Clear, brief technical description of Android

By Cory Doctorow at 3:26 am Wednesday, Nov 24

Tim "XML" Bray is now working on Android for Google; he's got a great post called "What Android Is" that explains in good, high-level, technical detail what Android is made from and how you make stuff with it.

Linux · Underneath everything is a reasonably up-to-date Linux kernel (2.6.32 in my current Nexus One running Froyo), with some power-saving extensions we cooked up; the process of trying to merge this stuff into upstream Linux has been extended and public and is by no means over. ¶

Android runs on Linux, but I'd be nervous about calling it a distro because it leaves out so much that people expect in one of those: libraries and shells and editors and GUIs and programming frameworks. It's a pretty naked kernel, which becomes obvious the first time you find yourself using a shell on an Android device.

If it were a distro it'd be one of the higher-volume ones, shipping at 200K units a day in late 2010. But nobody counts these things, and then there are a ton of embedded flavors of Linux shipping in unremarkable pieces of consumer electronics, so there's a refreshing absence of anyone claiming to be "the most popular Linux". I like that.

What Android Is (via O'Reilly Radar)