Android Dumps Desserts

We rejoin the story of Android to see how the operating system evolved from Ice Cream Sandwich to the most recent release.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works and Love of
all Things Tech. And in our last episode, I talked
about the creation of Google Android leading up to the

(00:25):
release of ice Cream Sandwich, also known as Android version
four point Oh. But before I go any further with
that story, I thought I might take some time to
describe what an operating system actually does from a high level,
since I kind of skipped over that in the last episode.
But in my defense, I really wanted to get to
the actual Android stuff, all right, So let's go from

(00:48):
the most basic explanations here and work our way up
from there. A computer is essentially a machine that, through
processing tons of complex calculations in a short amount of time,
can produce all sorts of different end results. Some of
them can be pretty intuitive, like calculating a formula that's
embedded in a spreadsheet program. That's very clearly a mathematical process.

(01:13):
It's easy to understand. Some are a little less intuitive,
like allowing you to make a video call to someone
who's on the other side of the world. But ultimately,
a computer is taking information in the forms of zeros
and ones, and it is performing various operations on that
data to get results, which are then fed back to
you in some appropriate way, depending upon whatever it is

(01:35):
you're trying to do, but you know you'll be able
to see it in a way that makes sense to you,
as opposed to just a different string of zeros and ones,
which would be useless to us. We run programs on
computers to get these results. So in the examples I've
already mentioned, you would have some sort of spreadsheet program
like Microsoft Excel, or some sort of video calling program

(01:57):
like Skype. Microsoft has nothing to do with this episode,
by the way, Obviously I'm talking about androids, so but
that's just to give you an example of programs that
exist on computers. These programs need to interface with the
hardware that's actually doing all of those calculations and gathering
that information. Now, in the old old days of computers,

(02:20):
programmers would build their programs into the machines themselves. They
would program on what we would call bare metal, and
computers would only do very specific tasks. By the time
we got to general programmable computers, we could run different
programs on the same machines. Programmers would write these four
specific computers, and the program instructions were essentially telling the

(02:44):
hardware what to do. And this goes all the way
from the era where you would actually physically unplug parts
of the computer system and plug it into different parts,
up to where you might program it in a series
of punch cards that would be read by computer, and
then the computer would follow whatever the instructions were that
the punch cards indicated. These are all various examples of

(03:07):
programs and computers, but as computers and programs evolved, it
became necessary to create some sort of liaison between the
bare metal of the hardware underneath and the programs that
would run on top of it. And the operating system
is kind of like a foreman or a supervisor. It's
in charge of managing stuff like computer memory and the

(03:30):
order of operations, and with modern computer devices that also
handles stuff like multitasking, making sure each instance of a
program has the resources it needs to run, or in
some cases even throttling those resources that are going to
a program that might be in the background while another
program is taking center stage. It's sort of dynamically managing

(03:50):
all these different resources. Most of the operating systems we
encounter today incorporate a graphical user interface or gooey, in
which little icon represent computer processes. Now, in the old
days and with some modern line command systems, you would
actually type out a command to start a program dot
e x C file. So, for example, I remember using

(04:13):
our old two eight six PC back when I was
a kid. We had MS DOSS running on it. That
was a line command operating system, and you would type
in commands to go to a particular file directory in
order to run a program like say Wolfenstein. The gooey
for home PCs became popular after the introduction of the
Macintosh computer from Apple and the Windows operating system from

(04:37):
Microsoft the following year, though really Windows truly took off
after Windows three point one. Now for pretty obvious reasons,
the operating systems we find on smartphones feature gooey's, Apple's iOS,
Android and other smartphone OS flavors. All of us interface
with programs through touch screen controls, or, as was the

(04:59):
case with older Android phones, with physical keyboards and maybe
even a track ball controller. The old g one had
one of those those icons on the screen represent processes, programs,
initiation programs, executable files. So selecting one of these icons
initiates the sequence to start a program sending instructions to

(05:20):
the operating system underneath to manage the resources that are
required to make the program go. Computer programmers and engineers
describe operating systems as existing as a stack of various functions.
Now these are not physical layers or anything like that.
It's more of a way for us to think about

(05:42):
the different functions the operating system must perform and grouping
those functions together in a way that makes sense. So
in general, you can think of if you think of
a stack like a vertical stack, almost like a stack
of wooden blocks. At the very bottom or the foundation
of the stack, the part that's against the bare metal

(06:03):
or the hardware of the device itself would be the
kernel that is the core of the operating system. These
are the functions that are are most directly interfacing with
the hardware stuff like processors and circuits and all the
stuff that's doing all the number crunching androids. Foundation is
based specifically around the Linux kernel. So, as I said,

(06:26):
the kernel is the core of the operating system. It
has complete control over the hardware. Lenox is an open
source operating system, has a large community of developers and
programmers contributing to it. And because of this huge community,
things like security vulnerabilities and bugs are typically discovered pretty
quickly and they can be fixed pretty quickly too. Now

