Android
In the third quarter 2010 the Android operating system was the world's best-selling smartphone platform, dethroning Nokia's Symbian from the 10-year top position. Symbian is still slightly ahead on sales if some legacy non-Nokia Symbian smartphones are included in the third quarter 2010 figures.
Android has a large community of developers writing application programs ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 250,000 apps available for Android. Android Market is the online app store run by Google, though apps can also be downloaded from third-party sites. Developers write primarily in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.
The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 79 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software and open source license.
The Android open-source software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java-based, object-oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation. Libraries written in language C include the surface manager, OpenCore media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics