After reviewing these permissions, the user can choose to accept or refuse them, installing the application only if they accept. F-Droid, another alternative marketplace, seeks to only provide applications that are distributed under free and open source licenses. Android still uses a software update chain-of-command designed back when the Android ecosystem had zero devices to update, and it just doesn't work". The success of Android has made it a target for patent and copyright litigation between technology companies, both Android and Android phone manufacturers having been involved in numerous patent lawsuits and other legal challenges. In 2010, Google launched its Nexus series of devices, a lineup in which Google partnered with different device manufacturers to produce new devices and introduce new Android versions.

The earliest vendor-customized Android-based smartphones known to have featured a split-screen view mode are the 2012 Samsung Galaxy S3 and Note 2, the former of which received this feature with the premium suite upgrade delivered in TouchWiz with Android 4.In the summer of 2019, Huawei announced it would create an alternative operating system to Android [71] known as Harmony OS, [72] and has filed for intellectual property rights across major global markets. The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, also known as T-Mobile G1, announced on September 23, 2008. This made it difficult to port existing Linux applications or libraries to Android, [208] until version r5 of the Android Native Development Kit brought support for applications written completely in C or C++. The recently released Android 12 is the most popular Android version on smartphones and tablets combined, usage is at 78% for all supported versions, i. This is a feature in the Linux kernel that allows for transparent integrity checking of block devices.

Additionally, by providing infrastructure that combines dedicated hardware and dedicated applications running on regular Android, Google have opened up the platform for its use in particular usage scenarios, such as the Android Auto app for cars, [465] [466] and Daydream, a Virtual Reality platform. Android used to require an autofocus camera, which was relaxed to a fixed-focus camera [118] if present at all, since the camera was dropped as a requirement entirely when Android started to be used on set-top boxes.It is sometimes also mentioned in articles discussing a device, because it allows to distinguish different hardware variants of a device, even if the manufacturer offers them under the same name. With the release of Android Oreo in 2017, Google began to require that devices shipped with new SoCs had Linux kernel version 4. All Trusty applications are single-threaded; multithreading in Trusty userspace currently is unsupported. With Treble, the new stable vendor interface provides access to the hardware-specific parts of Android, enabling device makers to deliver new Android releases simply by updating the Android OS framework, "without any additional work required from the silicon manufacturers. for its development, [491] [492] and was later followed by other Android-based consoles, such as Nvidia's Shield Portable – an Android device in a video game controller form factor.