(06:47):
an Android that's just the kernel. Android itself is not Lennox.
So the next layer up from the Lenox kernel and
Android is called the hardware abstraction layer or how which
is an ominous at all. Sorry, I can't do that, Dave.
This layer provides a software environment through which the programs

(07:10):
higher up on the stack can interface to access the
components they need, such as let's say it's the handset speaker.
Let's say that it's a music program. Well it the
program would then send messages to the hardware abstraction layer
to say I need to get access to the speaker
and play this audio file through the speaker. So how

(07:32):
would kind of handle that and then relay the specific
requirements further down to the Linux kernel to get all
the way down to the speaker level. So other examples
would be the Bluetooth devices. You know, Bluetooth devices connect
to a phone via the Bluetooth transmitter. Well, the hardware
abstraction layer provides the resources needed for an app that

(07:56):
needs to have access to a Bluetooth transmitter to actually
get that access. So this way, developers don't have to
create stuff for specific handsets, but rather for any Android handset.
They don't have to worry if one Android phone is
built in a very different way to another Android phone.
Now two blocks share the next layer in the stack.

(08:17):
They are the Android run time block and the native
c C plus plus libraries. Okay, so the Android run
Time or a RT serves as a kind of envelope
for processes. Alright, think of like every program that you're
running on a phone, like you're actually running that program
on the phone. It exists in kind of a think

(08:40):
of it as like a box. It keeps each process separate.
So let's say that you've got your photo app running
and you're also listening to something on the I Heart
radio app, for example, shameless Plug. Let's say you're listening
to both of those, so you've got both processes running
at the same time. Well, you don't want them just

(09:00):
running on the phone with no division between them, because
if something were to happen to one of those processes,
it could affect the other one. Let's say that the
photo app has a failure for some reason, something goes
wrong and it freezes. Well, you don't want that to
affect the other apps running on your device. So the

(09:21):
best thing you could do is create what are called
virtual machines, which I've talked about quite a bit in
recent episodes. These virtual machines act as silos. They act
as as uh, separated and protected areas in which a
process can run without it affecting anything else, and each

(09:41):
of them will get the resources needed to run that process.
So again, the operating system has to look at the
requirements of each of those processes, the photo app and
the I Heart Radio app, and say, all right, well,
I need to dedicate this much memory and processing power
to run this one, and this much memory processing power
to run this other one, and that all that stuff

(10:03):
is happening in the background. We as users are completely
not you know, aware of this, unless something were to
go wrong, in which case we might say, oh, the
photo app crashed, but at least I'm still listening to
my music, so really you don't notice it happening. Now
I should add that this particular feature was really added
in starting with Android version five point oh also known

(10:26):
as Lollipop. So this is technically jumping ahead in our
story a little bit, but this is the part of
the stack that lets stuff run independently of one another. Now,
before Android run time, before that was the virtualization strategy
that Google was using, they did rely on a different
virtualization strategy with a process virtual machine software called dal

(10:49):
vic d A l v I K. That's what did
essentially the same sort of job as the Android run
time component up through Android version four point four, also
known as get cat. So Android did have this earlier,
but I figured it would be more and make more
sense to talk about Android runtime because that's what's currently
being used in Android operating system phones today. Now, as

(11:14):
for the libraries I mentioned earlier, In programming, a library
is a collection of pre compiled routines that programs can
take advantage of. So when you think of a program,
a program is really a series of instructions for a computer,
and some of those instructions are going to be common ones,
ones that you would use in lots of different types
of programs. So it doesn't make a whole lot of

(11:34):
sense to have to go back and re established that
path every single time you want to build a program.
It would be time consuming, it would be wasteful. So
libraries are these pre compiled routines that mean that you
you just plug those in for that part. And this
is a very, very granular approach. We'll get into a

(11:55):
slightly larger version of this in just a second. Library
is dramatically reduced the amount of work programmers have to
do to build out applications. So if a program needs
to access a particular process, a module in the library
can be plugged into the program as a kind of shortcut.
So it's an invaluable resource and pretty much all programming
environments take advantage of them. Now, next up in the

(12:18):
stack we have the Java a p I framework. This
includes all the basic components you need to build out apps.
So it's kind of like taking that concept I just
talked about with the library, you know, these these little
pre compiled routines and building on that. Now we're talking
about larger building blocks, not super teeny tiny ones, but

(12:39):
that can still be used to put together basic functions
of various applications and it's a huge help to developers.
The framework has the building blocks or puzzle pieces that
programmers can use to to build out those apps. And
this is the environment in which programmers actually operate. They
rely on the a p I, which stands for Application

(13:00):
Programming Interface in order to build out the apps, whether
it's a video editing app or a puzzle game or
whatever it might be. Now, the topmost layer of this
stack is what it tends to be that well, it
is the system apps themselves. So again, if you think
of that bottom layer of the stack as the foundation
that rests against the bare metal of the handset, this

