What is Android?

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For a brief definition, Android is an operating system for mobile phones based on well-known Linux operating system. It is developed by Open Handset Alliance and getting its popularity since major mobile phone manufacturers adopt it on to their new phone production. HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and Huawei are among those brands which already embeded Android OS on their products.

What makes Android gain such a popularity is that this operating system's available open source under Apache license, thus developers are free to develop their propietary applications without submitting back to the open source community. The well established Linux community then in turn provides various applications to add the phone functions, such as PIM, text editor, Internet applications, and games.