Android has been with us for about 15 years now, and it runs on around three billion devices,
way more than even Windows. So today we're gonna look back at every version
of Android ever, starting out with 1.0, which came out way back in 2008, an innocent time.
It looked a little something like this, with the first mass-market Android phone
being the HTC Dream, featuring 256 megs of storage,
an actual physical keyboard, and an incredibly lifelike 320 by 480 display
that slid away from the main body. You get that satisfying,
kinda clicks down when you hang up. But unsurprisingly, not everyone wanted
an easily breakable sliding screen. So it was good that Android 1.5 Cupcake,
released in 2009, introduced support for auto rotation,
as well as an on-screen keyboard. It also allowed for third-party widgets,
setting the stage for everyone and their mother to come out with a weather forecast on your home screen.
We got Android 1.6 Donut later in 2009,
which gave quality-of-life improvements like better scaling for different-sized phones,
as well as text-to-speech support. But 2.0, E.Claire, came later that same year
and represented a bigger improvement that introduced multi-touch support
and a large suite of photo editing features, as well as an incessant adlets for the OG Motorola Droid.
The next year, we got Android 2.2 Froyo, which allowed you to use your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot
and also supported Adobe Flash, for as long as that was relevant.
And it could even play animated GIFs, yes, I say GIFs,
marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of human society. This was followed by 2.3 Gingerbread later in 2010,
which provided resolutions up to 1366 by 768,
along with support for NFC signals and the all-important selfie cam.
Honeycomb or Android 3.0 graced us with its presence
in 2011 and was actually a tablet-only version
that introduced a whole new UI design and support for browser tabs and multi-core processors.
The next version for phones though was Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
That one further refined the user experience, bringing us swipe to dismiss as well as face unlock,
which some people actually thought was an unnecessary gimmick.
We got Android Jelly Bean 4.1 in 2012, which crucially allows you to individually disable
notifications from specific apps so you could finally silence those stupid freemium games.
2013's KitKat or Android 4.4 helped with optimizing Android
for lower-end devices, as there were plenty of phones out
that didn't run Android all that well. But Android 5.0 Lollipop from 2014 was a bigger deal,
as it gave us notification cards similar to how notifications are handled today.
This was part of Google's push to get their new design language, material design,
onto phones, which was supposed to provide visual elements that were cleaner and more intuitive.
2015's release was Marshmallow 6.0, which gave us support for biometric unlocking via fingerprint.
I can't believe they didn't have it before. And USB-C support, so we no longer had to fight
to insert the cable the right way. 2016's Android 7.0 Nougat didn't have a creamy center,
but it did give us a split-screen option for displaying multiple apps,
as well as customizable settings icons in the notification shade.
Still with us, we're getting to the more modern area of Android now, with 2017's 8.0 Oreo
that brought us picture-in-picture. I guess the little screen is like the Oreo's filling.
Who wrote this? Along with wider color gamuts and even a self-repair tool called Rescue Party
that could save you from getting stuck in a boot loop. Android 9 Pie from 2018 was the last version
to be named after a tasty dessert, unfortunately, and brought a refresh of material design,
disabled notifications from apps you habitually dismissed automatically,
and introduced notch support, which was something I know all of us
were waiting for with bated breath. 2019's Android 10 is the oldest version
that still supported at the time we wrote this video, and not only did it make our lives easier
with simple gestures like swipe to go back, which I actually use instead of the buttons,
but it gave us the long-requested system-wide dark mode
so that we can obliterate our retinas a little more slowly.
Android 11, released in 2020, clamped down on privacy
by restricting when apps could fetch your location and made accessing payment methods and smart home functions
a bit easier by holding down the power button. But 2021's Android 12 gave us another privacy boost
by mandating a green indicator whenever the camera or microphone is active,
alongside a major redesign called Material U.
And aside from the stupid name, it looks like it'll be with us for quite a while,
as a way to distinguish Android from its major competitor, iOS.
So that's every version of Android ever, until, of course, Android 13 comes out,
and we'll have to do this whole video all over again, because we're completionists like that.
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with your suggestions for topics for us to cover in the future, or for your favorite feature
that we totally missed in this roundup.