In 2017, Google announced that Google Play would begin to require apps to target a recent Android version. The first release under the numerical order format was Android 10, which was released September 2019. Google announced in August 2019 they were ending the confectionery theming scheme to use numerical ordering for future versions.

The project manager, Ryan Gibson, conceived using a confectionery-themed naming scheme for public releases, starting with Android 1.5 Cupcake. The code names 'Astro Boy' and 'Bender' were tagged internally on some of the early pre-1.0 milestone builds and were never used as the actual code names of the 1.0 and 1.1 releases of the OS. Android 1.0 and 1.1 were not released under specific code names. The first public release of Android 1.0 occurred with the release of the T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream) in October 2008. Both the operating system itself and the SDK were released along with their source code, as free software under the Apache License. These releases were done through software emulation as physical devices did not exist to test the operating system. Several public beta versions of the SDK were released.

The beta was released on November 5, 2007, while the software development kit (SDK) was released on November 12, 2007. There were at least two internal releases of the software inside Google and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) before the beta version was released.

The development of Android started in 2003 by Android, Inc., which was purchased by Google in 2005.

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