Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Android M Developer Preview and Tools

android-developers.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 153 posts

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#131

Post by izacus »

dharma1 wrote: post #97
krschultz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is mandatory. Material guidelines are a suggestion and a set of tools to make the baseline app better by default. In general the UI components are moving out of the SDK into the support libs or the community at large. RecyclerView & Toolbar are examples of Google untangling the foundation from the look & feel, and letting the community come up with the final implementation of things.

Is that a deliberate strategy or a lack of communication between teams at Google to create the SDK level support for components their design team designs?

I don't understand this sentiment, why do you need those components? There's bunch of 3rd party libraries to implement the UI patterns. Do you go annoy Safari/Chrome/Firefox developers that they don't provide you with components for carousels in browsers as well?

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#132

Post by threeseed »

leonatan wrote: post #126
threeseed wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been rumored that for iOS9 Apple will be focusing on reducing the overall footprint. There are a lot of 8GB devices that could be upgraded to iOS8 but are unable to because of lack of disk space.

What 8GB devices? Even iPod Touch starts at 16GB and is supported.

iPhone 4S and iPhone 5C in 8GB configuraitons are still being sold around the world. They are both capable of iOS8.

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5c/iphone-5c-8gb-...

And by disk space I mean after the user has installed the typical number of apps, photos, music etc. My partner is an example of this. She has to choose between deleting apps and doing OS updates.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#133

Post by Manishearth »

socceroos wrote: post #114
Aldo_MX wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Application YourTypicalMobileApplication is asking for access to the Internet to display advertisements powered by Google AdMob. [ D̶E̶N̶Y̶ ] [ ALLOW ] (Do you think we would give you the option to easily cut our income?)

Then please, oh please separate it out. Internet and Advertising. Shouldn't be hard.

> Shouldn't be hard.

How can the OS tell if an HTTP request is for the Internet or for Ads? It can't.

Though Google could special-case AdMob effectively owning the ad scenario for apps which don't use the internet for anything else.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#134

Post by pjmlp »

izacus wrote: post #130
pjmlp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully, as they will not add Java 8 support. Source: the Q&A at the end of the developer tools session. So at least we can make use of some C++ love, even if the frameworks access is limited.

Hmm, Java 8 is actually supported in Android Studio. That support however will not make device Dalvik/ART VMs magically support Java 8 bytecode :) Retrolambda is rather useful to get a subset of J8 features.

> Retrolambda is rather useful to get a subset of J8 features.

I never advise hacks for production code. Either it is first class support or it doesn't get used.

Adding extra layers to debug only increases production costs.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#135

Post by devsquid »

e40 wrote: post #79
digi_owl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best i can tell, Doze is supposed to cover that automatically. But then Doze will wake the device up if a GCM priority notification comes down the wire. And i expect Facebook and the rest to start spamming those to make sure they get every nanosecond of your life to their servers.

Yeah, I don't see Google allowing me to stop Facebook (and others) from constantly checking for updates, etc.

Settings>Data Usage>Click app>Disable Background data.

Not ideal, but it works if its really an issue. Actually FB does not consume much bandwidth unless you are using it.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#136

Post by krschultz »

gusmd wrote: post #116
krschultz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn lies and statistics. The Android dashboard numbers are always super pessimistic on upgrade rate. I am the lead for an app with >250,000 installs. Over 45% of our usage is coming from Lollipop. The rest is JB & KK. We see I know other major apps that have even better numbers. Looking at my data, L usage was basically nil in January 2015. There was slow growth from there until April, when we saw an inflection poin…

This is very good news, thanks for sharing that. I'm learning Android development by building a basic app that I've always wanted but couldn't find in the play store. I'm targeting SDK 21 and minSDK 19 and was afraid of having a small userbase (based on the dashboard numbers). That means that I can continue to focus on the latest SDK and leverage all the good SDK 21 features :)

If you are working on a side project type app my best advice would be min SDK 19 or even 21. The total # of Android users in the world makes even the minority that are on L a large userbase. You will get much further faster not having to deal with backwards compatibility. If your app is aimed at making money, the people with money are generally on the newer versions. Not everyone can get away with it (Facebook will be supporting Gingerbread forever), but don't waste your time on the old versions if you can avoid it.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#137

Post by arthurfm »

vardump wrote: post #68
wongarsu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As for Internet, they leave that out of their "improved" Play store permissions as well (and the M groupings seems like a carbon copy). Why would they do that? On it's own "Internet" may not seem to be an important category, but I am willing to give apps many more permissions if I know that they can't phone home. For tools, the Internet permission is often the deciding factor for me.

A few years ago mobile virtualization was hyped a lot. What came of it? I'd love to be able to run multiple OS instances on same phone. Use one for private communication and others for fun and games (not that I play games, but the point).

There isn't any need for the OS to be virtualized now that Android supports dual-personas (i.e. Android for Work). [1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/a-revi...

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#138

Post by wtracy »

amolgupta wrote: post #3

the NDK support in Studio will end the use of eclipse for Android development.

I'm actually considering going back to Eclipse (or dumping IDEs altogether) because my computer is struggling under Android Studio's memory requirements.

(I'm unemployed and don't really want to pay for a 64-bit system. Anybody want to hire me so I can afford a new computer?)

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#139

Post by tdkl »

heyheyhey wrote: post #11

> Battery - We’re making Android devices smarter about managing power through a new feature called Doze. With M, Android uses significant motion detection to learn if a device has been left unattended for a while. In this state, Android will exponentially back off background activity, trading off a little bit of app freshness for longer battery life. Will this improve wakelock performance that has been plaguing Andro…

> Will this improve wakelock performance that has been plaguing Android for years?

"Unsurprisingly, there are three apps set to ignore battery optimization by default—Google Play Services, the Play Store, and Download Manager."[1]

So, nope. GPS will continue to do whatever they want and poll location every 60s.

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/05/28/android-m-feature-sp...

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#140

Post by [deleted] »

krschultz wrote: post #87
27182818284 wrote: post #28

Google is showing off Android M dev previews while devices sold new last fall in major US retailers are still running KitKat with no updates from Google or their providers. They continue to actively create the "fractured" world of Android. In other words, that's cool about Android M, but most people aren't even using L. (40% on K, 9% on L whose preview was the 2014 IO) Can Google not poach one or two of Apple's negot…

Damn lies and statistics. The Android dashboard numbers are always super pessimistic on upgrade rate. I am the lead for an app with >250,000 installs. Over 45% of our usage is coming from Lollipop. The rest is JB & KK. We see I know other major apps that have even better numbers. Looking at my data, L usage was basically nil in January 2015. There was slow growth from there until April, when we saw an inflection poin…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN