7 phones, 700 screenshots: Behind the scenes of our Android history project.

One of my most-visited Wikipedia articles is the "Android version history" page. It's great for a timeline of Android releases and bullet-point lists of features, but for me it's only really good as a reminder. If you haven't tried the early Android builds first-hand, it doesn't really give a good impression of what they were like. There are almost no pictures, no descriptions of how things work. The rest of the Web offers, at most, one- or two-paragraph overviews of each version and a single picture. That's about it. And for some reason, everyone ignores the early versions that came before Android 1.0.

So I set out to do it myself—to create a detailed account of every version of Android. I've always loved retrospectives of old technology, and while six or so years might seem like a little early to do a look back, Android both adds and shuts down features faster than anything else in the tech world. Even if you started over today, you wouldn't be able to run half of the 1.0 apps that I did just a few months ago. They simply don't work anymore.

But step one in documenting the history of Android is "Get lots of phones!" While the above picture is my current phone collection, most of the newer stuff in the picture belongs to Ars, which usually has a pretty substantial arsenal of loaner units at any given time. It's also exaggerating things a bit as far as phones needed to go from 1.0 to 4.4. You can actually do it with a surprisingly low number of devices.

In testing, I used a T-Mobile G1 (1.0-1.6), a Motorola Droid (2.0), a Nexus One (2.1-2.3), a Motorola Xoom (3.0-3.2), a Galaxy Nexus (4.0-4.1), a Nexus 4 (4.2-4.3), and a Nexus 5 (4.4). While many of these phones receive updates for longer than I used them, I tried to stay with the latest flagship as much as I could. That comes out to about one phone per year of Android's existence. The only flagships that have jumped a "1.0" barrier are the Nexus S (not in my collection) and the Xoom.

I would love to claim that I'm an OG Android user and that the above G1 is mine, but it was specifically eBayed for our History of Android. While I've been interested in Android since the beginning and played with the newest BlackBerry-style emulators as soon as they came out, I refused to buy a G1 because of how ugly it was. When eventually shopping for the G1, I was also careful to get a brown one, because, really, how often will you have the chance to get a brown cell phone?

I've yet to break a screen and everything mostly works, but many of the batteries on these old phones have been reduced to needing a permanent tether. Thankfully, the G1 came with a new battery from China that is covered in the most awful English I have ever seen.

My first Android phone was the Motorola Droid, which was the first Android phone that didn't look like a Fisher Price toy. I gave my Droid to a family member when I was done with it, and they took it for a swim, so the version I have is Frankensteined together with another broken Droid a friend donated. While I usually do software teardowns, I'm just as handy with a screwdriver and often get roped into doing screen swaps for friends.

Step two, and surprisingly one of the hardest steps, was getting the software. Your first thought might be of the emulators, which Google keeps an extensive archive of. But these don't include the Google apps, making them incomplete for our purposes. While it's not all that difficult to find a T-Mobile G1 on eBay and start snapping screenshots, finding the software packages you need to hop from one version to the other is another matter entirely. Google's "Factory Images for Nexus Devices" page is a godsend for this, but the page only goes back to Android 2.3 on the Nexus S. If you need something older than that, you're on your own.

So where do we find these unofficially hosted versions of Android? Wherever a Google search sends us, which is often some shady download site. Your best bet for not getting a horrible virus is to find the official download link, which will be broken by now. You can then Google the name to (hopefully) find a mirror. For Android 1.5, that's https://android.clients.google.com/u...0.de6a94ca.zip, so you'd want to Google "signed-kila-ota-148830.de6a94ca.zip." (Spoiler alert: Android_update.exe is not really an Android update.)

While full Android versions are still floating around out there, Google apps that were delivered via the Android Market/Play Store back then are even more difficult to get a complete history of. For instance, I would have loved to cover Google+, but for most of its life, it wasn't included as a packed-in app. You'd have to hunt all around the Internet to find APKs ranging from 1.0 to 4.4, and it's much easier to hide nasty surprises in (new) APKs. I found one or two older versions, but like many early apps, the authentication scheme has long since been changed, and nothing will actually open.

Step three involves taking tons of screenshots. There are about 500 screenshots in the article, and I probably ended up taking about 700 total. And taking a screenshot on an Android device isn't necessarily easy. While on 4.0 and above, you can just press power + volume down, but for everything older, you need to plug the device into a computer, install Java, install the SDK, and use a utility called "Android Debug Monitor" to take screenshots. This extremely inconvenient screenshot method is a big reason why you never see old Android screenshots—they were just a huge pain for anyone to take.

At more than 40,000 words, our article on the history of Android is about the length of a small book, and it's one of the longest articles to ever appear on Ars Technica. I've always had a reputation for writing long articles, but I never expected to write anything this large. I started at the beginning and kept working through versions until it was finished—the size just snuck up on me. I wrote most of it as a back-burner project, just something to revisit when I wasn't doing news or reviews. While sometimes weeks would go by where I wouldn't touch it, bits and pieces of the article have been hanging around on my hard drive since January. Once I finally turned it in, it was a 48,000 word monster, and thanks to the heroic efforts of Ars Staff Editor Nathan Mattise, it was pared down to "only" 40,000. The project even spawned three other offshoot articles.

The size of the article never really daunted me, but now that it's finished, I'm just relieved it's finally out there. Hopefully you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. For me, it's on to the next project.

It will require a lot of energy and time but the results will be very useful