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A visual history of the development of the three main operating systems of the mobile market
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A visual history of the development of the three main operating systems of the mobile market
author: Evgeny ZobninSen 25, 2014
In recent years, the mobile market has changed so much that today even a top smartphone from five years ago looks ridiculous and ridiculous.
The development of mobile OS moved by leaps and bounds, and nothing but memories remained of the once dominant Symbian and Windows Mobile.
We will try to understand what has happened over the past five years and why the changes have turned out to be so global in this article.
2007: iPhone OS 1.0 and the first Android announcement
The year 2007 was one of the most important in the history of the development of pocket computers and smartphones.
It was this year, on January 9, at the Macworld Conference & Expo, the iPhone was presented, which turned all users ' ideas about smartphones upside down.
After the presentation of the "Steve Jobs phone", all other smartphones instantly became obsolete, so much so that if the iPhone had been released a year later, the situation would not have changed at all.
It was the iPhone that set the style of interaction with a smartphone that we are used to today.
There are no control keys, no stylus and small elements on the screen, no joystick, the place of which has been replaced by a large clear screen, a truly smart operating system, a desktop like Mac OS X, a full fledged web browser and the concept of" multiple touches " to access any function of the device.
Released on the market in June, the iPhone became an absolute hit of sales for several years ahead and brought the Apple company billions of dollars in profits.
Interestingly, in technical terms, the iPhone was not a breakthrough at all.
Almost all the findings attributed to Steve Jobs and Apple existed before, but, as has always happened with Apple, they were the first to think of putting all the best together and implementing it at such a high level.
This was largely achieved thanks to the use of a full fledged OS, which was actually a fork of the desktop Mac OS X and, as a result, had the widest opportunities for creating applications.
They could use any phone functions in their work, including the 3D accelerator, thanks to which the iPhone OS interface worked surprisingly smoothly and quickly.
The first version of the iPhone OS did not have any special functionality, but it offered users a fairly complete stack of applications for everyday work, including a smart address book, a browser, a multimedia file player, a scheduler, an email client, an alarm clock, and others.
For everything else, oddly enough, Steve Jobs suggested using web applications that already worked perfectly in the mobile version of Safari at that time.
Support for third party applications was not provided as such and appeared only in the second version of the operating system, which was released exactly a year after the start of sales of the first iPhone.
2007 was also the year of the announcement of Android, which clearly occurred under the pressure of a rapidly gaining popularity product from Apple.
Then Android appeared only in the form of a beta version of the developer kit (SDK), equipped with an emulator in which you could "spin" the OS live.
On November 12, the SDK was posted online, and any user or developer could make their own personal impression of the OS and decide for themselves whether it is worth their attention.
And the impressions of most people turned out to be very ambiguous.
A suspicious resemblance to the iPhone OS immediately caught my eye; Android looked like some kind of ridiculous copy of the operating system for the iPhone, much less spectacular, but actually repeating it.
Secondly, Google took a slightly strange, but logical path, equipping the OS with a Dalvik virtual machine that executes its own byte code format, which was generated from the byte code of Java applications.
Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0
However, the main feature of the OS was its obvious imperfection, caused by the pursuit of the rapidly gaining popularity of the iPhone OS.
The first Android didnot even have such simple things as a on screen keyboard, Bluetooth and OpenGL support, the virtual machine executed byte code without using JIT compilation, and the overall impression was that there was no central line in the OS, but there were a lot of interesting ideas casually stacked on top of each other.
This feeling, by the way, will persist for a long time, until the release of the fourth version of the OS.
The first iPad
Anyway, as a result, Google was still able to entice independent developers to its side by organizing a competition to create unique applications with very tempting prizes in the form of a lot of dollar bills.
This feint gave a big win when launching sales of the first Android smartphone next year.
2008: iPhone OS 2.0 and Android 1.0
The year 2008 was marked by two important events at once, one of which was the release of the new iPhone 3G, running iPhone OS 2.0.
The smartphone itself was not of much interest and was nothing more than a slightly modified version of the first iPhone, in which 3G and A GPS support appeared.
But the iPhone OS 2.0 operating system has once again become a kind of breakthrough, bringing the owners of the old and new versions of the smartphone the long awaited support for native applications.
The reasons why this event has become so important are simple.
Being a full fledged OS running on standard modern hardware and supporting all its features, iPhone OS gave developers the opportunity to create applications without regard to compatibility, screen size, device limitations or runtime environment (Java ME, for example).