(13:23):
topmost layer, you can think of, is the layer that
actually faces the end user. It's it's what we interact
with when we're using our phones. So this is the
side that we actually see. It includes stuff like the
dialer application, you know, in case we want to use
our smartphone as a phone, or maybe the email app

(13:43):
or well you get the idea. It's all those basic apps. Now,
these are intended to be the basic apps that any
other third party app could tap into for certain capabilities. Now,
Google made the decision to allow users, carriers, and or
handset manufacturers the chance to swap out many, but not all,

(14:05):
of these system apps for something from a third party.
So if you don't like let's say the basic on
screen keyboard that comes standard with Android, you could change that.
You could switch it out for a different on screen
keyboard created from a different put third party, and that
would become the new system level app for that particular feature.

(14:27):
Google does restrict this for certain functions. Not every system
level app is available to be swapped out. For example,
the settings app, you can't do that, and that gives
you more fine tune control over a lot of the
handsets settings. So that's the reason why Google says, no,
this one is off limits. We're going to keep it
as is. But otherwise it's pretty fair game. And that's

(14:49):
an overview of what an operating system is and how
the Android OS stacks up, so to speak. And it's
good to remember that Android is built on top of
an older operating system, that being Linux. Because Linux is
open source, Reuben and his team of developers Andy Rubin,
that is, could tweak the Linux kernel to suit their

(15:11):
own needs when they were building out Android. Anyone can
do that because it's open source. And another point that's
important to stress. I'm really just talking about the kernel
that component just above the bare metal the interfaces directly
with the hardware of the handset. And the reason it's
important to remember that is you can't just run Linux

(15:32):
applications on an Android device, nor can you run Android
apps on a Linux computer, at least without not without
some sort of emulator. And that's because those layers that
stack on top of the kernel are different. Between Linux
and Android, the software libraries necessary to run certain processes
are different, and because of those differences, there's been some

(15:54):
debate over whether or not you should actually call Android
a Linux distribution or dis s trow so. In Linux speak,
a distribution is a specific implementation of the Linux operating system,
and there are hundreds of different distros out there now.
I think the debate is largely unimportant because it remains
that the two different operating systems are different enough that

(16:17):
you can't port apps across environments without doing a lot
of extra legwork. Now, before I take a quick break,
I do want to give a quick recap of what
was going on. When I finished the last episode. Google
had released Android three point oh a k A Honeycomb,
which I'll talk about a little bit more in a second,
and this was a version of Android that Google had

(16:38):
designed specifically for Android tablets. It was the first version
of Android that UI expert Matthias Duarte really had a
hand in, as he had been brought in shortly before
its predecessor, Gingerbread, had been pushed out to users. So
Duarte didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to put
his mark on Gingerbread, but he definitely did a lot

(16:59):
more work on honey Home. Duarte also faced a big
challenge because Google is a company built by and arguably
some would say four engineers, and the Android phones definitely
reflected that. I say that as someone who owned a
first generation Android phone. They worked, but they weren't necessarily intuitive.

(17:19):
The design didn't establish a coherent aesthetic. There was no
defining trait for an Android app apart from the fact
that it was running on an Android phone. They all
looked wildly different. There was no cohesive vision. Convincing engineers
that design was an important component wasn't always easy, but

(17:42):
Duarte figured he was up for the challenge. I'll talk
a little bit more about that in just a second,
but first let's take a quick break. Okay, let's go
back to Honeycomb for a second. The tablet only version

(18:03):
of Android. Google itself has admitted that the development of
Honeycomb was rushed. They didn't have a whole lot of
time to get it out, and it was a frantic response.
You could think to Apple's iPad launch, which managed to
do what no other tablet had done up to that point.
It was able to capture the attention of the mainstream public.

(18:24):
Tablet computers had been around for a while, and they
weren't brand new when the iPad came out. They had
been a thing for years, but they had previously been
fairly niche gadgets used by a few different industries, like
in medicine. Nurses were using them things like that for
very specific tasks, and largely they were ignored by the
general public. In fact, tablet computers had been such a

(18:48):
non component in everyday computing that I famously, and if
you want to search the back catalog of tech stuff
you can find out where I did this. I famously
predicted the iPad itself would flop. I mean, no one
had managed to make tablet computers useful enough for anyone
to actually want one, So I was a bit off

(19:11):
on that particular prediction, But I don't even know to
this day if I was off about them truly being usable.
Maybe this speaks more to my inability to incorporate tablets
into my day to day life. So I very rarely
use them myself. If I do use a tablet, I
typically turn it into a super lightweight laptop computer instead,

