Android application

Android has a growing selection of third party applications, which can be acquired by users either through an app store such as Google Play or the Amazon Appstore, or by downloading and installing the application's APK file from a third-party site.[55] Google Play Store allows users to browse, download and update applications published by Google and third-party developers, and the Play Store client application is pre-installed on devices that comply with Google's compatibility requirements and license the Google Mobile Services software.[56][57] The client application filters the list of available applications down to those compatible with the user's device, and developers may restrict their applications to particular carriers or countries for business reasons.[58] Purchases of unwanted applications can be refunded within 15 minutes of the time of download,[59] and some carriers offer direct carrier billing for Google Play application purchases, where the cost of the application is added to the user's monthly bill.[60] As of July 2013, there are more than one million applications available for Android in Play Store.[61] As of May 2013, 48 billion apps have been installed from Google Play store.[62] Applications ("apps"), that extend the functionality of devices, are developed primarily in the Java programming language[63] language using the Android software development kit (SDK). The SDK includes a comprehensive set of development tools,[64] including a debugger, software libraries, a handset emulator based on QEMU, documentation, sample code, and tutorials. The officially supported integrated development environment (IDE) is Eclipse using the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin. Other development tools are available, including a Native Development Kit for applications or extensions in C or C++, Google App Inventor, a visual environment for novice programmers, and various cross platform mobile web applications frameworks. It was announced in January 2014 that Chrome HTML5 web applications should become available, using a compatibility layer from the open source Apache Cordova framework to allow such applications to be wrapped in a native application shell, enabling their distribution over Google Play.