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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#411

Post by geodel »

sametmax wrote: post #398

Google could have taken firefox and improve it to make it better, but they created something new. Now instead of improving the linux stack and the gnu stack (the kernel, wayland, the buses, the drivers), they rewrite everything. They put millions into this. Imagine what could have been done with it on existing software. They say they are good citizen in the FOSS world, but eventually they just use the label to promot…

> Google could have taken firefox and improve it to make it better, but they created something new.

This does not work. They were initially working on webkit but technical decisions they wanted were different from apple/webkit team so they had to fork. It is much better they implement their technical ideas with their resources.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#412

Post by noobermin »

pjmlp wrote: post #339
TeMPOraL wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years. Between that and fragility of smartphones (mechanical damage, water damage), most people are bound to replace theirs every few years anyway.

> Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years. My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine. When it dies, I will most likely adopt one of my Lumia devices as main one, or will buy a 2nd hand Android device, instead of giving money to support bad OEMs

Sorry but you are nowhere near the mean. We can't use your experience as a stand-in for the mean.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#413

Post by TeMPOraL »

pjmlp wrote: post #387
TeMPOraL wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SO's S3 is of more-less the same age and it's so slow that it's barely usable now. Still can't track down why - she is not a power user, she wasn't installing apps beyond the few things I installed her and the OS updates. My old S4, currently used by my brother, suffered the same fate, being slow even after a factory reset. I wonder where this comes from?

I had some performance issues, but they got sorted out when swapped the battery for a new one.

A battery? How would that help? Not doubting you, just honest question. I feel like I'm missing something very important about how smartphones work.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#414

Post by Roy0 »

jm_l wrote: post #72
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.

Hiroshi Lockheimer has publicly stated several times that there is no merger of Chrome OS and Android. https://chromeunboxed.com/some-andromeda-perspective-hiroshi... I think you alluded to this, "cue endless debates over the semantics of that, and what it all entails," but it might be worthwhile to add the official statement.

This is like Apple saying they are committed to PPC right before they announced the intel transition, or Nintendo stating that "The DS will not replace the GBA". If they become successful in building that OS, that statement will be thrown away as something they had never said. If they stumble upon roadblocks while trying to build this, they will have this statement to back them up.

It's typical market-o-speech.

They are not actively working on this :

https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/modular/commits/master

For no reason.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#415

Post by izacus »

bb101 wrote: post #255
untog wrote: 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…

I wonder how much of the performance issues are related to Android being Java vs iOS being C? The old Blackberry OS was also implemented in Java and I remember well the spinning hourglass and the odd pauses in its UI.

Not much, modern devices and modern Android runtime is fast enough that GC and Java aren't a problem. There's bunch of other issues around though, mostly coming from the fact that devices use problematic and slow I/O controllers, apps do blocking I/O and OEMs add bloat and misconfigure behaviour of the OS to prioritize their services at the expense of apps you're actually using.

But bad I/O is the killer (e.g. fun things like triggering 2 image load requests at once which then take 2500ms vs. doing them sequentally which takes 400ms on some Samsungs. This happens also if several processes collide). Apple side-steps that by throwing money at the problem (good controllers, expensive flash) which probably won't happen in budget Android market.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#416

Post by NoGravitas »

dTal wrote: post #349
pjc50 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one design decision in Linux that makes this slightly harder than it needs to be in this situation: Linux's lack of a driver ABI. At the moment, phones include all sorts of custom drivers for very specific versions of the hardware. The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. You can't build your own kernel and upgrade without breaking all the binary-only drivers. Android falls between two stools…

>The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. Isn't this a rampant GPL violation? Why do we put up with this? We are about to lose the war for general purpose computing due to insufficient GPL enforcement.

In a lot of cases, the OEMs publish their kernel source, with their drivers and changes, so it's not a GPL violation. But it takes a tremendous amount of work to get that kind of thing into the mainline kernel, not least because of the atrocious quality of a lot of OEM kernel code. And the incentives are absolutely not there to get them to do it.