(19:33):
like I have a Microsoft Surface that I use for
that purpose. I love it as a very lightweight laptop,
but I don't know that I would get as much
use out of it if I used it strictly as
a tablet, simply because that's not how I work. However,
I should say I gotta concede. The Apple iPad was,
without any qualifiers, a huge success, and Google recognized that too,

(19:57):
and so there was a strong incentive to develop a
version of Android aimed at the tablet experience. In some ways,
this helped the people who were building Honeycomb because the
version of Android would only be used for tablets, and
that helped cut down on the sheer variety of things
that had to consider, like screen size or access to
a cell phone. Those were off the table. Because most

(20:20):
tablets were in a pretty small range of sizes, they
didn't have to worry about the huge number of variables
that they would encounter if they were designing and operating
system for smartphones. But it also meant that Google needed
to make sure the hardware manufacturers were gonna play by
the rules because previous versions of Android were all open source,
so after they were pushed out after a certain amount

(20:43):
of time, Google would allow the code to be freely
available for anyone to look at, to use, and etcetera.
But Google did not want some manufacturer out there trying
to push Honeycomb out on a phone like device was
not intended to do that, so they said, while we're

(21:05):
going to instead of releasing this as open source, we're
going to keep it to ourselves, and manufacturers would have
to go through Google to get Honeycomb for their Android
based tablets. Upon its initial release, Honeycomb lacks support for
some pretty important processes, like it didn't have support for
Adobe Flash, which at the time was still a very

(21:26):
important component for web content, and Honeycomb was a bit
buggy when it was first released. There were a lot
of little performance issues and that, paired with the lack
of open source, would end up hurting the launch of Honeycomb,
and so a lot of people didn't really care for
the Android tablets that were coming out of that time,

(21:48):
and that's not really the fault of the OS necessarily,
but it didn't end up doing it didn't do the
OS any favors either. The design decisions were largely admired.
Duarte had created a more cohesive design approach and he
leaned really hard on sci fi like visuals. A lot
of people referred to it as a tron like interface,

(22:11):
and it was called a hologram interface. Within Google, Google
built in some new features that would give handset manufacturers
more options. Uh the Zoom, the XO o M, the
first tablet to feature Honeycomb, had no hardware buttons, so
Google had to build in on screen capabilities to do
stuff like navigate to the home page of the Android

(22:33):
operating system, pull up menus, that kind of stuff, the
stuff that previously had dedicated hardware buttons on Android devices,
because up to that point that's what you had to
have if you had an Android phone. It had a
physical menu button, a physical home button, a physical back button.
But starting with Honeycomb, Google was able to get rid

(22:54):
of some of that and they built in on screen
versions of those functions. That design element would carry over
into ice Cream Sandwich, which was the next version for
actual Android smartphones, it was toned down a bit. However,
The Honeycomb was full on tron but ice Cream Sandwich
was sort of tron light. They eased off a bit

(23:16):
on that design approach. This version of Android debut on
the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, a phone that had a seven
resolution screen, which was a big step up from the
earlier Android phones, and the additions in Honeycomb for on
screen controls meant the Galaxy Nexus and most Android phones
that were to follow no longer needed those physical buttons.

(23:37):
Other than maybe a power button and volume controls, those
would typically be physical, everything else would be an on
screen button. Uh. This let designers create more sleek and
aesthetically pleasing handsets to dedicate more of the space of
the phone to the screen itself, and it put the
more chunky origins of Android phones deep into the past.

(24:00):
Ice Cream Sandwich also had a lot of UI updates,
like a system bar for the top of the phone
that would hold stuff like notifications, and there was also
a system bar at the bottom of the phone that
would allow users to navigate home, back and hit the
menu button. Some of the icons got not just a
graphical facelift, but also a name change, so what was
previously referred to as contacts now became people. For example,

(24:25):
it seems a little less cold, so I'm I'm in
favor of it. It's an Android that's learning to love.
In January two twelve, Duarte led the effort to publish
a set of guidelines called Android Design. The site would
act as a tutorial for app developers so they can
make apps in such a way as to fit within

(24:45):
the overall aesthetic of Android operating system. This was something
that Apple had been doing for a while. In fact,
over at Apple, it was notorious for the company to
deny apps from being able to go into the App Store,
and one of the many reasons that Apple might give
is that the aesthetic of the app didn't match Apple's

(25:07):
overall aesthetic for iOS, and so the designers will have
to go back and retool the look and u I
of their app. So that was more in line with
Apple's design policies. Google would be a lot more lenient
than Apple in those days, but Duarte saw the value
of establishing a definable look so that when people saw
something they would know, oh, that's an Android app, as

(25:29):
opposed to that's on some sort of mobile device. A
few months after the introduction of ice Cream Sandwich, Google
made some more changes to some of its primary apps.
The company introduced the Google Play banner of apps. So
you had Google Play Music, Google Play Books, Google Play Store, etcetera.
And you could buy content through the Google Play Store

