41–50 of 68 posts
Asking HN This might be a little bit of a far stretch, but based on the belief that anyone is reachable, would anyone have any leads to Mr. Rubin or would know how to make contact with him? tw @carlosvivaldi
Who knows if he still checks it though.
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Android is only a "success" insofar as being the only game in town for an open-source iOS competitor. I'm frankly amazed it ever gained any traction at all, but when your competition is non-free garbage like Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows mobile, I guess you can just win by default. Especially when you have the might of Google's multi-billion dollar support behind you. Android has already gotten miles better in the…
That could be an indication that building a viable mobile phone OS is really, really hard . While I'm also quite glad to see the recent Chrome/Android integration, I think Rubin should get a lot of credit for getting Android to the point where it's even worth integrating with. A bunch of competitors tried and failed; I'm glad that there's more than just Apple available in the mobile OS market.
It's not like they don't have excellent runtime designers in house. They could have taken the opportunity to go with Python or something else entirely when they rewrote so much anyway.
I think it’s a good time to reflect on the massive impact of Android on the mobile OS market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system#Market_... The Android team under Rubin executed extraordinarily well with a tiny fraction of Google’s engineering resources.
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What about the underlying architecture of the OS though? Linux with a Java runtime and a new windowing layer that stops "normal" Linux apps running? Running each dalvik process in its own confined user process? What about the design for background services and foreground activities that can be switched to/from (multitasking) right from the beginning, with AIDL for implementing service definitions? What about Intents…
> iOS didn't have multitasking until a lot later, and the > concept of background services is more aggressively > policed (that is, processes killed often) on iOS, as far > as I know? Ugh, of course iOS had multitasking from the very beginning as you would expect from unix kernel. The access to it from third party apps is entirely different question.
I think it’s a good time to reflect on the massive impact of Android on the mobile OS market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system#Market_... The Android team under Rubin executed extraordinarily well with a tiny fraction of Google’s engineering resources.
They executed so extraordinarily well that Google spent lots of time in practically every version of android to rewrite core components. They finally killed the horrible DalvikVM recently.
Every software, pretty much ever has to have core components rewritten, sucks and is horrible. Fortunately, it's just code.
And yes, DalvikVM wasn't very good.
I think it’s a good time to reflect on the massive impact of Android on the mobile OS market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system#Market_... The Android team under Rubin executed extraordinarily well with a tiny fraction of Google’s engineering resources.
They executed so extraordinarily well that Google spent lots of time in practically every version of android to rewrite core components. They finally killed the horrible DalvikVM recently.
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Throwaway because I know with pretty strong confidence what went down -- The truth seems to be both (a) unpleasant for Andy and (b) unremarkable to the rest of us. In other words, it wasn't his choice, but there wasn't a scandalous smoking gun either. He just wanted what Larry wouldn't give him. Nothing that would be front page news.
What did he want? Money, resources, position/title?
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What about the underlying architecture of the OS though? Linux with a Java runtime and a new windowing layer that stops "normal" Linux apps running? Running each dalvik process in its own confined user process? What about the design for background services and foreground activities that can be switched to/from (multitasking) right from the beginning, with AIDL for implementing service definitions? What about Intents…
> iOS didn't have multitasking until a lot later, and the > concept of background services is more aggressively > policed (that is, processes killed often) on iOS, as far > as I know? Ugh, of course iOS had multitasking from the very beginning as you would expect from unix kernel. The access to it from third party apps is entirely different question.
They expanded it quite a bit in iOS 7? to all apps with background fetch, background url upload and download tasks, silent push notifications, and background tasks.
All of these approaches do not work if a user forcibly shuts down the app (I am not quite sure of every case). All these mechanisms are controlled by the OS: we'll call you, don't call us sort of thing and if you don't return in a certain period of time or if we need to, we will shut you down.
In iOS 8 you have extension support which launches mini apps. Extensions are somewhat equivalent to services but they are about integration with multitasking an implementation detail for security purposes.
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I agree it's a pretty trite comment - unless op meant he lasted so long ".. on the robotics junket" aka exit lobby, in which case I'd agree. Andy could be a pain but his accomplishments speak for him -- Android has long been seen as a massive success, warts and all, at the highest levels of goog.
Android is only a "success" insofar as being the only game in town for an open-source iOS competitor. I'm frankly amazed it ever gained any traction at all, but when your competition is non-free garbage like Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows mobile, I guess you can just win by default. Especially when you have the might of Google's multi-billion dollar support behind you. Android has already gotten miles better in the…
What was so successful about Android is the speed they pivoted as the market changed. This was, obviously, largely a response to the iPhone, which didn't stop at technology pivots, but the entire business model. This did indeed lead to a rate of development and collecting far too much crap along the way, which has been problematic since.
However, Symbian are a great example of the opposite, in the sense their development had slowed to a crawl. Things like OpenGL and anti-aliased text rendering appeared first in feature phone user interfaces, and then moved up - it was nuts. Quite how Nokia, in particular, remained oblivious to the potential UI improvements the new stuff enabled is beyond me, but then a good number of us were floored by just how bad the performance of the G1 was.
The "improvements" you mention are, with the exception of the bought in runtime, inconsequential. We've been through the phase where people wanted to use WebViews for most of the apps (I was a champion of that idea at one time) and it sucked. Do things like Google Now use the WebView for rendering their UI? Now that the lower levels are approaching good the real problems that remain are much more pervasive, causing an unbelievable amount of app developer time to be wasted (at Google too), and the sad thing is it doesn't look like they will ever be fixed because the answer will be "we're replacing them with web stuff" which is an answer no one making this stuff actually wants.
I think it’s a good time to reflect on the massive impact of Android on the mobile OS market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system#Market_... The Android team under Rubin executed extraordinarily well with a tiny fraction of Google’s engineering resources.
1) Linux, from Torvalds onward. Android used Linux as the hardware abstraction layer and still does. How many developers there?
1B) The ARM Linux developers, especially. Russell King is an unsung hero in this space.
2) The sea of subcontractors that helped with device drivers, subcomponents, integration, and manufacturing. Remember that whole "Open Handset Alliance"[1] thing? Those were all companies doing work for the Google/Android either under contract or gratis in the hopes of getting future work thrown their way or increasing their handset sales with the Google monolith behind them. I was one of them.
3) Webkit. How many developers worked on that (including Apple engineers)? OpenBinder (started at Be)? OpenGL?