Android Glossary
Here are some Android terms (some even with definitions!!)
- adb
- Android Debug
- ADP1
- Android Developer Phone 1
- Android
- A robot resembling a human being - the name of the operating system produced by Google for mobile phones. Apparently, Andy Rubin, one of the original founders of Android, Inc. loves robots.
- ASE
- Android Scripting Environment
- binder
- A fast
- Bionic
- small C library used in Android devices
- Bootchart
- A mechanism to create visual charts of a Linux boot sequence, including the timing of process start and execution.
- Dalvik
- Virtual Machine in which Android applications are run. This VM executes Dalvik bytecode, which is compiled from programs written in the Java language. Note that the Dalvik VM is not a Java VM (JVM).
- 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.
- Dream
- Code name for the mobile phone hardware publicly called the t-Mobile G1, in the United States.
- fastboot
- a program which communicates with the developer firmware, and which is capable of loading new software on the ADP1 phone (including re-writing the flash partitions on the device).
- FreeType
- An open-source set of fonts and font system
- G1
- The name of the first Android-based mobile phone, from t-Mobile.
- init
- the first user-space program run in the Android system
- Java
- ???
- JDK
- Java Development Kit
- Linux
- An open source operating system kernel, developed originally by Linus Torvalds, but over time by many thousands of developers worldwide.
- MSM
- ???
- OpenGL ES
- 3D graphics system and API for Android applications
- Saphire
- SGL
- 2D graphics layer for Android applications
- SQLite - a powerful and lightweight relational database engine used by the Android system components, and available to all Android applications.
- Trout
- another hardware code name
- wakelocks
- A kernel mechanism for Android power management. When a thread holds a wakelock, the kernel will refrain from entering a low-power state.