This has led to the emergence of a large number of mobile applications of a completely new class, which use position sensors, a compass, a GPS module and the advantages of a large screen in their work.
In addition, the iPhone OS, in fact, marked the beginning of the appearance of really high quality mobile games that could boast of good 3D graphics (a built in 3D accelerator with full OpenGL support is used), as well as multi finger touch control and control using a position sensor.
The correctly chosen policy of distributing applications only through the official App Store also played a role: each creation uploaded to it was checked by Apple employees for quality and the absence of malicious behavior.
You could buy and install any software in a few taps on the screen using the official App Store client, find out the app ratings and see screenshots before buying.
Not being the inventor of the online app store as such, Apple actually became a propagandist of this idea, completely prohibiting users from installing software from other sources and, in fact, forcing a change in the thinking of users.
It is worth noting at the same time that, despite the completeness of the iPhone OS as a serious operating system, at that time there was actually no multitasking in it.
In order to preserve the smooth operation and "responsiveness" of the OS, Apple programmers left the ability to work in the background only to stock applications pre installed in the OS, while third party software was killed immediately after switching to another task.
And although this approach smacked of DOS'yatina, it bore fruit in the early stages of the OS's existence, when the iPhone's performance was very limited.
The interactive "magazine page" is one of the key metaphors of the Metro interface
The second important and probably even more significant event of 2008 was actually the first birth of the Android operating system, which took place on September 23 along with the release of the Android SDK 1.0, which included an almost ready made, but still smacking of an incomplete operating system.
The first serial smartphone on this OS appeared a month later and was developed by HTC specifically for Google.
He got a double name: HTC Dream or T Mobile G1.
Only with the release of this device, the real highlight of Android as an operating system became obvious, turning a smartphone into a kind of terminal for accessing Google services.
The fact is that Android not only included many client applications for search engine services (search, mail, calendar, maps, chat and YouTube), but also allowed the user to link to all these services once by entering their username and password from the mail.
After that, messages that came by email and chat, calendar notifications began to pour on the smartphone, and all contacts were automatically synchronized with Google.
The same username and password were used to access the app store, which already included a lot of software developed during the year since the release of the beta version of the Android SDK.
2009: iPhone OS 3.0 and Android 1.1-2.1
2009 can rightly be considered the year of the heyday of Android as a mobile OS.
Manufacturers of mobile equipment began to look closely at Android and announce their first devices based on it, Google continued to hastily refine the OS, patching up multiple gaps in its design and functionality.
On February 9, the search giant releases the first update of the operating system under the index 1.1, which did not bring any special innovations and was released to close the bugs and problems found in the API.
At the end of April, the company posted a full fledged Android 1.5 update, officially named Cupcake.
This version included many important changes, such as the on screen keyboard, desktop widgets, the ability to shoot videos, support for Bluetooth headsets, automatic screen flipping, as well as many others.
Six months later, on September 15, Google announced Android 1.6 Donut, which included many improvements, a speech synthesis engine, as well as, very importantly, support for higher than 320 by 480 screen resolutions and an integrated function for adjusting applications to different resolutions.
The latter allowed you to run applications on different devices without any problems, even if the developer did not provide support for different screen resolutions (roughly speaking, the picture simply scaled).
Just a month later, Google releases Android 2.0 Eclair, which can be called the last one at the stage of transition to a truly stable and fully functional operating system.
Eclair includes many improvements, such as support for multiple Google accounts, Bluetooth 2.1, a new on screen keyboard, a redesigned interface, as well as many improvements in stock applications, such as SMS, browser and camera, which finally received support for various effects, digital zoom and macro focus.
The Nexus 7 is Google's first truly successful attempt to enter the tablet market
The year 2009 is also the year of release of the first smartphone models running the new OS.
The leader in this market is the Taiwanese HTC, which has released three new smartphone models at once: HTC Magic, the more advanced HTC Hero and the budget HTC Tattoo.
Later, Chinese Huawei enters the game with a budget smartphone Pulse and Samsung with the first device of the legendary Galaxy line, as well as a budget "spoke" (Spica).
However, the real furor is made by Motorola, which suddenly came out of the shadows with its top — end Motorola Droid smartphone, which later became a cult, equipped with a stunning 3.7 inch screen with a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels, a high performance OMAP3430 processor, 256 MB of RAM and running the latest Android 2.0.
It was thanks to Android that Motorola was able to break into the seemingly already missed smartphone market and subsequently hold its position firmly.
