I was trawling the web looking for juicy bits on the up coming Android 4.3 / 5.0 codenamed Key Lime Pie and found this awesome info graphic.
Take a walk through the the history of Android and its functionality evolution so far. Thanks Kinvey and Kelly Rice @kellyrice88
Android 1.0
Android Market
Camera support
Gmail app & sync
Contacts sync w/ People app
Calendar sync w/ Calendar app
Google Maps, Sync, Search & Talk
IM, SMS, MMS
Media Player
Custom notifications & wallpapers
Voice Dialer
YouTube Player
Wi-Fi & Bluetooth Support
1.5 Cupcake
Support for Widgets
Soft-keyboard w/ text-prediction
Bluetooth A2DP, AVRCP Support
Record / watch videos
Copy & paste in browser
Animated screen transitions
Auto-rotation
New stock boot animation
Upload videos to YouTube
Upload photos to Picasa
1.6 Donut
Quick Search Box
Gallery, camera, camcorder integration
CDMA/EVDO, 802.1x & VPNs support
Battery usage indicator
Text-to-speech engine
Multilingual speech synthesis engine
Easier search, app screenshots in Market
WVGA screen resolution support
New Gestures Builder dev tool
New framework APIs
2.0 Eclair
Multiple Accounts
Turn-by-turn navigation for Google Maps
Email & contact sync
Exchange email support
Quick contact
Bluetooth 2.1 support
Search for saved SMS & MMS
Live wallpapers
New Camera features
Browser support for HTML5
New framework APIs
Optimized hardware speed
Multiple screen sizes & resolutions support
2.2 Froyo
Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM)
Improved Exchange support
Dedicated shortcuts on Home Screen
Chrome V8 JS engine in browser
Portable Wi-Fi hotspot functionality
Disable data access over mobile
Voice dialing, contact sharing over Bluetooth
Bluetooth-enabled dock support
Numeric & alphanumeric password support
Adobe Flash Support
Extra-high PPI screen support
Multiple keyboard languages
“Card Mode” & “Night Mode” UI frameworks
2.3 Gingerbread
Near Field Communication (NFC)
Better control over apps
ACess to multiple cameras
XL screen sizes and resolutions support
Native input & sensor events
New mixable audio effects
SIP-based internet telephony
New Download Manager
WebM/VP8 Video playback support
AAC audio encoding support
Open API for native audio
Robust native dev environment
Multitouch keyboard
Improved copy/paste
Video chat in Google Talk
3.0 Honeycomb
New virtual & “holographic” UI
Added System Bar
Added Action Bar
Simplified multitasking
Customizable home screen
Redesigned keyboard
Multiple browser tabs replace windows
Quick access to camera features
Support for video in Google Talk
Hardware acceleration
Ability to encrypt all user data
4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Recent Apps multitasking
Android Beam for NFC
Apps accessible from lock screen
Drag and Drop folder creation
Resizable widgets
Integrated screenshot capture
Real-time speech to text dictation
Face Unlock
Goolge Chrome
Data usage warnings
Shut down apps in background
Built-in photo editor
WebP image format support
Wi-Fi Direct
Consolidated platform for phones & tablets
Swipe to dismiss notifications
4.1 Jelly Bean
Google Now search app
Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)
Vsync timing
Triple buffering in Graphics pipeline
Synchronized & anticipatory touch
Multiple language support
User-installed keymaps
Expandable notifications
Android Beam w/ Blutooth data transfer
Offline voice dictation
Multichannel & USB audio
Gapless playback
Project Butter: improved performance & smoothness
Actionable Notifications
Lockscreen widgets
Multi-user sUpport
Multi-screen support
Since this post 4.2 Jelly Bean was released with a slew of new features.
In addition at Google I/O 2013, google started to promote its new intention to push critical core services into the Google Play Services stack thus helping reduce Android Fragmentation by providing up to date APIs to all devices connected to Google Play. This was also a pretty smart move to keep the Amazon App Store and Samsung App Store and other third party stores from completely replacing Google Play. After all if users want things like GCM and the new Fused Location API they need Google Play Services installed.
It will be interesting to see what Amazon does about this in their Kindle Fire range which is renowned for being a non Google Services based Android device.
I hope you enjoyed this quick run down on Android history, its interesting to see the evolution and priority of functionality and just how far Android has come over the years. With Key Lime Pie almost a certainty, the question is, what Dessert will make the letter L? Could it be Android Lamington as an Australian Google Android Engineer Reto Meier @retomeier hinted at I/O 2013.