A brief discussion on the relationship between iOS, Android, Unix and Linux

First, let's look at the time when several systems appeared

• Unix was born in 1969
• Linux was born in 1991
• iOS was born in January 2007
• Android was born in November 2007

The Birth of UNIX

In 1969, Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, wrote a computer game called Space Travel, which was run on multiple systems. However, the results were not ideal, so he decided to develop his own operating system. Thus, UNIX was born.

When Bell Labs existed, it was an eternal god. However, it was eventually broken up due to antitrust reasons, which also foreshadowed the end of an era for Bell Labs. It is really a pity.

The birth of Linux

In 1991, when Linus Torvalds was studying at university, he wrote

Linux is a mini version of UNIX. Later, Linus Torvalds made the Linux source code public and invited others to improve Linux together.

It is said that in the end the code written by Linus Torvalds only accounted for 2% of the Linux source code, but his name will remain forever in the history of the development of the Internet.

Based on the Unix system, Apple iOS was born

iOS was first announced by Apple at the Macworld conference on January 9, 2007. It was originally designed for the iPhone and later applied to the iPod touch and iPad. iOS, like Apple's macOS operating system, is a Unix-like commercial operating system.

Android was born based on Linux system

In November 2007, Google and 84 hardware manufacturers, software developers and telecom operators formed the Open Handset Alliance to jointly develop and improve the Android system. Subsequently, Google licensed Android under the Apache open source license. Android is a free and open source operating system based on the Linux kernel (excluding GNU components).

Summarize

Therefore, we have clearly sorted out a line, which is Unix, which is simplified to form Linux. Linux is the kernel of Android, and Apple uses the Unix system as the kernel of iOS and macOS.

Therefore, their relationship can be simply seen from the figure below. Please understand that the manual drawing is relatively simple.

So what do you think about this matter? What do you think the editor has missed? Welcome to discuss together.