Couple of days ago one of my Friend told me that he is working on Android. I know its nothing new but why everyone is using android these days??  If you look at your GMail friend list you will see that there are some icons of Android as status of your friend.I thought I must look in to this because it seems like something special in the programming world. I started learning about Android and here are some cool points on that.

What is Android?

According to Android Website

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.

So basically what I understand is Android is an API for creating applications of Mobile devices or if you make it simple creating applications for Android based operating System. Just like we have API for windows programming on Windows based mobiles. Seems like nothing new? But no Android is much more powerful and have plenty of features for you and off course If you know Java then it is really easy to build Applications in Android.

Features of Android:

• Application Framework: Android provides a very powerful library for building applications. Most of the core Java classes are accessible to Android developers. It provide features like running services in background threads and localization of text strings etc.

• Run time Libraries: Android comes with number of third party libraries that can be used for Various Purposes. One example is SQLite which is used to fetch data from some source through a Query or some other way.

• Dalvik VM: Each Application in Android runs in its own Process. Dalvik VM is written in such a way so that a system can initialize multiple VMs at a single time. Dalvik VM is based on Linux kernel and use linux for Thread and low level memory management.

Security in Android

As mentioned in the third point of Android Features. Each application runs in its own process and have access to files that are related to that application. This isolation among the application provides great level of Security. It is possible to share same resources among the applications that may run on different Process or may share same Dalvik VM.

So this is just an introduction to Android. You will find very good information from the Android Site. I have taken most of the stuff from their site. Keep watching my blog I will post some tutorials for starters very soon and please give feedback!