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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#51

Post by untog »

If nothing else comes out of this, I hope we end up with an Android OS that works better than the current one.

I've been running Android since the Nexus One so I'm no newbie to the platform, but the ease with which iOS manages to get all UI interactions at ~unnoticable FPS and outstanding battery life is staggering when you're used to Android. It feels like some really fundamental choices were made badly on the platform that make it incredibly inconsistent and unreliable. A fresh start would be fantastic.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#52

Post by [deleted] »

macintux wrote: post #17
pier25 wrote: post #9

We definitely need a universal OS for all our devices and I really believe Google is in a great position to get us there. It would really surprise me if Apple got there first. Tim lacks vision and will keep on milking iOS even if the iPad Pro is a failure as a laptop replacement. Windows is still king in the desktop space, at least as far a user base goes, but it's terrible on tablets and phones. MS has all the tech…

You may "definitely need" a universal OS but I'm far from convinced I do. I don't buy that a finger and a mouse/trackpad pointer are equivalent input devices. One obscures the display and is imprecise. The other, well, isn't. I'm fine with a different server OS than desktop. I see no compelling reason why I need a single OS for all of my personal devices.

[deleted]

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#53

Post by vii »

It's awesome that Google is doing this and in public too https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/

Unfortunately, the hard part of an operating system isn't in a cool API and a rendering demo. It's in integrating the fickle whims of myriad hardware devices with amazingly high expectations of reliability and performance consistency under diverse workloads. People don't like dropped frames when they plug in USB :) Writing device drivers for demanding hardware is much harder than saving registers and switching process context. The Linux kernel has an incredible agglomeration of years of effort and experience behind it - and the social ability to scale to support diverse contributors with different agendas.

Microsoft, with its dominant position on the desktop, famously changed the 'preferred' APIs for UI development on a regular cadence. Only Microsoft applications kept up and looked up to date. Now Google has such a commanding share of the phone market - Android is over 80% and growing http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os - they have a huge temptation to follow suit. Each time that Microsoft introduced a new technology (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundatio... WPF) they had to skirt a fine line between making it simple and making sure that it would be hard for competitors to produce emulation layers for. Otherwise, you could run those apps on your Mac :)

There are many things to improve (and simplify) in the Android APIs. It would be delightful to add first class support for C++ and Python, etc. A project this large will be a monster to ship so hopefully we'll soon (a few years) see the main bits integrated into more mainstream platforms like Android/Linux - hopefully without too much ecosystem churn

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#54

Post by [deleted] »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #15
pier25 wrote: post #9

We definitely need a universal OS for all our devices and I really believe Google is in a great position to get us there. It would really surprise me if Apple got there first. Tim lacks vision and will keep on milking iOS even if the iPad Pro is a failure as a laptop replacement. Windows is still king in the desktop space, at least as far a user base goes, but it's terrible on tablets and phones. MS has all the tech…

Yes, we do. I want my phone and my laptop to be in total sync, I want to be able to write code on my mobile which I can just continue on my laptop without any hindrance, currently I have a mac and an android phone, I do have Go and Python installed on my mobile, but it isn't that great to code on my mobile, I have to host the repo on an internal version of gogs to get the code synced up and I still have to manually p…

[deleted]

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#55

Post by vlunkr »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #42
vlunkr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always develop remotely, use your phone to ssh into a more powerful machine. Use tmux or screen and pick up right where you were on a laptop or desktop. This is far more compelling IMHO.

Yes, I have to figure out the typing issue with mobile first!

Yeah you really need an external keyboard to be productive. And at that point the benefits are debatable

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#56

Post by throwawaydbfif »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #12

Is this an actual plan of Google as a company, or is this some sort of Microsoft-style war between divisions where the Chrome team has just decided on its own that the future is based on Chrome and Dart? Also, considering the way that the ARC runtime for Chromebooks was a failure and had to be replaced by a system that apparently essentially runs Android in a container, will it really be possible for a completely dif…

I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is owned by google.

Their reasons that "dart is better" is the typical google koolaid before they attempt a market takeover. As we've seen over and over with Android, chrome, and AMP especially. Google loves to make glass house open source projects you can't touch. You're free to look at how great it is, feel it's well refined curves and admire the finish, but God help you if you don't like how the project is going and want to fork it for yourself.

Don't bother trying to commit a new feature to any of Google's software that they don't agree with. It will languish forever. Don't bother forking either, because they'll build a small proprietary bit into it that grows like a tumor until it's impossible to run the "open source" code without it.

Fuck dart, I don't care how great it is. Microsoft is being the good one in this case by extending js with typescript, google is trying to upend it into something that they control

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#57

Post by bitmapbrother »

mastazi wrote: post #48
nitemice wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd like to see it, I don't think Windows will ever quite get there. Not, at least, in any recognisable form. They value backwards-compatibility way to much (which is to be commended in some ways, but won't save them here). While they seem to have everything lined up to be able to turn it into something, developers seem too reluctant to get on-board too. Apple will have to go through all of the growing pai…

> developers seem too reluctant to get on-board too Might be limited to your specific environment though. As a counter-example among the people I know there are far more .NET devs than the total sum of iOS/Mac/Android devs.

Limited to their specific environment? You mean the world?

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#58

Post by techenthusiast »

markdoubleyou wrote: post #33
techenthusiast wrote: post #10

Article author here. Posted this in the notes, but possibly too buried: For anyone interested, I intend to write quite often about consumer technology on this blog. Topics will include hardware, software, design, and more. You can follow via RSS or Twitter, and possibly through other platforms soon. Sorry for the self promotion! Thanks for reading. Please do send any corrections or explanations.

Great first post, hope you keep it up! Only feedback is that I had to reread this sentence several times before I was confident I'd parsed the negations correctly: "I also can’t imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) won’t at last be solved by Andromeda, but one can never be too sure."

Thanks for the kind words. I debated that sentence, but you're right - always avoid double negatives. I'll fix it now.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#59

Post by mastazi »

MBCook wrote: post #41
mastazi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows [...] [is] terrible on tablets and phones. Surface tablets seem to be doing OK though.

What percent of people regularly use them as tablets without the keyboard?

I think there are several different characteristics that make us categorise a device as a tablet vs. a laptop, input methods being just one of them; there are many others e.g. form-factor, weight, battery life etc.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#60

Post by techenthusiast »

skybrian wrote: post #43

re: "Flutter was [...]" A bit weird to use the past tense here since it's not reached 1.0 yet. You can try it out today (tech preview) to create apps in Dart that run on Android and iOS: https://flutter.io/ (Googler, not on the Flutter team itself, but working on related developer tools.)

Fair point! Just fixed that, thanks. I had only meant that Flutter was not originally intended for Andromeda, as far as I can tell :)
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