The use of Android based smartphones has increased reasonably well with time and now boasts of an incredible number of apps. The market is growing at the rate of 32 per cent every month and there is no end to the number of smartphones which are coming in the market related to every price range which gives the users with a huge number of options. The rise in interest is mostly attributed to the great sale of Samsung S II and due to the advent of Samsung S3 which has got released recently. There are certain HTC models along with Sony Ericsson who have been impressive with the slew of smartphones that they have released in recent months. Android is open source and hence there are many Android developers who are interested in creating innovative apps.

Android also presents an open market place for developers who create third party apps and they are allowed to publish and rate too. Android app development can be done using any platform: Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Here are some of the best-known apps which have a large fan following:

• Google Voice
• Advanced Task Killer
• Evernote
• Documents To Go
• Amazon Kindle
• Astro File Manager
• Pandora
• Shazam
• Dial Zero
• Google Goggles
• Google Sky Map
• Tricorder
• Bump

Cloud based service integration and its related apps have companies that control IT to expand their operations. Mobile apps have extended the overall reach and location based apps can easily find out the location of the mobile as well as the customer via GPS. These apps give out detailed information related to different places, things and facts. It is said that in the future the Android-based phones will be used as smart cards to swipe and withdraw money. E-commerce companies are looking to leverage this feature on smartphones and so that they can easily attract people for easy sales. It would also make shopping easy and fun for all.

Android is always in demand and the field of mobile application development space comprises of many other players. But Android is very popular because of its easy-to-use software development kit, Android Media APIs, Location–based feature and Wi–Fi feature.

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Android 4.1 version which is nicknamed the Jelly Bean is here with exciting new features. It is expected to create a storm in the coming months too. Google announced Jelly Bean recently and the new operating system brings new and smart features which include a faster interface, a brand new Camera app, voice typing offline, notifications with few enhancements, a voice search tool, and many more. The changes made to the new OS were mentioned as "Project Butter" during the Google I/O developers’ conference which referred to the under-the-hood improvements in progress. There are a lot of buffering tweaks, and increased frame rates which the new Android version boasts of which will help in the overall touch input events in sync better. Jelly Bean also has the new ability of touch prediction which actually means that it tries to predict where you're going to touch the screen next. With the Nexus 7 tablet running Jelly Bean, it is expected that the so-called project is sure to make it run more smoothly than any of the previous Android versions. It is possible that Google will take some time here for finishing the version. One of the other features in the spotlight is offline voice typing. The new version allows users to dictate something to your phone without the need of a cellular or Wi-Fi data connection. Offline voice typing is the latest entrant in the features introduced by the Android version.

Until now, every device which had poor data connection faced the problem of not being able to handle voice-to-text tasks. According to the first previews of the feature, analysts say that the feature is good enough and quick too. Voice recognition is basically controlled in the cloud in the first place since it is easy to match a voice with thousands of samples at the snap of your fingers. So it can be expected that the offline voice-to-text version is less accurate than the previous version, which is actually a minor issue. Google Now is expected to be the future of the tech giant. Google is going to predict what the user will need and will also get it for you easily. The device is expected to know and learn your interests and inclinations and then work up relevant traffic and even minor point-of-interest information. At the start, Google Now is not expected to give much information since it has to know what the user’s interests are. One needs to use it a lot more for actually getting the device accustomed to the user but surely, this is a feature which is one of Jelly Bean's best attributes and has extreme potential in the future. Voice search was revolutionized by Apple’s Siri but Android makes it better with the S-Voice, the Siri competitor which is included in the latest Samsung smartphone, the Galaxy S III. The feature is going to be getting some new add-ons too.

Google's voice search feature is being handled by Knowledge Graph which would depend on Google’s ability to predict answers to your query and the relevant web results follow next. Google's voice search is certainly better than Siri. There are many more features which are offered by Google’s newest Android version, but that is for later, when the real things arrive!

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