231–240 of 245 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real point of the original comment was that outside the US iMessage is not dominant and so nobody cares about what color a chat bubble is.
Did we read the same thing? There is nothing about color of chat bubble but there is "they all use WhatsApp". No they don't. Not all. More like half.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is it doesn't have a developer community that could maintain the project without Google.
It doesn't have one because Google is doing it and then publishing the code so there is no point in someone else redoing what's already been done. If they were to stop, the demand for someone to do it would still be there, and that demand wouldn't be getting met anymore, which creates the incentive for others to do it. Meanwhile the point is that most of "it" doesn't actually need to be done anyway. You don't need to…
You're right, if Google steps away from Android completely then there would be incentive for others to do it, another megacorp will step in. Maybe Facebook or Microsoft or Samsung.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but God does WhatsApp suck. They've got a billion-strong userbase and yet the Android app still dumped literally every attachment I received into my camera roll until I manually added '.nomedia' files in the right places. And, oh man, the API for businesses is a Kafkaesque nightmare. Maybe it was good before it got Zucked, but I had to fight with their support for over a week to get an automated ban-hammer over…
What's "camera roll"? WA images go into the "WhatsApp Images" folder. They're separate from "Camera".
That works fine (and is in fact easier than remembering the exact album) when I get to pick and choose exactly what I photograph/save, but it became borderline unusable once WhatsApp started vomiting hundreds of stupid GIFs and throwaway screenshots into it.
I hope they make it closed source and make us much money out of it as possible for shareholders that is their job and their duty, why are they giving this away for free they have already captured market share by claiming opensource and building a community now all they have to do is make it proprietary and the old opensource version slowly wither and become unstable, then they can charge money for the operating syste…
" For a while now, Google has been developing most parts of Android behind closed doors in its “internal branches,” with the “AOSP branch” only having certain other aspects of Android’s framework (including Bluetooth, kernel, and some other core components). As such, it’s been quite a while since the current state of AOSP is at the same level as Google’s internal builds, leaving developers and others to wait on Google to make a public release to get all of the new changes.
With this change to move everything to its internal, private development branch, Google isn’t changing the speed at which these new builds arrive. Rather, this will potentially streamline the process and prevent conflicts when merging the branch"
They might be cooking up their own silicon, like Apple did when transitioning from the A-series chips to the M1. If that's the case, they'd definitely want to keep any low-level system tweaks or new APIs under wraps. This whole situation also reminds me of the Manifest V3 drama with Chromium. They might be planning something similar and want to avoid the early headaches of public criticism. Or maybe they're doing a b…
Don't they already have their own silicon (Tensor)?
In comparison Apple (and the very very latest QC chipsets) use custom ARM cores. Google has yet to do this.
Hmm while this could be sold as just to prevent leaks (which occasionally happen), I think this is more likely a first step to closing the source, in light of the EU messing up their open source monetisation strategy. Well, more like the 5th step really. They already moved a ton of functionality into Google Play Services, and discontinued a load of the open source stock apps like Calendar.
Google kinda irked me when they purchased Motorola - I was hopeful we'd get nice hardware with the android team focused on making android better but they instead gutted the company and sold it off and android has been more solid on non Google devices from what I can tell. From pixels not having an operating system shipping to people to pixels 4 and 7 having notable worse camera features (I should note I'm biased to h…
This headline really is misleading. The source will still be released, it just means that the work leading up to a release will be in private. IMO, there's nothing wrong with that, since it's likely that a lot of the intermediate com mediates are likely just noise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need DSC off?
Psychology more than anything, to be honest. I know it's supposed to be visually lossless, but it does touch and nudge many pixels, and I just want the raw image. I do dabble in graphics and UI frontend at times, and I don't want to take chances. It's something that spending a little more time digging into the algorithmic details of DSC might address for me, but I haven't so far.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't have one because Google is doing it and then publishing the code so there is no point in someone else redoing what's already been done. If they were to stop, the demand for someone to do it would still be there, and that demand wouldn't be getting met anymore, which creates the incentive for others to do it. Meanwhile the point is that most of "it" doesn't actually need to be done anyway. You don't need to…
Debian doesn't "work" like Android works. Almost no end-user runs Debian on any of their devices because no one wants Debian over anything else. If you want to achieve Debian's stunning success of having almost no consumer adoption, you should follow its model of community development. You're right, if Google steps away from Android completely then there would be incentive for others to do it, another megacorp will s…
Meanwhile there are hardly any devices that come with it, because Macs come with macOS and Microsoft exerts pressure on PC OEMs, so all of the people running it are people who explicitly did want Debian over anything else, as opposed to many millions of Windows users who have no real preference or an active dislike of their operating system but got it by default with the hardware and may not even realize that anything else is available.
If Google stopped developing Android, it would still be one of the two major incumbent platforms and people would continue to use it. It might even get better because third party apps would have to stop depending on proprietary Google APIs/services and then the community could strip out the Google spying code without worrying about losing access to those APIs. So then the question isn't how to get a critical mass of users -- that's already there -- you just need basic maintenance of a stable code base, which is a thing the community can demonstrably do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debian doesn't "work" like Android works. Almost no end-user runs Debian on any of their devices because no one wants Debian over anything else. If you want to achieve Debian's stunning success of having almost no consumer adoption, you should follow its model of community development. You're right, if Google steps away from Android completely then there would be incentive for others to do it, another megacorp will s…
Millions of people run Debian, even though it has zero marketing budget and is competing primarily with Microsoft Windows (infamous for anti-competitive practices) and macOS (a largely competent operating system with the backing of another multi-trillion dollar megacorp that itself increasingly uses anti-competitive practices). Meanwhile there are hardly any devices that come with it, because Macs come with macOS and…
Anyway in the world we both live in, if Google abandoned Android then most people would instantly switch to a megacorp fork of Android with that megacorp's own proprietary APIs and services because people will follow the proprietary things they care about like for eg fast & battery-efficient centralized notifications, an out-of-the-box app store with popular apps like Instagram, and tap to pay.
But I didn't have to explain this to you, you already know this. You know this because "millions of people" is derived from you knowing that the peak Linux desktop marketshare is like 4% out of billions of people. You know this because you said users are "worrying about losing access to those [proprietary, spying] APIs" which is why megacorps who provide these proprietary spying APIs will actually win over users. You know this because you know friends or family or colleagues who are aware of Debian and still don't choose it because they rely on some proprietary service or API that Debian's community developers have never given a rat's ass about.