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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#201

Post by Sanddancer »

thinkloop wrote: post #110

Why can't the pure web replace apps and programs? All the pieces are almost there: hardware acceleration, service workers, notifications, responsive design... I currently "add to home screen" for most things. I edit my images online, and develop code using cloud9 ide, etc. There are few things I need apps/programs for right now, and that's improving day by day. iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share, b…

I take photos miles from where there's cell signal. I write code on the bus while heading to doctors appointments. The web is about as far from a panacea as you can get. It's slow, it's bloated, falls apart when you don't have a connection, useful applications die when the company dies. Were some of the midi devices I use for music "web-based" they'd have probably become doorstops decades ago. A web-based IDE would be horrible for trying to develop code with an intermittent connection. The web is not a good time.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#202

Post by krzyk »

felixge wrote: post #162
maheart wrote: post #153

How credible is this source? I don't understand half the decisions outlined in the article. > I also have to imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) I seriously doubt the Linux kernel is anything but a minor contributor to Android's update problem. Handset developers make their money by selling physical phones. In two years, your average consumer probably doesn't care if their device is s…

> In two years, your average consumer probably doesn't care if their device is still receiving software updates. They'll jump onto a new phone plan, with a fresh, cool new mobile, with a better screen, newer software (features!), and a refreshed battery. This might be true for the US, where 75% of subscribers are on post-paid (contracts). It's not true for the rest of the world. * Europe: * Rest of the world: I'd als…

But it is not something related to 2 year upgrade plan. In EU phones have 2 year warranty, after that period most people would like to upgrade it. And more over in parts of the world outside US, the best phones are not always available on contract, you need to buy them on your own (e.g. Nexus line was mostly like that, Pixels probably too).

And more over cellular companies put a lot of bloat on the phones, some of them would make malware creators proud (e.g. an app that if you open it after 1 month trial period it will add a recurring cost to our cell bill).

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#203

Post by mercer »

flukus wrote: post #158
MarkMc wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Write once, mediocre everywhere" was a problem with Sun's implementation, not with the concept of cross platform code. There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. In any case, Google doesn't need to be as strict as Sun was. It is free to implement "write 90% of your code once and 10% customised for each platform".

> There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. Actually they suffer from most of the same problems, only computers have gotten faster (masking performance issues) and our expectations have lowered. How many of these web apps obey the native OS themeing for instance?

1) The fact that webapps can run relatively well strikes me as hopeful, considering how much more inefficient using HTML/CSS/JS is compared to Java applets. Or is the latter not the case (honest question)? 2) I'm not sure if our expectations have lowered much. Perhaps it's more that mobile interfaces are generally simpler and thus easier to make 'native enough'?

Although I think there's more going on in regards to 2. I was never bothered so much by the UI of a java applet looking different. What bothered me was that even very fundamental stuff like input fields and scrolling felt both alien and shittier than native. And while it's certainly possible to make a web app just as shitty, if you rely on 'stock' html elements, a lot of the subtle native behavior carries over.

Just a few weeks ago, for example, I built a web-app for mobile devices. It felt off immediately because the scrolling didn't feel right. All I had to do was turn on the momentum scrolling (with a line of ios-specific css), and the scrolling suddenly felt native. Had I used a hypothetical Java applet equivalent, I might've had to either go for a non-native-feeling scroll or build it myself.

While I of course can't prove any of this, I think what people care about is that things feel native, not the 'skin' used to display it.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#204

Post by radicalbyte »

flukus wrote: post #158
MarkMc wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Write once, mediocre everywhere" was a problem with Sun's implementation, not with the concept of cross platform code. There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. In any case, Google doesn't need to be as strict as Sun was. It is free to implement "write 90% of your code once and 10% customised for each platform".

> There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. Actually they suffer from most of the same problems, only computers have gotten faster (masking performance issues) and our expectations have lowered. How many of these web apps obey the native OS themeing for instance?

The problem was that the UK of java apps was really ugly and blurry. They were painful to use.

Modern web apps are non standard but pretty.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#205

Post by rimantas »

MarkMc wrote: 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…

Tell me, why would I want to run Android app on Mac?

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#206

Post by RyanZAG »

ianai wrote: post #187
taneq wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you somehow haven't noticed that even mobile devices now are an order of magnitude faster than desktop computers were back in the days of applets. Desktop computers can run Java applications with no significant overhead.

Not totally. We support a number of java applets at work. The clients still take "way too long" to load and feel bloated. "Way too long" is a subjective measure based on the current hardware/OS. For a JVM to not feel slow it would have to speed up relative to itself...and I haven't seen them do that.

If it's specific apps, usually it is just bad coding. 'Enterprise Java' style coding where performance is not even tested for, let alone designed into the algorithms.

Usually culprits are things like downloading multiple data files in a single threaded block, or insanely deep object graphs with thousands of memory fetches per real operation.

That's not really anything to do with the technique (code in browsers) or the runtime (JVM) or even the programming language (Java) -- and everything to do with poor development.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#207

Post by rimantas »

thinkloop wrote: post #110

Why can't the pure web replace apps and programs? All the pieces are almost there: hardware acceleration, service workers, notifications, responsive design... I currently "add to home screen" for most things. I edit my images online, and develop code using cloud9 ide, etc. There are few things I need apps/programs for right now, and that's improving day by day. iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share, b…

"Almost there" does not count. It has not just be there but be better at everything. And I will argue it is far far away from even "being here". I am getting tired of repeating this each time, but "web everywhere" folks simply have no idea what native SDKs offer.

    > iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share
And taking all the profits. Android being everywhere does not mean that every Android device is being used as smartphone, quite often they are just replacements for a feature phones.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#208

Post by sangnoir »

pjmlp wrote: post #183
lenkite wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First up - I do not argue with you. Android is not as open as it was in the old days. But I think its not fair to only blame Google here. Google making Google play services was a natural reaction to manufacturers never updating Android on their phones for years leading to all kinds of vulnerabilities and bugs on Android that kept it far behind iOS in quality and features. Lets face it - Android used to be sneered at,…

Google is 100% to blame. There are these things called contracts, and if there are clauses for an OEM to be allowed to have access to Google services, Google lawyers could certainly add a few more sentences regarding compulsory updates.

Android is open source, and OEMs see long-term updates as a money-losing proposal. If the "lost sales" (to them) costs outweigh the benefit of shipping Google services, OEMs will fork/ship AOSP and call it a day - they want profits more than they respect/fear Google. Google's negotiating position is not unassailable.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#209

Post by pjmlp »

brianon99 wrote: post #2

Google is just afraid of GPL I think.

Most likely, just like Apple, Google is getting rid of GCC.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/...

Remove GCC

GCC is still in the NDK today because some of gnustl's C++11 features were written such that they do not work with Clang (threading and atomics, mostly). Now that libc++ is the best choice of STL, this is no longer blocking, so GCC can be removed.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#210

Post by officialjunk »

rimantas wrote: post #205
MarkMc wrote: 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…

Tell me, why would I want to run Android app on Mac?

The fact that it is an android app doesn't really matter. Your question becomes essentially "why would I want to run any app on Mac?" which I think you can figure out the answer to.
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