New Android 1.5 and Android Platform

The much-anticipated Android 1.5 SDK, released in late April 2009, provided a number of substantial improvements to both the underlying software libraries and the Android developmenttools and build environment. Also, the Android system received some much-needed UI “polish,” both in terms of visual appeal and performance. Although most of these upgrades and improvements were welcome and necessary, the new SDK version did cause some upheaval within the Android developer community. A number of published applications required retesting and resubmission to the Android Marketplace to conform to the new SDK requirements, which were quickly rolled out to all Android phones in the field as a firmware upgrade, rendering older applications obsolete.

Android is an operating system and a software platform upon which applications are developed. A core set of applications for everyday tasks, such as Web browsing and email, are included on Android handsets. As a product of the Open Handset Alliance’s vision for a robust and open source development environment for wireless,Android is an emerging mobile development platform.The platform was designed for the sole purpose of encouraging a free and open market that all mobile applications phone users might want to have and software developers might want to develop.

The Android platform is designed to be more fault-tolerant than many of its predecessors. The handset runs a Linux operating system, upon which Android applications are executed in a secure fashion. Each Android application runs in its own virtual machine Android applications are managed code; therefore, they are much less likely to cause the phone to crash, leading to fewer instances of device corruption (also called “bricking” the phone, or rendering it useless).