As for the iPhone OS, here Apple adheres to the previous course of gradual annual upgrades.
On July 17, Steve Jobs presents to the public the iPhone 3GS, equipped with an improved display, a more productive Samsung S5PC100 processor operating at a frequency of 600 MHz (instead of the standard 833), a PowerVR SGX535 3D graphics accelerator, twice the amount of RAM (256 MB instead of 128 MB), a digital compass and a 3 MP video camera (instead of 2 MP in the iPhone 3G).
As expected, the third version of the smartphone is running iPhone OS 3.0, which includes more than a hundred innovations, including the copy and paste function, MMS support, Spotlight search throughout the smartphone, as well as remote vape and smartphone search functions.
2010: Windows Phone 7, Android 2.2–2.3, iOS 4.0
The year 2010 was probably the most intense in the history of mobile technology.
The most significant event was the announcement of the Windows Phone 7 operating system, work on which began in 2008.
The OS was presented on February 15 at the Mobile World Congress exhibition and immediately attracted everyone's attention thanks to a completely new, unusual and incredibly effective Metro interface.
Metro looked stylish, minimalistic and at the same time brought the experience of communicating with the OS and applications to a completely different level, or more precisely, it returned the user to the usual models of interaction with the environment that we are used to in everyday life.
The interface simultaneously combined all the main graphic components of a modern urban city, such as information boards, guidebooks and glossy magazines, which made it intuitive and easy to use.
Interestingly, despite the completely new interface and programming API, which made all applications written for Windows Mobile incompatible with the new OS, inside Windows Phone, Windows CE continued to remain the same with an outdated kernel based on Windows 95 technologies.
For the development of applications and games, Microsoft offered to use a special version of Silverlight and the XNA framework, also used in the Zune multimedia player and the Xbox 360 console.
However, as in the case of iOS, the multitasking of the operating system was reduced, so that the programmer could not count on the background execution of the application, but could use the API to perform certain types of background tasks, such as receiving mail or updating data from the Network.
On October 11, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced ten devices running Windows Phone 7 from manufacturers such as HTC, Dell, Samsung and LG.
The devices were immediately released to the market.
2010 was also the year of another technological triumph for Apple, which introduced three significant products to the world at once: a new, really upgraded iPhone 4, an iPad tablet and the iOS 4.0 operating system, in which multitasking finally appeared.
This is how one of the first prototypes of an Android smartphone looked like
The central event in this whole chain, of course, is connected with the iPad a tablet computer, which Steve Jobs spoke about back in 1983, predicting the release of "a powerful computer with the size of a book, which will take no more than twenty minutes to learn how to use."
From a technical point of view, there was no revolution this time either.
In fact, it was just a large iPhone with a 9.7 inch screen, a 1 GHz processor and a special modification of iPhone OS 3.2, which almost did not differ from the smartphone version and allowed using all the same applications.
However, thanks to the quality of performance, Apple once again managed to open a completely new market.
The iPad was introduced in April, but in June, following its tradition, Apple announced the iPhone 4, the main features of which were a screen with a resolution of 960 x 640 pixels, twice the amount of RAM (512 MB) and a 0.3 MP front camera for video calls.
Along with the new iPhone, iOS 4.0 was introduced, which became the first OS that is incompatible with some previous versions of the smartphone and is available for a new type of device — the iPad.
The main highlight of iOS 4.0 is a more complete, but at the same time incomplete multitasking.
From now on, third party applications could work in the background, but their capabilities were limited to a set of "background APIs", in much the same way as it is implemented in Windows Phone.
Applications could play music, determine the location of the device, display notifications, request additional time to complete an unfinished task, but they could not "just work" in the background, as it happens in desktop operating systems or Android OS.
Excessive attention to detail is not always appropriate — as Apple designers would say to their Korean colleagues
For the Android ecosystem, 2010 was no less significant.
It was this year that became a real boom in the release of Android devices by almost all significant players of the mobile market.
Developers began to seriously look at the OS, so by the middle of the year, 100 thousand applications could be found in the Android Market, and by the end of the year their number grew to 400 thousand.
In the same year, there were two major OS updates, thanks to which Android could already be called a complete OS.
In May, the Android 2.2 Froyo version was introduced, the main feature of which was improved performance due to the inclusion of JIT compilation in the Dalvik virtual machine, integration of the V8 JS engine into a standard browser, as well as multiple code optimizations.
In the same version, there is a long awaited opportunity to distribute the Internet using Wi Fi (Wi Fi hotspot), as well as a new home screen, which finally has a dock, in the manner of iOS.
