If your device ships with O it should be running an immutable semantically versioned HAL. In essence you should be able to be able to flash AOSP on every new device. No matter what the vendor does.
Edit: I can see it now, in the technical specs of each device you will see a list of HAL Versions. The newer your HAL the longer you can expect support from AOSP if not your vendor.
[0] http://androidbackstage.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/episode-75-pr...
In the end it's just a way to make OEM's lives easier while developing updates. It will still require them to actually make updates for devices. Despite Project Treble they will still not have an economic incentive to update devices. And that is the core issue here, really.
My expectation is that Project Treble will help speeding up Android updates - they should come to devices sooner than they are released now, because Treble shortens the development process of updates. I don't expect devices to be updated any longer than they are now, or receive much more updates. OEMs will remain economically unpunished for not updating and likely will just pocket the money saved in the development process.
The only way to solve this problem is to build a "Windows Update for Android" whereby system components are updated in a modular and OEM independent way. The fundamental issue in Android's update problem is that OEMs are fully responsible for device updates and not motivated to do this job well, and Project Treble does not signficantly change this [1].
Don't get me wrong, Project Treble is a great move for Android. I however don't think it will make a huge difference in the Android update story.
[1]: EDIT: it's worth pointing out that Project Treble looks like a necessary move to make a "Windows Update for Android" happen though. Let's see if that becomes a reality.
Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google."
Let's hope the VPN can be set to non-Google too, or it's optional or opt-out feature.
>The biggest change to the foundations of Android to date: a modular architecture that makes it easier and faster for hardware makers to deliver Android updates.
With any luck, this will end the huge security/update problem Android has. Right now an update is dependent on the chip manufacturer's drivers, then the OEM adding them to the ROM with their custom "improvements", and finally the carrier pushing the update to devices. Right now it just takes one break in the link and a device goes without updates, which is a security disaster. If Google can push updates from the Play Store (presumably the end goal of Treble), none of this will be a problem.
The proof here will be when they ship.
Thankfully, 'Google Play Services' and distributing more and more services through the Play Store is a step in the right direction.
The OEM side is usually pretty easy / trivial in comparison. And there are a number of OEMs who would happily push updates but can't, because they can't get hardware packages from Qualcomm / Amlogic / Freescale / etc.
That, more than anything else, holds back new Android releases on lots of hardware.
Verizon especially makes it miserable. Ah, but who am I kidding, I'm sure Verizon will still find a way to ruin it.
They already admitted on the ADB Podcast that they don't want to remove the ability for OEMs and mobile operators to customize their forks of Android.
We will still be forced to buy new devices even if they are VTS certified.
For instance, the Galaxy S8 is the hottest new thing on the market right now, and it launched with Nougat. It will probably be six months to a year before Samsung pushes an Oreo update to it, if at all.
Then again, this new architecture likely makes it easier to move the Android userland to a new (non-linux) kernel, so maybe it'll be a moot point.
Tooltips
Support for tooltips (small popup windows with descriptive text) for views and menu items.
Normally, this would be relegated to a git changelog in the support library. But this is on the global marketing landing page.
I like to imagine a fictional internal mail thread going like this:
> Folks! please, give us something, anything, to put on the landing page!
> Someone replies duh, maybe tooltips
> What's a tooltip?
> uhh, small popup windows with descriptive text
> What's a popup window?
> uhh...
> Nevermind, its on!
Obligatory /s and yeah its Google, but seriously I can't imagine any other circumstances on how this specific copy, which tries to explain what a "tooltip" is by using the words "popup window", "view" and "menu item", came up.
This could be a good sign though, of the maturity of the platform (and harder to feel left out if you didn't upgrade).
By issuing a hard restriction on background usage Google has brilliantly improved battery life for the masses while condonig the same lazy architectural patterns of the past, locked people into Firebase Cloud Messaging--a Google service not part of the AOSP, and potentially stunted Android adoption in domains outside of mobile. It's the turning of an era for Android, and my interests have moved elsewhere (from an app platform perspective, embedded Android is still vialble since everything you ship runs as a system app with no restrictions).
Users blame Android when Facebook and other popular apps started eating all their battery by running in the background. Google's only choice was to aggressively punish these apps.
All developers think their app is the most important thing running on the user's system, and that is how we get into situations like this.
If HN allowed emoji in comments, I'd have a U+1F923 here. Since I can't do that, you're adorable. The users, eh? The users are supposed to be burdened with checking the wake status and radio activation schedule of their apps? How was that supposed to work, exactly?
