Happy birthday to us! Android Police turns 16 today. We were founded the year that Google introduced its first phone, the Google Nexus, and we’ve been here ever since to bring you the latest news, authoritative reviews, reliable guides, expert opinions, and hot takes across mobile technology.
In that time, we’ve covered phones, wearables, tablets, audio, and everything smart home. So we had a hard time narrowing down some of our favorite stories over the past decade and a half plus. But we’ve done our best to bring you some highlights and we look forward to continuing to be your source for all things Android (and beyond) far into the future.
2010
The year we started is the year Android started to take over the world. Android became the fastest growing OS, up 22%, from 2% to 24%, from 2009 to 2010.
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2011
In 2010 Steve Jobs declared “thermonuclear war” against Android and in one battle sued HTC. Our former Editor-in-Chief David Ruddock said it wasn’t that important or scary and, as time has told, he was right. Though HTC did eventually fall to one of Android’s own, Samsung.
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2012
Though it started the year before and did not wrap up until an out-of-court settlement in 2018, 2012 was the height of Apple v. Samsung. We broke down the whole trial.
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2013
He’s a household name now, but back in 2013 Marques Brownlee was just gaining traction in tech. That’s when he shared his thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with our readers.
2014
Material Design emerged with Android 5.0, aka Lollipop. It made Android look more like digital paper and it’s still with us today. We took a look back at its impact just last year.
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Android 5.0 made our phones more delightful
2015
The first major threat to Android users, Stagefright, popped up in 2015. It was an exploit that only took a text message to execute. The fallout resulted in the monthly Android updates that we’re all familiar with today.
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2016
Good-bye, Nexus. Hello, Pixel. Google got a new flagship phone in 2016. A few years ago we looked back at the birth of the Pixel.
2018
In 2018, the Pixel 3 XL fell off a truck, as the euphemism goes, and a Russian tech blog was all over the story.
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2019
Getting foldables right is hard and, to be honest, is still a work in progress. But they’ve come a long way since the introduction of the Samsung Galaxy Fold in 2019.
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2020
The pandemic stopped the world and protests gripped the nation. We don’t have to remind you about 2020. All in-person shows stopped, including Google I/O, and Google even pushed back Android 11’s release.
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2021
LG exited the smartphone world in 2021, but that hasn’t stopped us from thinking about it since. Including measuring our time with some of our favorite phones.
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2022
The Pixel phone needed a companion and in 2022, we got the Pixel Watch. Of course, we got our hands on it immediately.
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Google’s first hardware Wear OS product is finally here, eight years after Android Wear’s inception
2023
This was the year that Google promised seven years of OS, security, and Feature Drop updates for its phones. While it did away with some concerns about planned obsolescence, at the time we called it a boring, though important, update. Then just this year, we wondered how much the pledge is worth if a battery cannot last that long.
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2024
Everything became AI in 2024. For Google, that meant a Gemini takeover.
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2025
Testing the limits of folding, Huawei and Samsung introduced trifold phones in 2025.
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2026
Who knows what the future holds, but we do know that things change quickly. One of the biggest stories in this so far short year has been that the Samsung’s trifold phone is gone, but another is set to take its place next year.
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Samsung’s current trifold phone is dead, but another model is reportedly on the horizon
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