Android Has a Better App Market

It's true that Apple's App Store has over 180,000 applications, while the Android Marketplace has only just broken the 50,000 mark but Android's rapid growth and adoption give it the potential to catch up to the iPhone App Store. Android also has another advantage: a completely open market. Apple receives around 10,000 app submissions per week, yet many apps are overlooked because they appear too simple or denied because a similar app already exists. The Android Marketplace is driven entirely by its consumers, so the best app is the one that succeeds - not the first one to reach the market. In addition, the Android Marketplace doesn't censor its apps, so the possibilities are truly endless.

Android is a mobile operating system initially developed by Android Inc. Android was bought by Google in 2005.Android is based upon a modified version of the Linux kernel. Google and other members of the Open Handset Alliance collaborated to develop and release Android to the world. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android. Unit sales for Android OS smartphones ranked first among all smartphone OS handsets sold in the U.S. in the second and third quarters of 2010, with a third quarter market share of 43.6%.

Android has a large community of developers writing application programs ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 100,000 apps available for Android. Android Market is the online app store run by Google, though apps can be downloaded from third party sites (except on AT&T, which disallows this). Developers write in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.

The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 79 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software and open source license.

The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation. Libraries written in C include the surface manager, OpenCore media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics engine, SSL, and Bionic libc. The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3 million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and 1.75 million lines of C++.