Does Android have a formal release cycle? I have been tasked with documenting Google/Android's release plan so that our company has a policy of advanced testing our software on new mobile operating systems. 

It seems like Apple/iOS has a fairly routine plan where several rounds of betas are available to developers. 

The most detailed report I found was this: http://reecewagner.com/post/21956240240
but it is a little lacking in official sources, and is less relevant for application developers. 

I would like to know when they offer the SDK/emulator with new OS image compared to when phones ship/platform updates roll out.
This quotes Andy Rubin in saying that they will move from a twice a year release schedule to a yearly cycle. But I don't know of an actual &quot;official&quot; publication. Also, this &quot;yearly&quot; cycle probably only means &quot;major&quot; releases, but there will still probably be &quot;minor&quot; updates through out the year like they have done in the past.
The Quote:

So we launched it, and from our internal 0.8, we got to 1.0 pretty quickly, and we went through this iteration cycle. You’ve noticed, probably, that that’s slowed down a little bit. Our product cycle is now, basically twice a year, and it will probably end up being once a year when things start settling down, because a platform that’s moving — it’s hard for developers to keep up. I want developers to basically leverage the innovation. I don’t want developers to have to predict the innovation.

ANDY RUBIN VP of Engineering for Android at Google