Dessert is served: 1.5 "Cupcake"

Dessert is served: 1.5 "Cupcake"

Android 1.5 — perhaps better known by its codename, Cupcake — marked much more of a milestone. It wasn't just about the fact that it added several hotly-anticipated features that were critical to keeping the platform competitive, it was also the first version to use Google's "sweet" naming convention: every major release since Cupcake has been named after a confection in alphabetical order. Apart from a couple tricky letters like "X," we'd expect the trend to continue for a while.

In many ways, Cupcake was about refinement, polishing some rough edges on the user interface that had originally launched. Some of these changes were nearly imperceptible if you weren't looking for them. For instance, the standard Google search widget — a staple on many users' home screens — gained a hint of transparency, and the app drawer was decorated with a subtle weave pattern beneath the icons.

Hover over the image below to get a sense of just how subtle these changes were. If you used a device running 1.1 and 1.5 in succession, you might never notice anything; in reality, though, everything from text alignment to shading on the status bar had gone under the knife.

Most G1 users probably flew past those UI tweaks without noticing them, though, because the extensive list of new features Google had thrown in was far more exciting, noticeable, and immediately relevant in day-to-day use:

An on-screen keyboard. In retrospect, it's amazing to think that Google could've shipped Android without any sort of soft keyboard, but that's exactly what it did. It helps explain why the first Android device at retail was a landscape QWERTY slider, and it also explains why it wasn't until Cupcake was released (in April 2009, some half a year after the G1 shipped) that we saw the first touchscreen-only phone on the market, the HTC Magic.

In conjunction with the soft keyboard support, Google took a bold step: it integrated the hooks necessary for third-party developers to create their own replacement keyboards, which is a capability that continues to differentiate Android from competing platforms even today — neither iOS nor Windows Phone support it. At the time of Cupcake's release, the official Android soft keyboard was considered by many to lag iOS for accuracy and speed, which ultimately led OEMs like HTC to quickly develop replacements on their own devices. Indeed, it was one of the first forms of "skinning" Android would see.

Extensible widgets. While Android 1.0 and 1.1 technically included widgets, their full potential had yet to be realized because Google hadn't exposed the SDK to developers — the only widgets you had available were the few included in the box. That changed in 1.5, and today, many (if not most) of the third-party applications on the platform ship with one or more widgets available to the user. It's a big deal for Android, which continues to enjoy the most flexible, extensible home screen of any mobile platform — and that title traces its roots to the addition of this feature in Cupcake.

Clipboard improvements. Android had a rather rough road to gaining "full" support for copy and paste. The platform technically supported it from day one — but it was largely limited to text fields and links. That meant that text couldn't be copied out of browser windows or Gmail, two places where you're very likely to want to do it. Though full clipboard capability wouldn't come to Gmail for several more versions, Cupcake added support to the browser, allowing you to copy plain text out of a page.

Video capture and playback. It's difficult to imagine a smartphone shipping without any support for shooting video now, but that's the situation that T-Mobile G1 buyers originally found themselves in. Cupcake would fix the problem, but like Android's built-in soft keyboard, the operating system's built-in camera interface became one of the more reviled parts of the platform — and it's a part that OEMs quickly replaced with their own improved interfaces, frequently adding support for additional scenes, modes, options, and conveniences like touch-to-focus.

And a lot more. Miscellaneous updates included batch operations in Gmail (you couldn't delete or archive multiple emails at once prior to 1.5), upload support for YouTube and Picasa, and ubiquitous access to contacts' Google Talk status throughout the platform in places like the Contacts screen, the Messaging application, and from Gmail. (In a way, this feature —synchronization of rich contact information across multiple apps and screens — would foretell the direction that Android was moving, particularly in 2.0.)