What is Android?

What is android ? This is a simple question but the answer is quite complicated. If you go deeper on the word android , You will get lot of answers for the question What is Android. To answer in a simple way. Android is an operating system for Mobile phones. I will explain more about this in the later part of this article.

Lot of advances can be seen these days in the field of smartphones. As the number of users is increasing day by day, facilities are also increasing. Starting with simple phones which were made just to make and receive calls. Now we have phones which can even access GPS , GPRS, Wifi, NFC. and lot of other cool and advanced features which you cannot even imagine.
So in this Mobile world of this complication. Android is one of those operating system platforms which made it easy for manufacturers to design top class phones.

More Details:

Android is a Linux-based operating system designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Initially developed by Android, Inc., which Google backed financially and later purchased in 2005,Android was unveiled in 2007 along with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance: a consortium of hardware, software, and telecommunication companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices.
The first Android-powered phone   was sold in October 2008.

Android is open source and Google releases the code under the Apache License. This open source code and permissive licensing allows the software to be freely modified and distributed by device manufacturers, wireless carriers and enthusiast developers. Additionally, Android has a large community of developers writing applications ("apps") that extend the functionality of devices, written primarily in a customized version of the Java programming language. In October 2012, there were approximately 700,000 apps available for Android, and the estimated number of applications downloaded from Google Play, Android's primary app store, was 25 billion.

These factors have allowed Android to become the world's most widely used smartphone platform and the software of choice for technology companies who require a low-cost, customizable, lightweight operating system for high tech devices without developing one from scratch. As a result, despite being primarily designed for phones and tablets, it has seen additional applications on televisions, games consoles and other electronics. Android's open nature has further encouraged a large community of developers and enthusiasts to use the open source code as a foundation for community-driven projects, which add new features for advanced users  or bring Android to devices which were officially released running other operating systems.

Android had a worldwide smartphone market share of 75% during the third quarter of 2012, with 500 million devices activated in total and 1.3 million activations per day. The operating system's success has made it a target for patent litigation as part of the so-called "smartphone wars" between technology companies.