> It's the turning of an era for Android, and my interests have moved elsewhere (from an app platform perspective, embedded Android is still vialble since everything you ship runs as a system app with no restrictions).
Google making it more and more difficult to avoid gapps is nothing new.
Presumably you can still give your users a good reason for why you need to run uninterrupted in the background and they can approve it similarly to how they now approve other permissions.
This is really not a secret at this time anymore and should be taken into account when you succumb to Samsung marketing.
Everybody else will be probably 4-6 months late.
"Be together. Not the same."
There's obviously some contractual relationship but I can't figure out who's on which end of it.
Wikipedia says the same.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_KitKat (see history section. Sorry can't figure out how to do the deep link on mobile)
Year of the Whopper
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
Android Heath Bar (TM)
Android Pocky (TM)
http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/ind...
Long story short I'd be extremely surprised if Google didn't sell this.
Though the name is a direct reference to the sweet, so that maybe makes it more complicated.
Ice Cream Sandwich used to evoke thoughts of sticky fingers and an over indulgence of sugar.
(Compare this to the Mac Pro landing page which actually hijacks scrolling https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/)
I really wish everyone would stop hijacking scrolling.
Still can't disable or customize to stupid "share" menu that puts you one click away from accidentally sending something to a stranger you contacted once on sms or facebook messenger or email.
Still can't revoke certain permissions from apps (like vibration). There is zero reason why my browser should need to ever vibrate or use the accelerometer/gyro.
Still no good system wide ad blocking solution. (not likely, but one of the biggest things I miss from having a rooted phone)
How about those superpowers, Google? I have been an Android user since 2010 but I am quite sure my next phone will be an iPhone (with a headphone jack).
It might not be a good reason, but I made a game a while back that used tilt input instead of arrow keys on mobile: http://nfriedly.github.io/space-jump/
Seen the same kind of reasoning play out in other contexts where user customization has been curtailed.
You can revoke individual permissions from apps. Settings > Apps & notifications > App permissions on Oreo. I think this has been in since Marshmallow (6.0).
You can manage individual notification settings (including vibration) from Settings > Apps & notifications > Notifications.
I'm not sure about accelerometer/gyro settings for apps. I feel a bit different about this one. Why should I care if my browser uses the accelerometer/gyro?
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andmadesof...
Theres multiple non root solutions that use a local vpn to accomplish this.
Why not?
On a serious note, Samsung is so far ahead of every other manufacturer (including Google) I wonder why people buy anything else. For me, whenever I need to buy a new phone, there are two options to consider: Samsung or iPhone.
I'm looking forward to this. It seemed to me in the switch from iOS to Android that the battery life definitely suffered. I wish the Samsung Galaxy's "ultra power saver mode" was available in more devices. The "battery saver mode" in my current Android phone is decent but doesn't seem as effective.
> Integrated printing support
> Compatible with all Mopria-certified printers, which make up 97% of printers sold worldwide.
Gee, I've never heard of "Mopria" but this sounds interesting.
97% of printers sold now - the initiative happened in 2014, and I assume that it took manufacturers a few years to ramp. So probably don't expect it to work with your 5 year old all-in-one.
Every time I think I've blocked every $_#&#- thing that annoys me, more show up. As of a week ago I now get these Throw notifications that cannot be dismissed or blocked.
I also despise apps that insist on being updated and disallow being uninstalled.
These itches are so bad now that I'm pretty disenchanted with Android altogether.
I want a no nonsense phone that literally does nothing out of the box except the app store and make phone calls.
It's an impressive bit of technology though, I've never seen an app so good at telling me exactly what I didn't care about, exactly 10 minutes after I would have cared about it.
"Wi-Fi Assistant
Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google."
I really do not want to tunnel my whole traffic through Google's servers.
It asks to enable it on a per Wifi basis, if it detects any traffic is being mitm mangled, and you have to agree to enabling it for that Wifi.
So the VPN is "required" by this feature but you can turn it off globally, or manually connect to networks where you don't want to use the VPN.
I wonder whether YouTube will let you use this without subscribing to Red.
System fonts have been an OS-level feature since the advent of OS with bundled GUI. Support of a larger part of the Unicode space in system fonts has been an OS-level feature since Unicode. New emoji has been a visible aspect of that, especially on mobile, for quite some time.
It really does seem to be something that drives adoption.
[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/...
Yeah, but not on my device. I didn't even get Android 7 :)
How do I disable "pop-down" notifications? i.e. facebook messenger, on receiving a message, drops down a little message box from the top with that message. It stays there for about 2 seconds and then disappears... unless further messages in that chat appears.
