The very first commercial release of Android happened on September 23, 2008, exactly ten years ago today. The debut of the Android operating system came bundled with the HTC Dream, a.k.a. the T-Mobile G1, a now-legendary device with a touchscreen interface combined with a slide-out physical keyboard.
Android Market (теперь Google Play Store)
What would an Android device be without an app store? Sure, plenty of essential apps came pre-installed with Android 1.0, but a lot was missing. For example, if you wanted to play video files on your Android phone, you’d need to download a third-party app, as that function wasn’t baked into Android yet!
The Android Market is where you’d turn for all your Android app needs on the HTC Dream. However, you wouldn’t find much: when the Android Market launched, it only had about 13 apps available (all of which were free). Just 13 apps! Once Google opened up the Android Market to indie developers who could list apps on their own, that number jumped up significantly. But still, at the end of 2008, there were only about 200 apps on the Android Market.
In 2012, Google merged the Android Market with two of its other offerings: Google Music and the Google eBookstore. The combined effort was called Google Play, marking the end of the Android Market moniker. But the core functionality of the Google Play Store today is all based on the beginnings of the Android Market.
Synchronization
Back in the day, your contacts were stored on your SIM card. When you bought a new phone, you would swap your SIM card and then load your saved contacts; cloud solutions weren’t really a thing yet.
Even today, you still have the option in Android to store your contacts on your SIM card, but most people opt for the more modern approach of putting their contacts into Google Contacts and then never having to worry about “New phone, who dis?” problems.
Synchronization may seem like a small thing, but it’s the foundation of modern smartphone applications. Today, would you even use an app that didn’t sync your highly-valuable data to a cloud server for re-syncing later should you upgrade your device or lose your local data?
Application organization
If you did decide to put your apps on your home screen, you could place them in any order you liked and even organize the apps into clusters using home screen folders.
Additionally, some applications had companion widgets that you could put on the home screen that gave quick-access to core app functions without having to launch the full app.
Obviously, all these Android features are well-known today because they’re still around, with very little changed over the past ten years. The fact that Android nailed these features on day one is extraordinary.
The next ten years
It’s a good bet that Android will still be around ten years from now. The mysterious Google Fuchsia project may overtake Android in some way, but the open-source nature of the operating system all but assures its longevity.
Judging from the past ten years, the five features listed in this article aren’t going anywhere, and we’ll likely be able to talk about them in 2028 on the twentieth anniversary of Android 1.0.
source: www.androidauthority.com
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