 In the past six years, Google's operating system has matured and developed greatly since its initial conception. And in that time, the concept of mobile has blasted past the idea of a simple cell phone and into the world of tomorrow. Android 5.0 Lollipop has brought Andy Rubin's beautiful brainchild beyond the phone and tablet into living rooms and cars and onto wrists. But how exactly did Google's bountiful buffet of dessert-themed operating systems get to this point? The Android era officially began on October 22, 2008, when T-Mobile's G1 launched in the United States. The first version of Android which the public saw as 1.5 Cupcake was by no means a perfect system, but it laid the groundwork for what the operating system would become. Home screen widgets, deep Gmail integration, and the pull-down notification window all made their debut in Google's first version of Android. It's also where users would first experience the Android market. In fact, it was one of the first mobile platforms with a centralized app store. Google was quick to release 1.6 Donut, which included a couple usability updates before moving on to its first major overhaul, Eclair. Android 2.0 Eclair launched roughly one year after G1's debut. Big would be an inaccurate description all around. It was a big deal, it made big promises, and it was deployed on big phones offered by big carriers. It also added Google Maps navigation, free turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation that obviated the need to ever buy a GPS unit ever again. 2.0 was initially offered exclusively on the horizon on the Motorola Droid, the phone that kicked off one of the most successful mobile franchises in history. It was only a few months later that Google would release Android 2.1, an update that wouldn't have been significant but for one thing, the Nexus One. The first flagship device designed by Google itself, a phone that would showcase the purest form of Android without carrier manufacturer modifications. With 2.2 Froyo, Google had plenty to showcase, including a redesigned home screen, a gallery app with some 3D quirks, and mobile hotspot support. The end of 2010 saw the debut of 2.3 Gingerbread, which in many ways was a relatively minor release with several aesthetic tweaks, better battery and app management tools, and support for front-facing cameras. It debuted on Samsung's Nexus S, the second phone in the Nexus line. Android 3.0 Honeycomb was, to say the least, an oddity. It was designed exclusively for the tablet and had a strikingly different visual look and perhaps more telling, Honeycomb debuted on-screen virtual keys for Home, Back, Menu, and Search. But it would take a few more years before Google figured out Android and tablets in any meaningful way. Eager to put Honeycomb and the Zoom behind it, Google released Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in the fall of 2011. It was, without question, the biggest change for Android on phones yet. Many of Ice Cream Sandwich's new features and design elements got their start in Honeycomb, including virtual buttons, a blue Tron-like motif, improved widget support, better multitasking, and action bars within the applications. Ice Cream Sandwich also introduced Roboto, Google's typeface for Android, designed for high-resolution displays. Ice Cream Sandwich launched on the Galaxy Nexus, one of the first smartphones with a 720p HD display. Okay, by now you realize numerical increments don't really indicate the importance of an update. Take 4.1 Jelly Bean, for instance, which is for all intents and purposes a reboot in Google's flagging tablet strategy. It debuted in the Nexus 7, a tablet that was the right size and the right price when it debuted in the middle of 2012. Jelly Bean included some major performance enhancements and interface tweaks, but its headlined feature was Google Now, an entirely new predictive computing platform. Google Now predicted what you wanted and responded intelligently to voice commands. The next 0.1 iterations all made improvements on that baseline, introducing new hardware. With 4.2, there was the LG-produced Nexus 4 and Samsung's Nexus 10 tablet, along with the debut of multiple users for tablets, and a second generation of the Nexus 7 for Android 4.3. Then, in October 2013, Google partnered with Nestle to introduce Android 4.4 KitKat, the first sponsored version of the platform. It even made a special edition candy bar for the occasion. KitKat brought a visual revamp with the Jelly Bean aesthetic and debuted with the Nexus 5 smartphone. Much of that Tron-like element disappeared by KitKat, with more visually pleasing white interface elements replacing the electronic blue that preceded them. A refined, condensed version of the Roboto font and new app drawer, most importantly Google Now, integrated directly into the home screen. Google also committed to making KitKat work better with lower spec devices. All that brings us to Android 5.0 Lollipop, released in the fall of 2014. Multitasking was redefined, notifications were smarter and more interactive. Most importantly, we once again saw a huge visual overhaul which Google dubbed Material Design. It wasn't just for Android, but for all of Google's apps and services. Colorful interfaces, playful transitions, and animation straight out of Disney's playbook. If KitKat was about getting more Android phones up to date, Android Lollipop was about putting Android everywhere else. It became the tide that binding Android across phones, tablets, cars, wearables, TVs, and everything else. Moving Android from the software that runs on your phone, to the software that runs on everything in your life.