Six months later, the version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread was released, in which it was possible to note the first steps of Google to modernize the interface and bring it to a more acceptable form, as well as features such as SIP VoIP, improvements in power consumption and support for NFC chips.
2011: Android 3.0-4.0, Windows Phone 7.5 and iOS 5.0
2011 was the first year in the history of the "arms race", which did not present any surprises in the field of mobile OS.
Apple calmly and calmly continues to release new versions of smartphones, tablets and systematically update iOS.
Microsoft signs a contract with Nokia and releases a minor update of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.
Google is releasing Android 3.0 Honeycomb — a really major OS update, which nevertheless does not create a resonance due to its focus only on tablets and closed source code, which seriously limited the distribution of the OS.
Android 3.0 was introduced on February 22 along with the Motorola Xoom tablet and was rather not a complete OS, but an attempt by Google to invade the tablet market, rediscovered by Apple.
The third version of the OS was not widely distributed, but it worked perfectly as a demonstration of what the next versions of Android will be.
The operating system has been seriously redesigned, including in terms of the user interface, which finally got its own memorable and incredibly spectacular minimalistic style, called Holo (from holographic — holographic).
The interface has not only become pleasant to the eye, but also received the long expected smoothness of operation thanks to the use of the GPU.
Many other OS subsystems have also been redesigned, and the overall hardware requirements have increased significantly.
INFO
Starting with the fourth version, the iPhone OS began to bear the name iOS, and Apple had to license the new name from Cisco, which owned the rights to the trademark of the iOS OS running in routers.
Back in 2007, HTC created a prototype of the Google Sooner smartphone for Google with a full fledged QWERTY keyboard under the screen, but the smartphone was never released to the market.
Together with Android, Google has created the OHA (Open Handset Alliance) alliance of mobile equipment manufacturers, which today includes about fifty companies, including HTC, Motorola, Intel, LG, NVIDIA, Samsung and many others.
In the same year, Google released two more major OS updates, including versions 3.1 and 3.2, in which further work was carried out to unify the interface, optimize performance, and support for various USB devices appeared.
However, their source code was also closed, and work on the "phone versions" of the system was actually completed before the end of the year, when Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was introduced.
The fourth version of Android has become an ideological continuation of Honeycomb, but focused on both tablets and smartphones.
Ice Cream Sandwich included a completely redesigned application stack, a home screen rewritten from scratch, implemented according to all the rules of the new Holo UI, a new Roboto font that is perfect for displaying text on screens with a high pixel density, a face unlock function (which is easy to deceive by showing the owner's photo to the phone), a Wi Fi Direct function for direct file transfer between devices, as well as long awaited VPN support.
It was Ice Cream Sandwich that made Android not just an "alternative to the iPhone for the poor", but a real competitor in the mobile OS market.
Android 4.0 was functional, convenient, beautiful, easy to use and had features that its competitor did not have in principle.
In February, a new version of Windows Phone 7.5 was introduced, codenamed Mango, which integrated Internet Explorer 9, which has all the features of the desktop version, expanded support for multitasking for background applications and the ability to sync with Windows Live SkyDrive.
Almost at the same time, Steve Ballmer announced an agreement with Nokia, according to which the latter will give preference to Windows Phone when choosing a mobile OS.
In fact, this meant that Nokia was starting to release smartphones only on Windows with all the ensuing consequences, in the form of stagnation and departure from the top five largest smartphone manufacturers due to the dislike of users for the" too unusual " and unpopular Windows Phone.
Windows Mobile — there was also a "Start"on smartphones
In October, Apple introduces iOS 5.0, which introduces the functionality first proposed by Android developers, namely Notification Center, that is, the notification area available by pushing the status bar down.
Also, the new version of the OS gets integration with iCloud, Apple's cloud service, functionally similar to Dropbox, and the iMessage service, which allows you to send SMS using an Internet connection.
2012: Android 4.0-4.2, Windows Phone 8 and iOS 6.0
Windows Desktop 8 in the Metro style
The most significant event of 2012 was, of course, the release of Windows 8, with which Microsoft unexpectedly made a serious leap forward again for many.
Despite the fact that technically three operating systems were introduced, all of them are now based on the same Windows NT code base and are based on the Metro interface (which can be disabled in the desktop version).
The API between the systems is also now compatible, which makes the transfer of applications actually a solved task, and tablet users, in fact, will work with a real desktop version of the system.
