to accelerate operating system updates.
Android still belongs to the Linux family. Just a very distant relative
Many smartphones may not be recognised by this older operating system, but Android is still the Linux kernel. You have just formed your own unique branch in the growing Linux evolutionary tree. It has just formed its own branch, which is very different from the ever-growing Linux evolution tree.
