Android turns 5 years old
Five years ago on 5 November 2007, the then newly formed Open Handset Alliance (OHA) announced the launch of Android, described as a "truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices". Headed by Google, the OHA is a consortium of various organisations involved in developing the open source mobile platform. When it was founded, the group had 34 members including T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola, and has since grown to 84 members including various other handset manufacturers, mobile carriers, application developers and semiconductor companies.
Like the OHA which oversees it, Android has grown steadily with recent figures from analyst firm IDC putting Android's worldwide market share at 75% of all smartphones shipped in the recent quarter. The first Android SDK was made available to developers just one week after the platform was first announced. Version 1.0 of the mobile operating system was released to consumers in September 2008 on the first Android device: the HTC Dream smartphone, also known as the T-Mobile G1 in the US and some parts of Europe. Less than five months later, Android 1.1 arrived fixing bugs, tweaking the API and adding a few new features.