(25:50):
like you Let's say you want to buy a movie
or maybe a record album. Anyway, the content would end
up going to the appropriate apps library, so was all
the management stuff was done in the background. You didn't
have to worry about it, and you didn't have to
go through the individual apps in order to access the store.
This was the first example of Google doing an out
of cycle update for individual apps, and it would mean

(26:13):
more freedom to update apps without having to wait for
a full operating system cycle update, a full version update
in other words. And this approach also managed to do
something that would have a big a big impact on users. Earlier,
Google would issue updates in a new version of the
operating system, or at least an update to the current version,

(26:33):
and it would then make that update available for all
the service carriers and handset manufacturers to push out to
users on the network. But that meant that Android phone
owners might be waiting for a while to get the
latest update, just because the carrier they used had and
pushed it out yet, or because there are delays in
the handset manufacturers making sure that the chips in their

(26:55):
handsets could accommodate the new operating system. But the app
updates were different. Google could push those out through the
Play Store and bypass the entire operating system update. If
it was just adjusting something, you know, relatively small in
one of these apps, those were completely under Google's control,

(27:17):
so in that way, Google could deliver new features to
users without them getting frustrated while waiting for their carrier
to roll out the latest OS update. And in April
two twelve, Google would go back to selling devices directly
to customers through the Google Play Store. They had done
this with the launch of the Nexus one smartphone, but

(27:37):
it essentially discontinued the practice shortly thereafter. Then it would
open up a new market for Google, one that would
include not just smartphones and tablets, but eventually also stuff
like smart thermostats and Chromebook laptops. So Google started to
get more into the business of selling hardware directly to users,

(27:58):
more like Apple in that regard, although Google was relying
on third party manufacturers to actually design the hardware, at
least until we acquired Nest. The next version of Android
to come out of Google was version four point one,
also known as jelly Bean, and starting with jelly Bean,
Google hidden operating system update cycle that would typically last

(28:21):
about half a year, so you could expect to updates
each year for several operating system updates in a row.
Jelly Bean featured some more updates to the user interface.
It also aimed to create more smooth animations and scrolling.
Google managed to make some steps forward with tablets as well.

(28:42):
A sous had created a seven inch tablet that would
be branded the Nexus seven and that would set a
form factor for many Android tablets to follow. It was
not so successful in the ten inch tablet size form factor.
I mean, I had it pretty much sewned that up,
but they were able to get some traction on this

(29:02):
smaller version the seven inch form factor, and in fact
they were successful enough that for once, Apple would end
up following suit by later launching the iPad many largely
as a response to this. Jelly Bean also introduced the
Google Now feature a type of predictive search results based
upon user activities and locations. Some people found this to

(29:24):
be a bit creepy because Now would serve up cards
of information that seemed to anticipate what you wanted before
you knew you wanted it. Some folks, like yours, truly
found the feature really interesting. However, since they do a
ton of research for lots of different stuff. I'm not
always really interested in all that stuff. I'm doing it

(29:46):
for my job. But my Now results sometimes feature a
lot of news stories about things that aren't really that
pertinent to me. I still get news stories about football,
for example, and I am not really a football fan,
but do keep the baseball updates coming because I am
a baseball fan. The card style introduced by Google Now,

(30:07):
in which each of these predictive search results sat in
their own sort of individual cards, and then you could
select a card to learn more about whatever the thing was.
That would become the basis for many of the play
apps that Google offered, and this would be a huge
contribution of jelly Bean. It shaped the way Android operated
and looked from that point. Moving forward, Google also introduced

(30:29):
play services, which were extremely important for the company. And
for app developers and almost entirely invisible to the end user.
It concerns stuff going on in the heart of the
Android operating system. With play Services, Google could send out
tweaks to core components of the operating system and add
new A p I features without the need for a

(30:50):
full system update. Again, this would let Google bypass handset
manufacturers and carriers to make these adjustments to the operating system.
And why is that important, Well, it meant that app
developers could be sure that the stuff they were creating
would be able to run on most of the Android
phones out in the market. So by this time, Android
was rapidly becoming the dominant operating system for smartphones in

(31:14):
the world. Now, again I want to stress this does
not mean Android was superior to iOS. Rather, Apple was
taking a very different approach in which you had to
go through Apple to get a phone that was running
iOS on it, and it was a premium experience. Android
phones could run on just about anything, so there was

(31:34):
a huge range of different hardware and a different price
points out there. So adoption for Android skyrocketed because there
was an Android phone for just about every budget, as
opposed to the iPhone, which was still kind of a
luxury item. So on the one hand, that was great
news for developers because it meant they could potentially reach

(31:54):
a much larger audience because there are more people with
Android phones. But on the other hand, it also meant
that there were folks out there with older handsets running
older versions of Android, and the people with the latest,
most up to date version might end up being a
small sliver of the overall Android population, and that would
discourage developers from embracing Android because the fragmentation in the

(32:18):
operating system would mean that there was no guarantee someone
with an Android phone could even run the app the
developer was making the play Services update. Then Google could
address this, creating more assurances that apps would run across
a greater number of handsets, though obviously hardware limitations would
still mean that some people wouldn't get a great result

(32:38):
if they ran particularly demanding apps on their older phones.
But this wouldn't stop the operating system updates, mind you.
Those would continue on and there would be some important
contributions made by some of them. I'll explain more in
just a moment, but first let's take another quick break.

