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Android M Developer Preview and Tools

android-developers.blogspot.com

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Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#71

Post by esrauch »

zserge wrote: post #22
quotemstr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how people see Android developments as a choice of heavyweight IDEs. I do all my Android development, Java and native, with Emacs and Buck.

Oh, finally I'm not alone here! I use vim/tmux and yesterday I discovered Buck and made a quick project generator: http://zserge.com/blog/buck-build-system.html

I feel like I would take more than 8 extra seconds just writing out and correcting the package names in imports than I would gain by trying to write Java in vim, and I'm saying that as someone who otherwise uses vim/tmux for everything.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#72

Post by digi_owl »

wongarsu wrote: post #62
digi_owl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only way i see Google getting them all onboard is revenue sharing from Play based on what Android version the person is using.

Or google could just stop playing nice, they practically own the platform after all. If they would say "either you supply updates for two years or you are not allowed to preinstall google apps on new devices" the issue would be over.

And watch Samsung go Tizen over night, HTC partner up with Microsoft, etc etc etc.

Damn it, Android without Google is already big in China. And lets not forget that Amazon is maintaining what amounts to a fork for their device range.

Google can't really play hardball unless they want to go full Apple.

In essence Android has gotten where it is by being more accommodating to OEMs etc than the competition. Something akin to what MS was doing until they went retard with Windows Mobile 7.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#73

Post by digi_owl »

kllrnohj wrote: post #59
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…

Wakelocks have just been a scapegoat for people to pretend to sound smart when just saying that they want better battery life. They haven't actually been an issue for years. No, this won't magically fix bugs in apps that lead to poor battery life. If an app opens the camera and forgets to close it, yeah that's gonna murder your battery.

Yep, you can as easily find battery guzzling apps by looking at CPU time.

Whenever i have something odd going on with the battery life, some app is sitting right up there with Android system for CPU time (sometimes even above). And you don't hit those kinds of numbers even with heavily used apps like web browsers (and yes, the most frequent offenders are the Facebook slop that i only have because family).

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#74

Post by amphi »

higherpurpose wrote: post #51
ignoramous wrote: post #38

IMO, the most game changing feature announced today is 'Now on tap' Google isn't releasing more details on it, but with it, Google would be able to understand what you do, when you do it, who your pals are, who you go out to movies with, who you chat with the most, are you looking to quit your job, are you about to break up, are you going through a depression and so on... They haven't revealed anything about how exac…

> Google would be able to understand what you do, when you do it, who your pals are, who you go out to movies with, who you chat with the most, are you looking to quit your job, are you about to break up, are you going through a depression and so on... Sounds a lot like the NSA.

https://wikileaks.org/Op-ed-Google-and-the-NSA-Who-s.html

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#75

Post by hyperion_ »

frik wrote: post #37

Permissions "We are giving users control of app permissions in the M release. Apps can trigger requests for permissions at runtime, in the right context, and users can choose whether to grant the permission. Making permission requests right when they’re needed means users can get up and running in your app faster. Also, users have easy access to manage all their app permissions in settings." Great, finally Google got…

Using the developer preview now there is no difference when installing new apps, so do developers all have to make manual changes in their apps for it to work, or will Google flip a switch at some point?

Currently you can change app permissions once an app is installed, but they gain all the permissions they ask for when installed.

If each app has to be updated by the developer for the changes to take place, it might take a while for this to have any large effect on the ecosystem.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#76

Post by pas »

kllrnohj wrote: post #70
serve_yay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shouldn't even be possible IMO.

I, too, would love to live in a world where it's impossible to write bugs. Things would be so much nicer if Google could just solve the halting problem already. Sadly it's more likely I'll just get some stupid pony instead.

The OS manages resources. It can temporarily grant (exclusive) control of a resource to an application. It can measure your other resource activity (touchscreen). If not touch screen activity for a long time, or when simply the screen is locked, then why is the camera on?

Sure, it can be a spy app, designed to listen and record! But then the OS can expose a per-app maximum wake setting. Yes, it'd look like a spreadsheet instead of a happy user UI, but that'd be a solution, instead of this "oh we can't do anything" excuse.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#77

Post by Roritharr »

Sargos wrote: post #56
Roritharr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What scared me about that announcement was that "no changes in the app are necessary" which basically means that google from now on will parse the text that is displayed, regardless of the type of app that is open. Without any further clarification i have to expect Google now to send the displayed data of my mobile banking app to its servers everytime i hit that "Now on Tap" button, accidentally or not, while its ope…

This only works if the developer uses app indexing where Google can search through the content and make it searchable to end users and other endpoints. It doesn't come for free so Google has no access to things like your bank app's screen.

Do you have ans links or sources for that? I couldnt find anything so far.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#78

Post by christop »

rentnorove wrote: post #49
calvin_c wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've actually set the number of permission groups to 8. But at least you can accept/decline each individually. EDIT: The permission groups are Location Camera Microphone Contacts Phone SMS Calendar Sensor

Conspicuously absent: - Read external storage - Internet

"When the user installs or updates the app, the system grants the app all permissions that the app requests that fall under PROTECTION_NORMAL. For example, alarm clock and internet permissions fall under PROTECTION_NORMAL, so they are automatically granted at install time."

Based on the Android 5.1 source, there are a lot of permissions in the "normal" group, which will apparently now be accepted automatically at install time:

  $ curl -sL http://git.io/vklnX | grep -B2 'protectionLevel="normal"' | grep name | cut -d'"' -f2 | sort
  android.permission.ACCESS_LOCATION_EXTRA_COMMANDS
  android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE
  android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE
  android.permission.ACCESS_WIMAX_STATE
  android.permission.BROADCAST_STICKY
  android.permission.CHANGE_NETWORK_STATE
  android.permission.EXPAND_STATUS_BAR
  android.permission.FLASHLIGHT
  android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS
  android.permission.GET_PACKAGE_SIZE
  android.permission.GET_TASKS
  android.permission.KILL_BACKGROUND_PROCESSES
  android.permission.MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS
  android.permission.PERSISTENT_ACTIVITY
  android.permission.READ_SYNC_SETTINGS
  android.permission.READ_SYNC_STATS
  android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED
  android.permission.REORDER_TASKS
  android.permission.RESTART_PACKAGES
  android.permission.SET_TIME_ZONE
  android.permission.SET_WALLPAPER
  android.permission.SET_WALLPAPER_HINTS
  android.permission.TRANSMIT_IR
  android.permission.VIBRATE
  android.permission.WAKE_LOCK
  android.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS
  android.permission.WRITE_SYNC_SETTINGS
  android.permission.WRITE_USER_DICTIONARY
Though note that the INTERNET permission is currently in the "dangerous" permission group, so I guess some changes have been made for Android M.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#79

Post by e40 »

digi_owl wrote: post #57
e40 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I see missing, that Xposed + App Ops gives me is the "Keep Awake"... having revoked this permission from almost all non-Google apps, my battery life is a full 50% longer than other people with my phone report.

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.

Re: Android M Developer Preview and Tools

#80

Post by on_and_off »

wongarsu wrote: post #65
digi_owl wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they consider external storage to be already handled by the Storage Access Framework. As for Internet, they leave that out of their "improved" Play store permissions as well (and the M groupings seems like a carbon copy).

>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.

Crash reporting and analytics come to mind as reasonable applications of the default internet permission.
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