The Linux kernel
The Android OS is built on top of the Linux kernel with some architectural changes made by Google. Linux was chosen as it is a portable platform that can be compiled easily on different hardware. The Linux kernel is positioned at the bottom of the software stack and provides a level of abstraction between the device hardware and the upper layers. It also acts as an abstraction layer between the software and hardware present on the device. To understand this better, consider the case of a camera click. What actually happens when you take a photo using the camera button on your mobile device? At some point, the hardware instruction (pressing a button) has to be converted into a software instruction (to take a picture and store ...
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