(33:02):
Google pushed out a couple of updates still under the
jelly Bean designation, so Android versions four point two and
four point three were still technically jelly Bean. With four
point four, the company again assigned a dessert nickname to
the operating system, and this time it was a branded name,
kit Cat from Nestley. The launch device for a kit

(33:24):
Cat was the Nexus five from LG. And one of
the things I think is really interesting about Android phones
is that you have the Nexus line of devices, both
phones and tablets, and they were made by several different manufacturers.
So you can have an HTC neck Nexus phone, you
can have a Samsung Nexus phone, you can have an

(33:45):
LG Nexus phone. They're all made at different times for
different operating system versions of Android. It's very interesting to
me that you can have one model name spread across
multiple manufacturers. At that point, the Nexus five had the
largest screen for an Android phone at five inches, with
the resolution of nineteen twenty by ten eighty pixels, so

(34:06):
a much better resolution than those early Android phones. With KitKat,
Google was able to improve on stuff under the hood
to make memory usage more efficient. This made it possible
to run current versions of Android on lower powered devices,
which was important because developing countries were building out network
infrastructure at that time, and that opened up a lot

(34:27):
of opportunities to have Android phones in brand new markets. Also,
it gave opportunities for people to get an unprecedented amount
of access to connectivity apps. And more so, it was
beneficial both for the company and for the people in
those developing countries. Kit Kat was also pretty much transitioning

(34:48):
away from the sci fi design that had been introduced
with Honeycomb and ice Cream Sandwich. It would also be
the uperating system that would power many of the first
Android wear products. These are things like Android based smart watches.
As far as I can tell, that particular category has
never really taken off for Google. I don't think any

(35:08):
Android based smart watch has seen enormous success in the market,
not like the Apple Watch dead for Apple. Google would
follow up KitKat with Lollipop, which I mentioned earlier in
this episode. Lollipop was the first to use the Android
run time environment for virtualization. It also introduced a new
era at Google, the era of material design. This was

(35:31):
not just a set of guidelines, but an actual design
blueprint that Google gave third party developers to follow. This
wasn't just for Android, but also for Chrome and all
versions of Google apps, even those that would be hosted
on other operating systems like iOS. So while Duarte had
already shaped the design principles for Android apps, now he

(35:54):
was working with a team to do the same thing
across all of Google's apps and services, the idea being
that if it was from Google, you should be able
to tell. Duarte would actually leave Android and transition to
a role in Google itself to help drive this initiative
across the company. The material design aesthetic took inspiration from paper.

(36:17):
Each layer a person would see would be like a
sheet of paper on top of all the ones beneath it,
and animation was given very much more focus in this
version of Android. The goal was to have all elements
animate onto the screen rather than just appear or pop
into place, so they should scroll up into view or

(36:38):
fly on into view. They shouldn't just appear. There should
never just be a transformation of one screen into another.
The result of all this was that, starting with Lollipop,
the UI had a very different look and feel to it,
and Lollipop was the first Android release to include the
voice recognition feature, in which a user would say okay,

(36:59):
follow by the word Google to activate the ability to
speak commands to the phone directly. I tried very hard
to avoid saying the activation phrase itself to spare all
of those listening in or near Google devices from having
to deal with the aftermath. If you listen to my
recent episode about how this stuff works, you know that

(37:21):
it's not always listening in on with a sense of it,
you know, keeping track of what it is you're saying,
like the phone is not spying on you. Rather, it's
on a constant lookout for a digital footprint of an
audio signal that indicates that the activation phrase has been spoken.
So it's like a key sliding into a lock. Around

(37:42):
this same time, in Andy Reuben, the guy who had
founded Android the company and who was associated with the
operating system at Google, thought of as the father of Android,
left Google. Now. The official story at the time was
that Reuben was leaving to start an incubator company to
help startups that were focusing on hardware. He had already

(38:04):
stopped running Android back in two thousand thirteen. He had
transitioned over to working in Google's robotics division, and now
he was leaving Google completely. Later on, it was revealed
that Larry Page had actually asked Reuben to resign, and
this was in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations that
had been brought against Reuben. The details of those allegations

(38:28):
are gross and they are horrible, So I'll just say
that if the allegations are accurate, Paige probably should have
just fired Reuben. But perhaps there was a worry of
how this might be bad pr around the whole thing,
and so I guess it was decided to keep things
quiet for the sake of and I really hate this word,

