Android was born in 2007 and since then it has had more than 20 major updates, although not all of them are equally important. Then we will remember the most important Android updates in its history.
In the history of Android there are updates that go unnoticed as minor changes and others who go down in historyintroducing changes that will set trends for years to come.
Android 1.0
Of course, he couldn’t be missing from this list. the first stable version of AndroidAndroid 1.0, released on September 23, 2008. Android 1.0 still didn’t have a dessert name or Easter egg.
Under Android 1.0, there was already the status bar, notifications tab, widgets on the home screen and App Store, Android Market. What it didn’t have yet was a virtual keyboard, although that’s not a problem since those early Android phones had a physical QWERTY keyboard.
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Android received significant improvements in subsequent updates, including an exclusive version for tablets, Android Honeycomb, which introduced concepts that permanently affected the design of Android in the following years, although consistency in the design will only be closed with the arrival of Holo on Android ICS.
Ice Cream Sandwich took the best of Honeycomb, as the navigation bar and dressed him up with the Holo look. With this release, the native shortcut for taking screenshots (Volume and Power) and NFC connectivity have also been revealed, with the arrival of Android Beam.
Android 5.0 Lollipop
Holo lasted three years, and by 2014, Google had prepared the next design philosophy. Hardware design. This new design arrived in several Google apps as a breath of fresh air, with clear rules that developers could follow to have a more consistent design between the system and different apps.
This Material Design from 2015 continues to be the predecessor of the design line popular today on Android. Inside, Lollipop introduced significant changes such as the ART compiler and performance and battery improvements under the name Volta Project.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow
A later version made a radical change: execution permissions. Instead of granting all permissions to the app when we installed it, apps could (and should) request each permission only when they really need it. This is a security and privacy improvement that new versions of Android continue to expand on today, for example with single-use permissions.
In this version, battery optimizations continued with Sleep mode, which asks apps to “go to sleep” so as not to waste battery power. Additionally, Marshmallow released support for USB-C, windowed apps (as an experiment), and direct sharing in the Share menu.
Android 8.0 Oreo
With a Nougat without too many surprises, Oreo is the next most important Android update and not so much because of what it has on the outside, but on the inside. The Treble project started with Oreowhich modifies the architecture of the operating system to be able to update certain components separately.
Treble was Google’s first serious attempt to attack fragmentation, and while it will still take a few years to start taking effect, it started with Oreo. This update also released the adaptive icons, notification channels and the form autocomplete API.
Android 12
The next time Google shook up Android was with Android 12 and the arrival of Material Youthe biggest design change since Lollipop’s Material Design.
Android 12 brought back the love of widgets and introduced the changing color palette, based on the wallpaper you have on your mobile at that time. Material You. With this version also came the approximate location permitvisual indications when an app uses the microphone, camera or location and privacy panel.
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