Unfolding Stakeholder Thinking: Theory, Responsibility and Engagement

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As a result, technical obstacles including locked bootloaders and restricted access to root permissions are common in many devices. Gartner expected the whole mobile phone market to "reach two billion units in 2016", including Android.

Under such sanctions Huawei has long-term plans to replace Android in 2022 with the new operating system, as Harmony OS was originally designed for internet of things devices, rather than for smartphones and tablets. With the release of Android Oreo in 2017, Google began to require that devices shipped with new SoCs had Linux kernel version 4. In December 2015, Google announced that the next major release of Android ( Android Nougat) would switch to OpenJDK, which is the official open-source implementation of the Java platform, instead of using the now-discontinued Apache Harmony project as its runtime. which uses ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to entirely compile the application bytecode into machine code upon the installation of an application. billion end users in 2014, Android shipped over four times more than iOS and OS X combined, and over three times more than Microsoft Windows.In some cases it may not be possible to deny certain permissions to pre-installed apps, nor be possible to disable them. The idea of an open-source, Linux-based development platform sparked interest, [334] but there were additional worries about Android facing strong competition from established players in the smartphone market, such as Nokia and Microsoft, and rival Linux mobile operating systems that were in development. For example, Samsung has worked with General Dynamics through their Open Kernel Labs acquisition to rebuild Jelly Bean on top of their hardened microvisor for the "Knox" project.

In 2020, Google launched the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative to improve the security of Android. In 2010, Google launched its Nexus series of devices, a lineup in which Google partnered with different device manufacturers to produce new devices and introduce new Android versions. Android applications run in a sandbox, an isolated area of the system that does not have access to the rest of the system's resources, unless access permissions are explicitly granted by the user when the application is installed, however this may not be possible for pre-installed apps. All Trusty applications are single-threaded; multithreading in Trusty userspace currently is unsupported. The company then decided that the market for cameras was not large enough for its goals, and five months later it had diverted its efforts and was pitching Android as a handset operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.

OEMs will no longer be barred from selling any device running incompatible versions of Android in Europe. In December 2015, Google announced that the next version of Android would switch to a Java implementation based on the OpenJDK project. In May 2013, at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai announced that 900 million Android devices had been activated. F-Droid, another alternative marketplace, seeks to only provide applications that are distributed under free and open source licenses.

These measures are likely intended to discourage forks and encourage commercial licensing in line with Google requirements, as the majority of the operating system's core functionality is dependent on proprietary components licensed exclusively by Google, and it would take significant development resources to develop an alternative suite of software and APIs to replicate or replace them. As a result, important security and performance improvements that previously needed to be part of full OS updates can be downloaded and installed as easily as an app update. Some commentators have noted that the industry has a financial incentive not to upgrade their devices, as the lack of updates for existing devices fuels the purchase of newer ones, [178] an attitude described as "insulting". The lack of after-sale support from manufacturers and carriers has been widely criticized by consumer groups and the technology media.of Android phones in use had known but unpatched security vulnerabilities due to lack of updates and support. Google licenses their Google Mobile Services software, along with the Android trademarks, only to hardware manufacturers for devices that meet Google's compatibility standards specified in the Android Compatibility Program document. After reviewing these permissions, the user can choose to accept or refuse them, installing the application only if they accept. In contrast to typical desktop Linux distributions, Android device owners are not given root access to the operating system and sensitive partitions such as /system/ are partially read-only. From 2008 to 2013, Hugo Barra served as product spokesperson, representing Android at press conferences and Google I/O, Google's annual developer-focused conference.

CyanogenMod was the most widely used community firmware, [229] now discontinued and succeeded by LineageOS. In June 2014, Google announced Android One, a set of "hardware reference models" that would "allow [device makers] to easily create high-quality phones at low costs", designed for consumers in developing countries. The main benefits of using Bionic instead of the GNU C Library (glibc) or uClibc are its smaller runtime footprint, and optimization for low-frequency CPUs.

In May 2019, the operating system became entangled in the trade war between China and the United States involving Huawei, which, like many other tech firms, had become dependent on access to the Android platform. In October 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Android will serve as Google's future main laptop operating system, with the plan to fold ChromeOS into it by 2017. This is a feature in the Linux kernel that allows for transparent integrity checking of block devices.