(38:49):
but for the sake of optics. And if so, if
that were in fact the reason why, that strategy backfired
big time because in it was revealed that Uben had
left Google with a ninety million dollar exit package as
well as leaving in the wake of these allegations. This

(39:09):
sparked an enormous reaction within Google, with employees protesting and
walking out upon discovering that a man accused of these
horrible acts would end up walking away with nearly a
hundred million dollars, and it's a dark stain on both
Google and Android. In March, Google rolled out an update

(39:30):
to Lollipop and introduced a new version of Android for cars,
called Android Auto, so it's designed to work in car
systems itself. It's the sort of thing that might power
the information and entertainment systems within a car. Following Lollipop
was Marshmallow in October two fifteen. This version introduced fingerprints
scanning for stuff like unlocking the phone and authorizing apps.

(39:52):
It was also introducing a feature called Google Now on Tap,
and that was a particularly odd feature. The I behind
it was you could hold down the home button on
any screen that you were in, whether it was an app,
maybe you were watching a video. But if you held
down the home button button, what it would do is
it would take a screenshot of whatever was on your

(40:14):
screen at that second and send it off to Google,
and then Google's AI and machine learning technology would analyze
the image and return search results based on what it,
quote unquote, thought you were interested in. Ultimately, this feature
didn't get much traction. It didn't have a refined focus,
so the chances of you getting the results you were

(40:34):
hoping for weren't that great. It just made more sense
to use the search feature for that kind of stuff,
where you could craft a query to return exactly what
you were looking for instead of just sending a picture
and hoping that Google picks up on the right thing
in that picture and doesn't just send you a bunch
of random garbage. The Google Assistant service would eventually replace

(40:55):
Google Now on Tap. Marshmallow also changed up how per
missions work for apps. So in the past, when you
downloaded an app that would need to get access to
stuff on your phone's hardware, stuff like your phone's microphone
or its camera, whatever that might be, you would get
a permissions page listing all of the components the app

(41:18):
wanted to have access to, and then you would authorize
the app and it would get that access. But starting
with Marshmallow, that changed. Instead, you would install an app
and you would never see a permissions page during the
installation phase. But the first time the app attempted to
make use of one of those phone components, it would

(41:38):
then ask permission. A little pop up would appear in
front of you, and it would ask you to give
permission for the app to access whatever it was it
was trying to get access too. So if you downloaded
like a camera app, and you activated it, you would
then receive a notification asking you to permit the app
access to your phone's camera. Or maybe not just your

(41:59):
phone's camera, but maybe your photos file folder, and then
you would have to either authorize it or say no,
and then maybe even uninstalled the program. After Marshmallow came
Nougat and Google's Pixel phones. Also recently, there was a
class action lawsuit against Google that wrapped up around that
first generation of Pixel phones, and if you owned one

(42:21):
of those first generation Pixels, you could be due a
small amount of compensation. As the first generation of Pixel
phones suffered a few problems, such as the handsets microphone
occasionally just not working anymore. Interestingly, I have a pixel too,
in fact, to have a pixel two XL right next
to me that keeps going off because it keeps hearing

(42:42):
me say the word Google, and it actually happened with
my phone to the main microphone on my phone doesn't work.
The speaker phone microphone works, but the main microphone doesn't. Now,
as far as I can tell, the pixel two is
not covered in that lawsuit, so I'm just out of luck.
Nougat added features like the ability to do picture and
picture due to a recizeable app feature now built into Android.

(43:05):
This would be more useful for stuff like Android TV
or Android on tablet devices. Other updates were behind the scenes,
stuff like support for file based encryption, so the things
that are important but that we probably wouldn't notice as
end users. NUGA would stick around for a good long while.
They would get an update in late and then it
would make way for Android version eight point oh also

(43:28):
known as OREO another trademark name. Part of this update
was something called Project Trouble, and Google released some pretty
crazy marketing technos speak to describe what this was about.
So I'm going to quote to you how Google described
Project Trouble. Quote. It's Google's ambitious effort to re architect

(43:49):
Android in order to establish a modular base in which
the lower level code created by Silicon vendors is separated
from the main Android operating system framework, so that the
device manufacts can update the OS code without having to
rely on Silicon vendors to refresh the lower level code
for every release. End quote. Now, what that actually means

(44:10):
is that Google was working on ways to smooth out
the challenges that handset manufacturers were facing when it comes
to supporting updates to Android, and the goal was to
cut down on the delay between an OS update coming
out from Google and the release that the handset manufacturers
could commit to. And again this gets down to like
very minute stuff. Largely we're talking about processor level concerns,

(44:37):
and typically you would have a handset manufacturer they would
have to work with its chip set, UH supplier, whatever
company was making the chips that were in those handsets
to make sure that it could interoperate with the Google
Android system and then rolling that out to all of
its users. So there were a lot of delays. Now,

