Android 5.0

I missed some of the awkward “coming-of-age” years on the Android platform with Honeycomb (3.0), Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and Jelly Bean (4.1 – 4.3). My first true experience with Android was earlier this year on KitKat 4.4. The OS was nice, and not too jarring of a change from iOS 7 (at the time), but several quirks in the software made it impossible for me to fully abandon the Apple ecosystem. This month’s release of Android 5.0 Lollipop, however, feels like it could be the tipping point. There are a lot of really amazing features that Android brings to the table now, and has in many way surpassed my expectations of what a mobile OS should be. I’ve been a long-time believer in iOS and Apple, but damn if Lollipop isn’t making the switch to Android oh-so tempting. This videos in this post were recorded on a Nexus 5, which might differ in some ways from other Motorola/Samsung devices, but ideally things will be fairly consistent for all Lollipop users! As I was writing this Design Details it became clear that there was too much content for one post. I’ve decided to break the feature into two parts; part one is focused on the high-level design details of the OS as a whole, while part two will look deeper into some of the stock Android applications. Also, a huge shoutout to [Dan Farrelly](https://twitter.com/djfarrelly) and [Tom Redman](https://twitter.com/redman) for proofing and improving this post – thank you!