Android 2012

After Google Zeitgeist and YouTube looked back on 2012 it’s time to do the same for Android.

January

The year 2011 has just ended and the Galaxy Nexus is the current flagship phone. 12 days later on January 12th the Android Design website launched. Followed by the Android developers Google+ page on January 30th.

February

The first numbers of the year are published. 850,000 Android phones are activated every day. 300 million devices have been activated so far.

March

On March 5th expansion files are introduced and Android apps break the 50MB barrier expanding the size limit to 4GB. The Android market retires and is reborn as Google play on March 6th. The same month on March 21st the SDK tools and ADT revision 17 are released, adding an emulator that supports running x86 system images on Windows and Mac OS X. An update to the Android Developer Console on March 29th allows multiple users to manage published Android apps.

April

The emulator gets even more faster on April 9th by adding GPU support. On April 20th the first episode of Friday App Review airs and is later called The app clinic.

May

On May 4th Wolfram Rittmeyer publishes the first posting on his blog Grokking Android. Followed by the first article published on Android Zeitgeist on May 27th. 3 days before on May 24th In-app Subscriptions are launched on Google Play.

June

The Google I/O takes place for three days from June 27th to 29th. There are now 900,000 Android devices activated every day and 400 million devices have been activated up to now. Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) is publicly shown for the first time on June 27th. The same day the Android 4.1 SDK is released. In addition to that the first tablet by Google is unveiled: The Nexus 7. On the second day of the Google I/O the Android SDK tools are updated to revision 20. At the end of the Google I/O there have been 3.5 million live streams seen from 170 countries.

July

On July 3rd the Ouya, an Android based console, is unveiled and a Kickstarter campaign is started on July 10th. On July 9th the Android 4.1 source code is published as part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

August

The funding phase for the Ouya is completed. The campaign collected $8,596,475. That’s 904% more than the initial campaign goal.

September

New numbers are released. There are now 1.3 million devices activated every a day. About 70,000 of these devices are tablets. 480 million devices have been activated up to now. On September 9th the first episode of This week in Android development airs. A day later the first episode of Android Design in Action is uploaded to YouTube.

October

Till mid October 3 million Nexus 7 units have been sold. Starting from October 15th the new Google Play Developer Console is available to everyone. Google planned a launch event on October 29th in New York but it has been cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Nevertheless the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 are introduced online this day. These are the first devices to run Android 4.2.

November

The first episode of (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ airs on November 8th. On November 13th the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 went on sale and are sold out in minutes. Later that day the Android 4.2 SDK platform is released. Another day later the Android SDK tools revision 21 are released.

December

Google releases a new Google Maps API for Android on December 3rd. On December 10th a new version of the In-App billing API is released.

The Android team releases their Happy Holidays video:



2013?

What has been your Android highlight in 2012 and what are your wishes for 2013?