What is Android and Why to use it?

Shailendra Chauhan  Print   4 min read  
03 Oct 2015
06 Aug 2018

Android is an open source and Linux-based operating system. It was first introduced on Nov 5, 2007. It was originally developed by Android Inc. and subsequently purchased by Google.

Basically, Android is thought of as a mobile operating system. But it is not limited to mobile only. It is currently used in various devices such as mobiles, tablets, televisions etc.

Android provides a rich application framework that allows us to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.



Features of Android

There are numerous features of android. Some of them are listed below:

Media support
Android supports various type of audio/video/still media formats like: H.263, H.264, MPEG-4 SP, AMR, AMR-WB, AAC, HE-AAC, AAC 5.1, MP3, MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and WebP
Web browser
The web browser available in Android is based on the open-source Blink (previously WebKit) layout engine, coupled with Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine supporting HTML5 and CSS3
SMS and MMS are available forms of messaging, it also include threaded text messaging and Android Cloud To Device Messaging (C2DM) and now support the enhanced version of C2DM, Android Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is also a part of Android Push Messaging services
Multitasking of applications, with unique handling of memory allocation, is available, using this user can jump from one task to another and at the same time various application can run simultaneously
Resizable widgets
Widgets are re-sizable, so users can expand them to show more content or shrink them to save space
Screen capture
Android supports capturing a screenshot by pressing the power and home-screen buttons at the same time. This features supports after Android 4.0
Android Beam
Android supports multiple languages, also supports single direction and bi-directional text

Why Android?

There are so many reasons you should choose Android platform for mobile application development.

  1. Zero/negligible development cost


  2. Open Source


  3. Multi-Platform Support


  4. Multi-Carrier Support


  5. Open Distribution Model


What do you think?

I hope, now you have better understanding about Android. I would like to have feedback from my blog readers. Your valuable feedback, question, or comments about this article are always welcome.

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