The only way I can disable this is by muting that chat, which is not ideal. Same for Hangouts and other messaging apps. It drives me insane.
lately I have been been wishing there is a way I can just run some version of linux like debian/fedora on my phone and be able to run apt-get update and upgrade (or yum) as updates are released.
IIRC it cost $600, and technically it does more than I need, but the fact I am becoming more and more concerned that security updates are not being received is making me call into question I actually want a 'smart' phone.
I understand android is based on linux but it is above my head to compile this realease on my own and it is difficult for me to trust rooting the device if there was an option to install oreo on htcone m8 with my 'old' chipset.
any thoughts? did I miss any truely 'free' linux smartphone OS that I would be able to use?
Rooting is nice, and I believe it's important from a philosophical standpoint, but I probably won't with my next phone because the features I want are getting built into the OS, and I am missing several apps that just refuse to work when they detect they're running on a rooted phone. (Everything from games to my work email.)
It definitely increases the longevity of phon but, while it mostly works, it has lots of little quirks - especially with the various radios. E.g. I occasionally have to re-pair bluetooth devices, wi-fi will disconnect and then re-connect for no apparent reason, etc. Also, sometimes I just find it getting warm in my pocket and I have to reboot it to make it snap out of whatever endless loop it's stuck in. (I assume that updating to LineageOS will fix a few bugs and introduce a few others.)
I'm going to replace it with either the next Pixel or the next iPhone when they both get released in a month or two, depending on which one I'm more impressed with. I am going to miss my headphones jack...
I've been running it on a few phones. Zero issues so far, the install procedure is trivial once you do it once, it self-updates and the changelogs are clean.
Tooltips
Support for tooltips (small popup windows with descriptive text) for views and menu items.
Normally, this would be relegated to a git changelog in the support library. But this is on the global marketing landing page.
I like to imagine a fictional internal mail thread going like this:
> Folks! please, give us something, anything, to put on the landing page!
> Someone replies duh, maybe tooltips
> What's a tooltip?
> uhh, small popup windows with descriptive text
> What's a popup?
> uhh...
> Nevermind, its on!
Obligatory /s and yeah its Google, but seriously I can't imagine any other circumstances on how this specific copy, which tries to explain what a "tooltip" is by using the words "popup", "view" and "menu item", came up.
This could be a good sign though, of the maturity of the platform (and harder to feel left out if you didn't upgrade).
I don't get it. They bring frequent major updates with such important features like 60 new emijis or antivirus software instead of just doing their homework and implementing the number one feature for an OS: Direct OS updates from the OS vendor and nobody else.
Don't tell me it's a problem and the driver situation is so difficult. This is just a bad excuse. They want to keep people buying new Android phones.
I wonder if this will be good enough to close the gap with the rich music creation ecosystem on iOS.
Google has been a gold-level sponsor the last couple of years at the JUCE Summit/Audio Developer Conference with a motivation to push developers in the direction of the Android NDK. It's good they acknowledge they are behind it that regard, but there's still a fair amount of catching up to do considering there's now AUv3 on iOS and no competing standard on Android yet.
They still don't get it. Google as the OS vendor should update all phones and NOT the hardware makers. Hardware manufacturers can still update their special features on the side after an OS update got deployed but I want that the OS and its core become updates directly and only from Google. Why is this so hard?
I agree it's probably the only way to actually fix this, I just don't think it will happen.
Blaming the OEMs for your security issues is free.
Android seems to have taken iOS approach towards saving power,
"When an app goes into the background, it has a window of several minutes in which it is still allowed to create and use services"
Though iOS's background restrictions goes up to socket level (e.g VPN, which android O seems to have whitelisted entirely); this is going to be a huge impact over consumers and of course pain in the * for developers.
You open the page. Scroll down. What should be the first thing you see? Obviously it should be the greatest, the best feature of the new OS. What is it instead? "Quick boot up time". Really? That's the best thing in Android Oreo? That when I reboot my phone once every 4 months, it's going to start quicker? Surely they could have picked literally anything else as the first thing to mention?
Seriously. Software has improved so much but the hardware nowadays is trash for my needs at least.
First two words on the page after the "Introducing.." title say so.
Which makes me look cynical at everything else.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/10/24/apple-wi-fi-assist-lawsuit/
At least my 4.x tablet used to have a 3-state wifi icon, off (not present), connected (gray), internet (blue).
System Settings > Wi-Fi > Gear Icon > "Use open Wi-Fi automatically"
Hmmmm. So Google can have even more of your data.
