Android is an open source, Linux-based operating system developed by Google for mobile devices. It was first released in 2008 and is now used by over 2 billion users worldwide, making it the most popular mobile operating system. Android is composed of four main parts: the Linux kernel, native libraries, Android framework, and Android applications. It requires a minimum of 512 MB of RAM, 1GHz CPU, and 8GB storage. The Android development environment uses the Android SDK, Android Studio IDE, and the Java programming language.