Android Police alum and current Ars Technica editor Ron Amadeo has been hard at work on something that might be of interest to you. Head on over to Ars and you can read Ron's 40,000 word history of Android. Yes, 40,000 words – for reference, the classic novella Animal Farm is about 10k words shorter. I can only hope Ron's bosses will unchain him from his desk and allow him to sleep now.

This article begins with the very first public beta builds of Android, and continues all the way up to the modern day and Android 4.4 KitKat. There's even an honest to goodness table of contents that takes up the whole first page. Yes, there will be a great deal of clicking to get through the whole thing. There are a ton of screenshots and in-depth interface comparisons sprinkled throughout, which only serves to remind you how far we've come. The chapter entitled "Android 2.1—the discovery (and abuse) of animations" is a particularly interesting trip down memory lane. The beta build stuff is neat too.

If you've got a few spare hours to kill, swing by Ars and read up on the history of Android. If the website isn't doing it for you, perhaps you'll want to add it to Pocket or a similar service to de-paginate.

[Ars Technica]