(44:57):
there were other technical improvements to Android as well, but
it was largely small evolutionary improvements to a wide range
of features on the operating system. With Oreo, Android nine
point oh has the extremely generic name Pie. It was
released about a year after Oreo came out. The user
interface got another update with some elements like the clock

(45:19):
moving to a different default position on the display. It
was also a move away from the material design philosophy
Duarte had introduced a few years earlier, or at least
a refinement of that philosophy. So that philosophy had helped
create a more cohesive look to Android and the apps
on Android, but it had also created the effect of

(45:41):
making things look a little too homogenized. They all look
a little too similar. So to correct the course, Google
now has an updated set of design principles and a
suite of developer tools to help take the basic ideas
behind material design, but to apply them more intelligently to
apps and services. Designers are able to apply customized designs

(46:03):
on top of the fundamental material design approach. So ideally
apps built using these tools will look like they belong
to the Android ecosystem, but they won't look like all
the other Android apps out there. It won't be a
cookie cutter kind of approach. This brings us up to
the most recent version of Android, at least as of
the recording of this podcast. Android ten point oh has

(46:27):
eschewed the convention of using dessert names as code names
for the operating system. The next letter would have been Q,
so I guess quins the fruit was just out of consideration.
Google has several Android statues on its campus commemorating the
various releases of Android with appropriate versions of the Android

(46:48):
bug droid like sometimes it's posing with doughnuts or a
Claire's or whatever, you know, whatever the code name for
the operating system was, I guess moving forward, that won't
be necessary. The finn version of Android ten point oh
launched on September three, two thousand nineteen. The latest version
of the operating system adds in more protections for the

(47:09):
end user in the form of granting apps permission to
use stuff like location data or to gain access to
media and photo files on the device. Now apps have to,
you know, send those alerts to you when they want
to make use of it, and it makes you more
conscious of what your apps are actually trying to do.
Another cool feature is that you can use an option

(47:30):
to change background blur in a photo after you've already
taken the picture. And there were already apps that would
let you do this, whether your intent was artistic expression,
maybe you just wanted to blur something that was kind
of objectionable or distracting that out of the background, and
and you want to have the focus be on whatever
is in the foreground. Well, whatever the case, it's now

(47:52):
natively supported by the operating system itself. Android ten also
introduced a more pervasive dark mode, meant to help save
battery life and use less light to illuminate the screen
when the user is in a low light environment, thus
the name. There's also a new feature called live Caption ing,
which can dynamically add captions to videos that have been

(48:12):
sent to you. So if a friend shoots a quick
video and sends it as a video message, Android ten
can actually attempt to create subtitles for the video dynamically.
And I appreciate that feature a lot because my hearing
is not as good as it used to be. Darn
you punk rock shows. I haven't had a chance to

(48:33):
see this actually used in action yet, so I have
no idea how accurate it is. I'm just reminded of
how terrible Google Voice was at transcribing language, at least
at first, and I'm really curious if my mom sent
me a video if Google would be able to caption
it appropriately. Android ten also builds in more support for

(48:55):
new form factors of smartphones, namely devices that have foldable screens.
A large incentive to do this came in the form
of the Samsung Galaxy Fold, which is a squar ish
kind of tablet from Samsung that, as the name implies,
has a hinge in the middle of this that goes
down vertically along this sort of squarish tablet, and then

(49:18):
you can fold it in half and you're meant to
use it as a phone when it's folded long ways,
and when it is done like that, it's closer to
the dimensions of a typical smartphone, though much much much thicker,
because you know you've just uh folded it on itself.
When it's unfolded, it's again more like a small tablet.
I think it looks pretty funky and weird, but it

(49:41):
could very well be that the future of smartphones will
be on foldable technology. So it's a good thing that
Android now supports it, and that brings us more or
less up to date with Android so far. Now, while
I'm wrapping up, I want to give a recommendation for
an article. It's titled the Updated History of Android, and
it's on the amazing site Ours Technica. If you're not

(50:03):
familiar with Ours Technica and you're a fan of this show,
you should definitely check out that site. They have incredible
articles on all sorts of technological topics. It's highly recommended.
This particular article was written by Ron Amadeo, and Ron
has done a phenomenal and exhaustive job going into way
more detail about the development, the rollout, the evolution and

(50:27):
the features of the various Android operating system versions. More
more than I could ever do unless I wanted to
just do you know, seven episodes about it. In fact,
he's got thousands of words written about the beta versions
of Android before Android Version one point oh ever came out.
I didn't even really touch on that. So if you

(50:48):
want to learn even more about what went on behind
the scenes to create and develop Android, go check out
that article. I will tell you it does leave off
in sixteen that's when the last update was written for
this article. But I figure after you've read thirty three
pages of material, you're okay taking a short break. As
for me, well, I recommend that you send me messages

(51:11):
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(51:58):
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