Android Celebrates 1 Billion Activations With Its Next OS

Bangalore: On returning from his whirlwind trip to Asia, Google SVP, Sundar Pichai announced two, very sugary news on his Google+ and Twitter platform. The first being the tremendous success of Google’s Android OS as it surpassed one billion Android activations, a 100 million more than it was in the month of May.

The second news was a visual treat shared by Pichai of a gigantic Android-shaped Kit Kat statue perched right in front of his office building. This confirms the much awaited news of the upcoming version of mobile OS, Android 4.4 KitKat.

Google has launched an official KitKat landing page android.com/kitkat, a teaser to showcase the candy bar’s existence in the Android market. Currently, the details are very limited on the next version of Android as Google maintains a tight lid on the release to up keep the excitement among the mass. "It's our goal with Android KitKat to make an amazing Android experience available for everybody", states the official website.

Kit Kat is a branded chocolate wafer confectionary owned by Nestle. In the United States, the Hershey’s have taken up to produce the Android-shaped Kit Kat goodies. This will be Android’s first OS to be named after a branded product. The Android team are a bit of a sweet-tooth themselves as they have creatively named all their previous OS versions after well-known candies and desserts alphabetically. Recapping the versions are Cupcake (1.5), Donut (1.6), Eclair (2.0), Froyo (2.2), Gingerbread (2.3), Honeycomb (3.0), Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and Jelly Bean (4.1-4.3) with KitKat 4.4 to be the latest to join this spirited team.

The developers were previously pitching after the dessert “Key Lime Pie” to be the face of the 4.4 version but the Android Marketing team director, Marc Vanlerberghe stated that the name KitKat was finalized as they have been a "favorite go-to snack among the team since the early days of Android." It is also a fact that Google is going full sail ahead through marketing its Flagship Android via a tie-in with a well known sweet brand.

With the Software running on over 1 billion Smartphones around the world, this makes Android the most widely used mobile operating system in the world.