The Evolution of Android and iOS

(published: 5/5/14)
Android and IOS have had hundreds if not thousands of changes over the last few years.

Now I know that there are many other mobile operating systems like Windows or Blackberry that have been around for many years and have had changes of their own, but I will be focusing purely on Android and iOS as they are the biggest players taking up the huge majority (currently about 90%) of the global market share.

The Beginning of the Apple iPhone.

Starting from the beginning, all the way back about 7 years ago, to the 79th Academy Awards February 25, 2007 when the very first Apple iPhone was announced to the public by Steve Jobs. This would be one of the most important presentations and what set the platform to one of the biggest advancement in smartphone technology. So it's not that Apple really created something completely new here, there were other smartphones at the time. In fact, the term smartphone appeared as early as 1997 when Ericsson released its GS 88 Penelope which should also be given some credit as well (This can be a article for another time).

What Apple did, was create the perfect recipe with the combination of hardware, as well as what was probably the best optimized software at the time.

At first, the iPhone operating system came with just a few apps like: notes, weather, mail, stocks, and maps. It was also called simply the iPhone OS, but eventually changed to iOS 2.0; 3.0, 4, 5, 6 and finally 7 (That's one every year with a new iPhone). One of the first things that was missing was the App Store coming out the very next year in 2008 along with the new iPhone and their first SDK (which is what developers use to create apps). The App Store was an amazing success and brought an early advantage for apple in years to come.

With every update new features were added; like the iTunes app and voice recorder, then the ability to change backgrounds of home and lock screens, copy and paste feature, top slider, and eventually in iOS 7 the entire look was changed to be more colorful and vibrant with the app icons looking a bit flattened out.

The Start of Android Smartphone.

The company Android was founded by Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Andy Ruben, in 2003. Not much was known about the company but in 2005 Google came to them with an offer to buy out the company Android Inc. for an estimated amount of around 50 million. Anyways, after years of development on October 22nd, 2008 Google unveiled its first commercially available smartphone running Android 1.0, the HTC Dream (also known as the T-Mobile G1 in the United States). It came with a physical QWERTY, No touchscreen, not even notifications. It was very heavily integrated with Google services and had a very limited Android Market (now called Google Play).

So, this was clearly an uphill battle to beat iOS, one that would last many years but as time went on, Google released more and more updates, 1.5 Cupcake was the first time android stared using desserts and went alphabetically to D- Donut, E- Eclair, F- Froyo, G- Gingerbread, H- Honeycomb, I- Icecream Sandwitch, J- Jelly Bean, and today which is K- Kitkat (this chart goes up to Jelly bean)

The entire mobile platform was a bit dull and ugly at the start, but as time passed it became especially noticeable with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwitch that the entire look was changed into a more modern theme and the software was optimized to be smoother. This was when I bought my first android smartphone (switching from apple) and for the first time it seemed that android was able to fully compete with Apple iOS as the glitches, lags, crashes, and other bugs were mostly rid of. Android went its own route opening the OS for any manufacturer and having much greater freedom of customization then iOS.
Conclusion..
There is really much more that could be added to this article, but I hope this was a good, quick overview of the two platforms. I have obviously had experience with both platforms and even owned a smartphone running Windows OS for some time. Feel free to check out my last article where I explained waterproofing on smartphones.