On May 9, 2014, the Federal Circuit partially reversed the district court ruling, ruling in Oracle's favor on the copyrightability issue, and remanding the issue of fair use to the district court. This is a feature in the Linux kernel that allows for transparent integrity checking of block devices. Android used to require an autofocus camera, which was relaxed to a fixed-focus camera [118] if present at all, since the camera was dropped as a requirement entirely when Android started to be used on set-top boxes. Android 14, released on October 4, 2023, is the latest version, and the recently released Android 12.

An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007's Apple iPhone meant that Android "had to go back to the drawing board". In a further effort for persuasion, Google shared a list of top phone makers measured by updated devices with its Android partners, and is considering making the list public.Google provides annual [167] Android releases, both for factory installation in new devices, and for over-the-air updates to existing devices. The majority opinion began with the assumption that the APIs may be copyrightable, and thus proceeded with a review of the factors that contributed to fair use.

Pichai himself would eventually switch positions, becoming the new CEO of Google in August 2015 following the company's restructure into the Alphabet conglomerate, [47] [48] making Hiroshi Lockheimer the new head of Android.This made Android tablets the most-sold type of tablet in 2013, surpassing iPads in the second quarter of 2013. Google introduced Project Treble, a major re-architect of the Android OS framework designed to make it easier, faster, and less costly for manufacturers to update devices to newer versions of Android.

Less than six months earlier, Google's then- CEO Larry Page announced in a blog post that Andy Rubin had moved from the Android division to take on new projects at Google, and that Sundar Pichai would become the new Android lead. The content and app "ecosystem" proved more important than hardware specs as the selling point for tablets. when ART took over, Android previously used Dalvik as a process virtual machine with trace-based just-in-time (JIT) compilation to run Dalvik "dex-code" (Dalvik Executable), which is usually translated from the Java bytecode. In December 2011, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the start of Android Mainlining Project, which aims to put some Android drivers, patches and features back into the Linux kernel, starting in Linux 3.At its core, the operating system is known as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) [4] and is free and open-source software (FOSS) primarily licensed under the Apache License. There are, as of August 2019, a handful of notable custom Android distributions (ROMs) of Android version 9. Mike Chan, co-founder of phone maker Nextbit and former Android developer, said that "The best way to solve this problem is a massive re-architecture of the operating system", "or Google could invest in training manufacturers and carriers 'to be good Android citizens '". Due to the lack of Android tablet-specific applications in 2011, early Android tablets had to make do with existing smartphone applications that were ill-suited to larger screen sizes, whereas the dominance of Apple's iPad was reinforced by the large number of tablet-specific iOS applications. Android's source code is released by Google under an open-source license, and its open nature has encouraged a large community of developers and enthusiasts to use the open-source code as a foundation for community-driven projects, which deliver updates to older devices, add new features for advanced users or bring Android to devices originally shipped with other operating systems.