Infographic: A timeline of Android's milestones

Matthew DeCarlo

Posts: 5,271   +104

The mobile computing scene looked pretty different when Android launched five short years ago. The iPhone had only just begun to take off, the iPad was barely a rumor and netbooks were still a thing. Fast forward to the present and we're nearing a billion smartphone shipments a year with tablets poised to outship desktops and laptops soon -- a transition many heavyweights have struggled to keep pace with.

Google's mobile OS has played a major role in that transition with Android due to ship installed on more devices this year than all Apple, Windows and BlackBerry units combined. Naturally, you don't reach that position by resting on your laurels and the search giant is constantly refining its software, having released 39 version updates and 18 API levels since 2008 -- not to mention all the vendor-specific tweaks.

Keeping track of all those changes by memory would be a nightmare so the folks at Kinvey have whipped up something of an infographic cheatsheet that lists key Android milestones with version codenames, their release dates and what they did. The list even has Google's next build, 5.0 Key Lime Pie, which is expected to ship next month with social media integration, cross-device SMS sync, app previews and more.

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Both 4.1 and 4.2 are Jelly Bean. This is not an infographic about each version number, but about each major release. And Google Now was introduced in 4.1.
Oh, I am not really an Android person so wouldnt know lol.
 
iOS's only big leap was with the addition of the App store in iOS 2 (I think this is the version). Other than that, I have seen no difference from iOS 1-6.
 
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