Zygote
API 4 · DONUT

Android 1.6 Donut

CDMA support

released
2009-09-15
runtime
Dalvik
design
pre-Holo
status
stable

The story

Devices were arriving with wildly different screens and no CDMA support, which locked Android out of major US carriers.

The problem

A platform built for one screen size and one radio standard could not scale.

Donut added CDMA and per-density resources, introducing the resource qualifier system that still governs how Android adapts to different screens today.

The one thing to remember

The resource qualifier system, still in use, was born here.

What shipped

  • CDMA support
  • Multiple screen resolutions
  • Camera and gallery speed-ups
  • Battery-use screen

Platform internals

What changed underneath the APIs. These are the changes this site's architecture modules explain in depth.

  • Support for different screen densities via resource qualifiers

What developers had to deal with

  • New screen-size and density resource qualifiers
  • Text-to-speech
  • GestureBuilder

Permissions introduced here

  • CHANGE_WIFI_MULTICAST_STATEnormal
  • GLOBAL_SEARCHsignature|privileged
  • INSTALL_LOCATION_PROVIDERunknown
  • WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGEdangerous

Where this sits

Release 4 of 37 API levels, by date
Headline features
4
Architecture changes
1
Developer changes
3
Sources cited
3

Kernel

This release shipped on Linux kernel versions 2.6.29. Kernel versions vary by device.