The “Break it Down” Blog

Looks like Google has released the Android SDK for mass consumption. What comes in the SDK is mostly expected, but still cool to see:

• Linux Kernel
• FreeType
• OpenGL
• SQL Lite
• WebKit (as a web browser, anyone else surprised this wasn’t Firefox 3 platform?)
• Custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is “highly specialized for the CPU”
• Common Java API
• Media File Support based on PacketVideo’s OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image files, including MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG

The OS platform of the phone executes on what is known as the Dalvik VM, a custom Java VM described as:

Every Android application runs in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine. Dalvik has been written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently. The Dalvik VM executes files in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format which is optimized for minimal memory footprint. The VM is register-based, and runs classes compiled by a Java language compiler that have been transformed into the .dex format by the included “dx” tool.

The Dalvik VM relies on the Linux kernel for underlying functionality such as threading and low-level memory management.

A diagram of the overall system architecture is as follows:

There is also a demo movie available as well, check it out:

To seed the effort, Google has also set aside $10 million in prize money for the Android developer challenge. That is a pretty awesome way to seed a new open platform… take note Apple and Microsoft… both of which have (or will have) SDKs but have never seeded development of 3rd party apps so aggressively.