Let me give you a quick overview of the Android platform.

The Android platform is a software stack that

is designed to run on mobile devices.
The Android platform can simply be viewed as consisting of three layers.
At the bottom most layer is the Linux kernel
that deals with the underlying hardware and exposes
an appropriate functionality for the higher layers to make use of.
On top of the Linux kernel is the middleware.
This is where the Android framework exists.
And this provides the appropriate functionality for applications
to make use of the underlying system.
On top of this, we have the application layer.
This is where, typical users experience the Android platform
in terms of making use of all the apps that are installed on their devices.
In addition, developers are working at this layer
to develop various applications, taking advantage of the functionality provided
by the underlying Android framework.
Android has been an evolving platform since 2008.
Every so often, there is a new version of Android platform
released for the users.
The latest version of Android platform is Lollipop.
Now, in the literature, you often see Android
being referred to in one of three different ways-- either
by the name of the platform, or the version number, or the API level.
The typical name of the Android platform is a user understandable name,
like Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Kitkat, or Lollipop.
A second way that we refer to the platform
is by specifying the version number.
The current version of Android, Lollipop, is version number 5.0.
The minor numbers represent small enhancements to the platform.
The third way we often see Android being referred to is by the API level.
This is what you would see being used when
you do the application development.
The API level, for example, for Ice Cream Sandwich, is 14 or 15
all the way up to Lollipop, which is 21 or 22.
If you have been following the news, you have seen that the M developer
preview has just been released.
And it'll be the next upcoming version of Android.
When we look at their current distribution of Android devices,
most of the Android devices in use are running
either Jelly Bean or Kitkat version.
We do have a small fraction of Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread devices.
The Lollipop version is slowly gaining ground.
And if you are developing an Android application,
it would be safe for you to target platforms as low as Ice Cream Sandwich
or Gingerbread, whereby you will cover most of the Android devices
that are active at this moment.
Now let's view the Android architecture itself in more detail.
As we saw earlier, the Android platform can be viewed as several layers.
So we'll examine these in a bit more detail.
At the top most layer is the Android applications.
This is where you have the standard applications that
come with your platform and also applications
that developers release for the platform.
Android applications are written in the Java programming language.
Right below the applications layer is the Android application framework.
This is the layer that consists of various managers--
like the notification manager, window activity manager, telephony
and resource managers-- and content providers,
which deal with the underlying data storage
and the view system that deals with the user interface aspects of the Android
platform.
So applications make use of the functionality
exposed by the application framework underneath.
Below this is the set of libraries that include the Bionic libC,
media framework for supporting both audio and video,
SQL lite for supporting databases, WebKit for browser support,
openGL for 3D graphics, and Surface Manager
for 2D graphics and the view system.
In addition, at this layer, you'll also see the Android runtime.
The runtime consists of the core libraries
that support the Java language and also the virtual machine, which,
in the current version of Android, is defined as the ART, the Android
Runtime.
Below that, of course, is the Linux kernel
that provides the underlying drivers for the hardware
and also provides the hardware abstraction for the higher layers
to make use of.
Now as we go forward, we have seen a basic introduction
to the Android platform.
We'll go ahead and then develop our first Android application, which
is the Hello World application, in order to understand the application
development and the integrated development environment.