Live data from Hacker News

Google’s not-so-secret new OS

techspecs.blog

81–90 of 561 posts

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#81

Since Fuscia is a new kernel, that means it will probably only support Google hardware. The status quo right now among android hardware vendors is to violate the GPL, and they have faced few if any repercussions for doing so. I wonder if Fuscia is sort of viewed as the way forward to addressing that. Anyone care to speculate why there isn't a community version of chromium os? I'd donate to it for sure. It sounds like…

>The status quo right now among android hardware vendors is to violate the GPL No it's not the status quo. The major OEM's do release their code. Yes, there are some Chinese OEM violators, but that's typical of China.

You can release code and still violate the GPL in other ways. For example, there are binary blobs out there and the GPL is pretty unequivocal on this point: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#82
post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#83
post #51

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 platf…

As a fellow Nexus user, I've owned the Nexus One, 5, and currently use a 6P, how much of this is due to the OS versus hardware? Will Google ever be able to achieve Apple level battery life or overall UI smoothness, not to mention update support, without having their own custom SoC?

I was very happy with the 5, even with the intermittent lags, especially considering it's price at release. I suppose I'm not a very heavy phone user, and I never play mobile games, but I've been very happy with the 6P on Android 6.0-7.1. Battery life could definitely be better, and it does get fairly warm at times, but overall it's been a very good experience for me considering the Snapdragon 810 it's using is generally poorly regarded.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#84
post #30
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.

To be usable, SSH to a more powerful machine requires a good and stable connection. That's almost never available, in my experience. If I'm on my phone, I'm likely to be on trains/planes/in tunnels/in the countryside/etc.

Use mosh.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#85
post #28

" The pitch will clearly be that developers can write a Flutter app once and have it run on Andromeda, Android, and iOS with minimal extra work, in theory. " How's that going to work? iOS, specifically? Is Dart a supported language?

This may answer your question:

https://flutter.io/faq/#how-does-flutter-run-my-code-on-ios

and

https://flutter.io/faq/#can-i-interop-with-my-mobile-platfor...

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#86
post #53

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 devi…

Given that it's Google, I wonder if it will support the languages favored by bootstrappers and small startups—Obj C, Ruby, JavaScript and more recently Swift and Elixir. I get the distinct impression that they're heavily optimizing large team productivity and aren't a fan of functional or highly expressive languages.

It's too bad, given how much nicer their app approval process, etc is than Apple's that the Android dev experience has been so much worse all these years.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#87
post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

Sun tried that, back in the day. Maybe you heard about Java applets, maybe you didn't. They were the slowest thing about the web, insecure even with a sandbox, and just an overall pain. Short of having a jvm always running on your machine, the performance of Android-via-Chrome will completely turn people off the Android ecosystem.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#88
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why stop there? I want to dock my phone to the TV and work with a remote control, I want to dock it to the car and control it with steering wheel buttons.

No, I don't want it in my car. If it connects to my home then I am fine.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#89
post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser.

Maybe I'm just jaded from downloading video games, but, at least on a landline, I don't think most people would care?

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#90
post #32
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…

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

How many touch optimized apps are on the Surface? I haven't seen many. The majority are still desktop apps and using desktop apps on a tablet isn't a very good UI experience.
Post reply on HN