By 2008, both Nokia and BlackBerry announced touch-based smartphones to rival the iPhone 3G, and Android's focus eventually switched to just touchscreens. Lifehacker reported in 2011 that third-party task-killer applications were doing more harm than good.

and earlier, no formal vendor interface exists, so device makers must update large portions of the Android code to move a device to a newer version of the operating system. Other development tools are available, including a native development kit (NDK) for applications or extensions in C or C++, Google App Inventor, a visual environment for novice programmers, and various cross platform mobile web applications frameworks.

Android's variant of the Linux kernel has further architectural changes that are implemented by Google outside the typical Linux kernel development cycle, such as the inclusion of components like device trees, ashmem, ION, and different out of memory (OOM) handling.

Three billion Android smartphones were estimated to be sold by the end of 2014 (including previous years). Third-party application development is not supported in" the current version, and software running on the OS and processor for it, run the " DRM framework for protected content. Now, though, Android has around 75–80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market—making it not just the world's most popular mobile operating system but arguably the most popular operating system, period.

The Guardian complained that the method of distribution for updates is complicated only because manufacturers and carriers have designed it that way.

According to International Data Corporation, shipments of Android-powered tablets surpassed iPads in Q3 2012. However, despite manufacturer acceptance, some carriers in the US still require that phones are locked down. The content and app "ecosystem" proved more important than hardware specs as the selling point for tablets. However, most original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) customize the source code to run on their hardware.The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004. The main hardware platform for Android is ARM (the ARMv7 and ARMv8-A architectures), with x86 and x86-64 architectures also officially supported in later versions of Android. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White. It is not possible, for example, to turn off the microphone access of the pre-installed camera app without disabling the camera completely.

Applications (" apps"), which extend the functionality of devices (and must be 64-bit [102]), are written using the Android software development kit (SDK) [103] and, often, Kotlin programming language, which replaced Java as Google's preferred language for Android app development in May 2019, [104] and was originally announced in May 2017. Applications for the Trusty OS can be written in C/C++ (C++ support is limited), and they have access to a small C library. The new policies enforcement started on January 6, 2019, 90 days after policy announcement on October 8, 2018.According to an April 2017 StatCounter report, Android overtook Microsoft Windows to become the most popular operating system for total Internet usage. Google marketed the platform to handset makers and carriers on the promise of providing a flexible, upgradeable system. CyanogenMod was the most widely used community firmware, [229] now discontinued and succeeded by LineageOS.