(Of course, some OEMs absolutely do violate the GPL, and then there's also the issue of binary drivers and blobs that violate the spirit but not the letter.)

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#417

Post by Roy0 »

therealmarv wrote: post #148
djsumdog wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the kernel thing happening. Just the licensing and breaking ABI is one of the biggest factors in not being able to have an easily upgradable android. I only see this as a good thing if this ensures an easier upgrade path than in Android; and if vendor ROMs can easily be replaced by a stock OS (like on Windows).

I definitely can not see the Kernel thing happen. Ever thought of power management and keeping the whole system fluent? This are all not easy problems which you solve in 1 or 2 years. It may only work for very specialized hardware... speaking of hardware. Hardware driver support is also something most other Kernels suffer from in comparison to e.g. Linux.

> Hardware driver support is also something most other Kernels suffer from in comparison to e.g. Linux.

So?

Google doesn't have to support all hardware, they can pick to support only the hardware they want. That's what they already do with ChromeOS. Installing ChromiumOS on unsupported hardware can have its issues. The reverse is true too, installing not-ChromeOS Linux or another OS on Chromebook does not always work well, although it's fine on some specific models.

Android is like that too, and in a much worse way than for Chromebooks. We're not talking about stellar linux kernel support for all the custom ARM SOC that are out there. All manufacturers write their own closed source hardware support for android and this is how android ends up having issues with updating, since whenever Google updates the linux kernel it breaks the ABI and all the support manufacturers wrote for the previous version, and manufacturers do not want to spend so much time on needless busywork such as keeping up with kernel API churn that exists just to satisfy the dev team sense of perfection.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#418

Post by the_af »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #373
pjmlp wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years. My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine. When it dies, I will most likely adopt one of my Lumia devices as main one, or will buy a 2nd hand Android device, instead of giving money to support bad OEMs

My SO's S3 is of more-less the same age and it's so slow that it's barely usable now. Still can't track down why - she is not a power user, she wasn't installing apps beyond the few things I installed her and the OS updates. My old S4, currently used by my brother, suffered the same fate, being slow even after a factory reset. I wonder where this comes from?

My S3 is also about the same age and is running mostly fine, except for two things: 1- the USB port is damaged and the phone sometimes doesn't charge or charges very slowly; I know it's probably a soldering problem, but I can't be bothered to fix it, and 2- the Facebook app frequently crashes and reboots the phone. I suspect this has more to do with Facebook being awful on Android, since I've seen it happening in other phones as well.

Point is, I won't change my S3 until it crumbles to dust, if I can help it. I don't understand the obsession with buying the latest mobile every 1-2 years.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#419

Post by coredog64 »

bjarneh wrote: post #261
michaelmrose wrote: post #249

It was unfortunately obvious that the writer had insufficient tech chops when use the phrase "a post-API programming model" But pressing on how somehow manages to blame the lack of updates to android phones on the modularity of the Linux kernel. The joke of course being that linux is monolithic and googles new OS is a microkernel ergo more modular. The quote is "...however. I also have to imagine the Android update p…

> would represent a non trivial amount of work for the oem whom already has your money This is it; unless crucial apps (or some other necessity) only work with a newer Android version (which could push OEM's to update) they never will. Much better for OEM's to hope that you'll "update Android" through the purchase of a new phone.

The carriers bear some blame as well. Apple negotiated for the right to upgrade the OS without carrier review, but most Android device OEMs don't. So the carriers drag their feet as well, hoping you'll buy that new device from them and be locked in for another 2 years.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#420

Post by the_af »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #413
pjmlp wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had some performance issues, but they got sorted out when swapped the battery for a new one.

A battery ? How would that help? Not doubting you, just honest question. I feel like I'm missing something very important about how smartphones work.

Mmm... it also happened to me with my (now defunct) Galaxy S1. I can't explain it, but at some point its battery developed the "bloated, about to explode" look and the phone worked but it was very slow and crashed frequently. I changed the battery and everything was ok. Later it died of unrelated causes.
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