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What is the Android Open Source project?

The free version of Android.

We tend to think of Android as an operating system for a phone or tablet (or even a watch or television), but it's just a part of the software needed to get any device to turn on and do things. (Image credit: Derrek Lee / Android Central)Phone manufacturers, like Samsung, save time and money by not building their own application platform and application storefront; we get the best Android phone with access to all the apps we love plus a market with over a million others, and Google gets a lot of people using its services and being on the internet to see Google's ads. By providing Android as source code anyone can use instead of a standalone product like Windows, Google can reap the benefits while another company does the work of building and maintaining a living operating system.

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