Introducing the Android OS and its architecture
Android is a Linux kernel-based OS. The company Android Inc. was founded in 2003 and acquired by Google in 2005. The main company focus is writing an OS for mobile devices, but they extended Android to other types of devices. At the time of writing this chapter, the Android OS goes up to version 13, and its code is always open sourced through the project: Android Open Source Project (AOSP). It is possible to easily navigate through the source code on the web page: https://cs.android.com/.
The Android architecture
Because Android is a Linux kernel-based project, once compiled, most of its components will run on top of the bare-metal microprocessor, while other components will run within the runtime of the OS (for example, the Android Runtime (ART) framework or the major part of the applications). At the beginning of the Android project, a long-term stable (LTS) version of the Linux kernel code was forked. Then, periodically, specific...