This was very eloquently shown by the example of the Windows Surface tablet presented at the same time with a switchable keyboard.
In fact, Windows 8 is a universal OS for all types of devices with one application repository, one interface, a system for organizing menus and settings.
An operating system in which the user will work with one software, regardless of the device, and will not be lost in the new interface.
This is exactly what Apple and Google tried to come to, but, oddly enough, Microsoft came first.
By the way, Google programmers also did not sit still and managed to release two incremental OS updates.
In Android 4.1, Jelly Bean worked on increasing productivity, interactive notifications appeared, a smart desktop that learned how to arrange elements on the screen in response to dragging a shortcut or widget.
There was also a Google Now assistant that prompted various data based on what the user had recently searched for on Google, his location and activity on Google+.
The Android 4.2 version of Jelly Bean (yes, that's right) brought the ability to take spherical photos (similar to Google Street View), it has long awaited power management buttons in the notification bar, a single interface for tablets and smartphones, as well as SELinux integration.
Apple, in turn, introduced along with the iPhone 5 a new version of iOS with an index of 6.0, which, in fact, did not receive any major changes, except for many minor improvements in the built in applications, integration with Facebook, as well as the removal of YouTube and Google Maps from the pre installed applications (which, by the way, played a cruel joke with Apple, since Apple's new vector maps turned out to be useless).
Conclusion
Five years is not a long time, but the world of mobile technology has changed dramatically during this period.
It seems incredible that once we used smartphones that did not know how to perform automatic synchronization with Google, had a bunch of buttons and did not have a centralized source of applications.
Now all this is in the past, and it is difficult to imagine how the world will change over the next five years.
The article was first published in the January 2014 issue of X.
Categories: Android, iOS
Tags: Articles Articles
About the author
Evgeny Zobnin is the editor of the X Mobile category.
Part time sysadmin.
A big fan of Linux, Plan 9, gadgets and ancient video games.
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Leave a comment
Accounting Business
Sep 25, 2014 at 1: 50 pm
Is it possible not to shove the entire article in rss?
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efwe
Oct 9, 2014 at 11: 19 am pdt
Yes, it is normal))
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Ilya
Sep 25, 2014 at 6: 02 pm
The Motorola Droid has only 256mb of RAM, not 512
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Konstantin
Sep 25, 2014 at 10: 18 pm
why do some go.ics use the oifon?
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Nick
Sep 26, 2014 at 8: 02 pm
If it wasnot for the iPhone, there wouldnot be cheap imitators on Android, if it wasnot for the iPad, there wouldnot be shit plates on Android and you'd be walking with Nokia 3310 right now, faggot..la.
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John Cramer
Sep 26, 2014 at 11: 47 pm
That's how strange it is: having normally working OS prototypes on desktops, developers have been thinking for five years about how to multitask on a smartphone.
And this is despite the fact that according to the "iron" characteristics, smartphones overtook some desktops.
What were you thinking?
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logos
Oct 4, 2014 at 8: 36 pm
The fact that it is impossible to directly compare mobile and desktop modifications, x86 and ARM are very different things at the same frequency, for example.
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Shurik
Sep 26, 2014 at 1:46 pm
they forgot to write about blackberry OS 10, it is also present and developing…
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Int
Sep 30, 2014 at 3: 25 pm
Return the buttons that you feel with your finger!!
Return the joystick, best of all optical, like the xperia x2!
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qwert
Oct 3, 2014 at 3:38 pm
I donot know!
And I really liked the article!
it feels like I've been to a history lesson thanks to the author!
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folp
Nov 30, 2014 at 1:09 pm
just the latest history, only electronics.
+
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Junkie
Dec 2, 2014 at 5: 15 pm
>inside, Windows Phone continued to be the same Windows CE with an outdated kernel based on Windows 95 technologies.
The author, from now on, work hard to checkmate.the part to study before writing such nonsense
Windows CE (also known as WinCE) is a variant of the Microsoft Windows operating system for handheld computers, smartphones and embedded systems.
Today, Windows CE (Compact Edition / Compact Embedded) is not a "stripped - down" version of Windows for desktop PCs, it is based on a completely different kernel and is a real time operating system with a set of applications based on the Microsoft Win32 API.
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oleg009
Dec 19, 2015 at 5: 58 pm
did you drink something about 9ka , marshmallow and 10ka?
there seems to be a good material being typed about 9ku, for example.(http://www.remontiphone6.ru/novaya versiya ios 9/#topp)
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