Architecture of Android

Architecture of Android

Applications-

        Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are written using the Java programming language.

Application framework

       By providing an open development platform, Android offers developers the ability to build extremely rich and innovative applications. Developers are free to take advantage of the device hardware, access location information, run background services, set alarms, add notifications to the status bar, and much, much more.

Libraries

    Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework. Some of the core libraries are listed below:

System C library - a BSD-derived implementation of the standard C system library (libc), tuned for embedded Linux-based devices.

Media Libraries - 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.

Surface Manager - manages access to the display subsystem and seamlessly composites 2D and 3D graphic layers from multiple applications.

LibWebCore - a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android browser and an embeddable web view.

SGL - the underlying 2D graphics engine.

3D libraries - an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer

FreeType - bitmap and vector font rendering.

SQLite - a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications.