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Android 16 is here

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Re: Android 16 is here

#251

Post by Eavolution »

MostlyStable wrote: post #22
esseph wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing that happens to every OS, features and bloat. That said, Pixel devices all the way. No gross UI reskin, no having multiple copies of the same type of app (Samsung camera vs android camera, dialers, keyboards, etc.). Fast, stable, good features. If it's not a pixel device, you're probably going to have a "mid" experience.

Which is unfortunate, because one of the strengths of Android was the diversity of the hardware ecosystem (although that strength has been lessening as manufacturers have all begun to converge on a common set of hardware features). You could get a phone that had the features you in particular wanted. Needing to buy a particular phone to get a good experience is a bummer. I say that as someone who has had several Pixe…

I was hoping over time the hardware beginning to get more similar would make the hardware more standardised and open like it is on PC allowing easier rom development, but that seems to be a pipe dream.

Re: Android 16 is here

#252

Post by jaoane »

octo888 wrote: post #213

"Unfortunately, Android has made changes which will make it much harder for us to port to Android 16 and future releases. It will also make adding support for new Pixels much more difficult. We're likely going to need to focus on making GrapheneOS devices sooner than we expected." https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114662145938666044

Okay, but what are the changes that made porting more difficult?

Re: Android 16 is here

#253

Post by colorman »

rickdeckard wrote: post #248
edg5000 wrote: post #212

"Samsung DeX has helped maximize productivity on phones, foldables and tablets for years. In Android 16, we worked closely with Samsung to develop desktop windowing, a new way to interact with your apps and content on large-screen devices." PS Let me make a guess for the future. Android Desktop mode will improve and people will ditch Windows and instead plug their phone into a USB-C dock that connects it to keyboard,…

> What does "working closely" mean for a company with infinite SW dev resources? What do they need from Samsung as far as software goes? Samsung already learned lessons from that journey, Google did not. Also, the Android strategy is to not compete with Android vendors on OS features, they rather collaborate to make them contribute improvements back to the OS. This strategy makes the project faster, cheaper, reduces…

> most of all reduces brand-stickiness within the Android ecosystem (--> if Samsung DeX gets merged into Android, Samsung users can switch brands easier).

Why would Samsung want this? Why would they actively reduce their own competitiveness by giving away distinguished features?

Re: Android 16 is here

#254

Post by benchly »

hackyhacky wrote: post #232
hulitu wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> be clear, legible, and get out of the way. Which none of the current OSs do (except Linux without SystemD or BSDs, with a custom WM)

Huh? What does systemd have to do with UX? If you want a bare bones Linux GUI, there are plenty of options, e.g. i3, which are completely independent of your preferred process 1.

Not the user you asked, but systemd has been controversial for a long time, long enough that I see the topic come up about once a month on various forums. There's a few folks who even consider it a bit fascist, I guess.

I don't particularly mind it myself, but I get where some power users would get irked by it. This article does a decent job of explaining why; https://www.infoworld.com/article/2251761/linux-why-do-peopl...

Re: Android 16 is here

#255

Post by rep_wex »

colorman wrote: post #253
rickdeckard wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does "working closely" mean for a company with infinite SW dev resources? What do they need from Samsung as far as software goes? Samsung already learned lessons from that journey, Google did not. Also, the Android strategy is to not compete with Android vendors on OS features, they rather collaborate to make them contribute improvements back to the OS. This strategy makes the project faster, cheaper, reduces…

> most of all reduces brand-stickiness within the Android ecosystem (--> if Samsung DeX gets merged into Android, Samsung users can switch brands easier). Why would Samsung want this? Why would they actively reduce their own competitiveness by giving away distinguished features?

To reduce disparency between the Samsung fork and the upstream. Google will implement this feature anyway, then why not agree on implementation details to have less merge conflicts in the future?

Re: Android 16 is here

#256

Post by andrelaszlo »

> Clearer, simpler calling with hearing devices

This is really important for me. Currently, hearing aids will turn to full duplex during calls, and be used as both input and output.

