On this day: September 23, 2008 saw the release of the first commercial version of Android

On September 23, 2008, Android 1.0 was released — the first commercial version of the mobile operating system. That date marks the start of the platform's official history, though work on the project began considerably earlier and went on for several years.

Development was launched in 2003 by the startup Android Inc.; Google bought it two years later. Before the first commercial version, a public beta had already been released — on November 5, 2007, with the SDK arriving on November 12, followed by several more public beta versions of the developer kit.

Testing the system had to be done almost blind: no finished physical devices existed, so builds were exercised in a software emulator. The first production device running Android — the HTC Dream, also known as the T-Mobile G1 — came out only in October 2008, roughly a month after the system's release. In other words, the platform that is now hard to imagine without a phone was, at the start, tested without a single phone at hand.

The early versions had no dessert names: Android 1.0 and 1.1 shipped without official nicknames, though labels such as Astro Boy circulated internally on early builds. The tradition of sweet names came later — with Cupcake in April 2009.

It was eventually dropped: in August 2019 Google announced a switch to numeric numbering, and the first version under the new scheme was Android 10, released in September of that same year.

The current version is Android 17; it came out on June 16, 2026, and since 2011 major releases have arrived roughly once a year. But September 23, 2008 remains the starting point for the entire line.

Image: Google Public domain

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.