-Picture in picture (dual app onscreen)
-Notification dots and "force-touch-like-feature" (my words, not Google's) to preview
-Google Play Protect (an antivirus) [0]
-Minimize unintentional overuse of battery from apps in the background
-Faster boot speed
-Support forAndroid Instant Apps
-Over 60 new emoji (sic)
Under the hood stuff, not in the release (thanks u/izakus)
- Project Treble that splits hardware HAL layer away from the OS layer. Plan being that this allows updating the OS without having to update the whole hardware driver stack (and thus avoid being dependant on Qualcomms of the world to update their proprietary blobs for each release) - GPU drivers are now updatable via Play Store (by OEMs)
More new features listed on the main Oreo page [2]:
-Accessibility button: Allows you to quickly access from the navigation bar accessibility features, like magnification, and functionality within accessibility services, like Select to Speak.
-Accessibility volume: Accessibility services can optimize the audio experience for users with disabilities.
-Adaptive icons: Developers can now provide a full-bleed square shaped icon and OEMs will mask the icon to ensure intra-device consistency.
-Ambient screen: Highlights the incoming notification with larger font, highlighted app name and immediate access to actions.
-Background execution limits: More control over how apps run in the background for better overall system performance.
-Background location limits: Limits the frequency of location updates in the background for better overall system health.
-Deep color: Enables applications to render richer visual content with more vibrant colors and subtler gradients. Supports full color management which allows applications to render images in the format and quality they were intended.
-Downloadable fonts: Applications no longer need to bundle custom fonts, which helps reduce their size.
-Install unknown apps: Hostile downloader apps can't operate without permission; users now permit the installation of APKs per-source.
-Integrated printing support: Compatible with all Mopria-certified printers, which make up 97% of printers sold worldwide.
-Linkable files: API that allows you to share files across the Internet via web links.
-Native C/C++ API for high-performance audio: API function for high-performance audio including Native C/C++ audio API.
-Notification categories: More granular and consistent control over which notifications can appear and how intrusive they are.
-Notification snoozing: Lets users hide notifications for a period of time, similar to Inbox snoozing.
-Pointer capture: Pointer capture allows the app to capture all mouse input.
-Project Treble: The biggest change to the foundations of Android to date: a modular architecture that makes it easier and faster for hardware makers to deliver Android updates.
-TextView autosizing: Developers can now let the size of their text expand or contract automatically based on the size and characteristics of the TextView, making it much easier to optimize the text size on different screens or with dynamic content.
-Tooltips: Support for tooltips (small popup windows with descriptive text) for views and menu items.
-Wi-Fi Assistant: Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google.
[0] https://www.android.com/play-protect/
[1] https://developer.android.com/topic/instant-apps/index.html
- Project Treble that splits hardware HAL layer away from the OS layer. Plan being that this allows updating the OS without having to update the whole hardware driver stack (and thus avoid being dependant on Qualcomms of the world to update their proprietary blobs for each release)
- GPU drivers are now updatable via Play Store (by OEMs)
I wonder if every Mopria-certified printer prints anti-privacy tracking dots.
Honestly I like it; it was better than basically all the other alternatives.
edit:// a little late with this
"The world's favorite cookie" right in the first caption. Almost subliminal images of Oreos in the background as you scroll.
[0] https://jwt.co.uk/work/android
Disclosure: I have worked for a JWT subsidiary at the time.
> Working to keep your device and data safe from misbehaving apps by scanning over 50 billion apps per day, even the ones you haven't installed yet!
Also known as anti-virus.
This page says 8 billion a day, which seems inconsistent. Also how many apps are there on the Play Store to scan that many?
This is good to hear. But, this makes me wonder about Android's ability to prevent people from pirating apps. Due to the nature of Android, I've never wrote an app that wasn't free.
On iOS, there are a number of audio apps that do quite well. I'd be hard pressed to port an app to Android, if taking the apk was as easy as it's always been.
Translation: we developed better compression algos for uploading your personal data to our servers
VPN back to Google?
"Linkable files: API that allows you to share files across the Internet via web links."
Will this mean that I don't have to download a pdf to view it? I wonder what this feature means.
And I don't believe OEMs and telecom operators will release updates even with Treble, if Google doesn't force them to do so.
Except that, if mobile OS's could still disrupt the desktop, there's still many features to go?
Oreo must have payed a good sum of money I suppose?
Coming up with the legalese on how and where Google is allowed to use the Oreo trademark seems difficult.
If not, then there is no trademark issue. Google isn't selling a food, it's selling an operating system.
Seriously?
I'll leave it up to you to figure out if I'm serious or not (and yes, I really am mixed so this is plausible).