- Audio quality will be much worse, since the bandwidth is split between the two channels. This is obviously bad if you're already struggling to hear.

- Listening to music, for example, the volume controls on the hearing aids simultaneously turn surrounding sounds down and the music up, or vice versa. In "phone-call" mode, however, the phone hijacks the volume control so if you're struggling to hear on a call in a noisy environment there's no way to increase the volume without simultaneously amplifying the surrounding noise to painfully loud levels.

- As mentioned in the article, the microphones are designed to make me hear other people but not myself, making other people complain about my sound a lot. The best I can do is to say "sorry - either you'll hear me like this or I won't hear you at all"

This was designed for people using BT headsets of course, but hearing aids are not headsets.

On Linux I can just pick which microphone I want to use and which mode to use for Bluetooth. It's worked flawlessly for the last decade. To me, that's being "user friendly", good UX, or whatever you want to call it.

On Windows, you can go deep into some ancient, almost hidden, settings and disable the microphone on the BT device. On macOS, you can do the same using the old Audio MIDI Setup tool. It will periodically reset itself of course, like anything related to a11y on macOS. Not sure about iOS, would be interesting to know.

Re: Android 16 is here

#257

Post by benchly »

prmoustache wrote: post #218
delfinom wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTC is dead. LG has exited the phone market. Motorola is barely hanging out. Turns out people tend to gravitate to a few choices.... Xioami/Huawei are in essence banned from the US.

That is probably a US only viewpoint. Everywhere else in the world apart from Samsung, Xiaomi is super big as well as brands such as Oppo, Realme, Honor, Pocophone, TCL, Oneplus, Huawei, Motorola and many others I just can't remember from the top of my head. i have the feeling that for anything in the US, everything has to end up in monopolies or bipartisan approach. People just seem to buy what their neighbors/cowor…

To be fair, in the US we can still walk into a Best Buy* and purchase a Motorola (my choice), Nokia, or OnePlus. In that environment, however, you will also notice that Samsung and Apple are the dominant device manufacturers, with consumers looking at Google phones as the stable alternative (for some reason).

There's also Amazon, which is often cheaper, but I am a bit old school in the regard that I like to physically use the device before I purchase it.

Either way, the perceived restrictions are more of a self-imposed thing rooted in our consumer conditioning here, which is this weird blend of "customer choice" and "all choices are basically the same" that gets muddy very, very quickly. Most people I talk to, especially the non-technical ones, do not realize that my $150US Moto is serving me just as well as an $600US Samsung would, with my needs being all the common types of communications, reliable 5G, a decent camera and run specific apps I use to control some cloud infrastructure while on the go. It's difficult to feel sympathy when I hear people complain about paying Apple $1000US just to look at TikTok or use Discord. We are guided on what to buy via the marketing machine instead of examining our use-cases and researching a suitable product before purchasing.

It's all silly bullshit, really.

Re: Android 16 is here

#258

Post by hackyhacky »

benchly wrote: post #254
hackyhacky wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? What does systemd have to do with UX? If you want a bare bones Linux GUI, there are plenty of options, e.g. i3, which are completely independent of your preferred process 1.

Not the user you asked, but systemd has been controversial for a long time, long enough that I see the topic come up about once a month on various forums. There's a few folks who even consider it a bit fascist, I guess. I don't particularly mind it myself, but I get where some power users would get irked by it. This article does a decent job of explaining why; https://www.infoworld.com/article/2251761/linux-why-do-pe…

I fully understand the controversy about systemd, but the comment I replied to seemed to imply that systems was related to the Linux GUI, which it is not.

Re: Android 16 is here

#259

Post by diffeomorphism »

izacus wrote: post #139
diffeomorphism wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that what all the 2015 antitrust stuff was about? Manufacturers were contractually forbidden from doing that.

Samsung literally provides their own alternative for all of these.

No, they provide them in addition but not as replacements/defaults. That is what the discussion was about.
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