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WTF is up with everything using Android?

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WTF is up with everything using Android?

#1
I was recently looking at VR & AR devices

(As an aside: Because the res has improved enough where I can code, and the peak coding position is with a pants keyboard on an inversion table -- very suboptimal for a monitor)

I noticed all of them sans apple run Android.

I understand why Android has become the unfortunate standard for mobile, but it seem absurd to me that it is now taking over VR (as well as "IoT" devices, car computers and so on)

It seems like a very inelegant OS that essentially committed itself to the wrong paradigms in everything:

- Committing to JVM usage instead of supporting static compilation -- locking itself in a dead ecosystem that can't see the light of either Rust or simple scripting language - Having heavyweight security abstraction that don't really achieve much beyond a linux kernel - Dependant on a bunch of proprietary modules for - And (now) having a bunch of new features rooted in backwards compatibility hell

I can't even comprehend the monumental effort to get the sort of GPU-intensive and RT capabilities a proper VR experience requires running onto something like this (vs a minimal RT focused linux distro)

Am I just being unfair to android and missing a core benefit? Is it mass psychosis ? Am I missing an underlying reason why it's getting so popular ?

(To be clear: I assume vision OS is bad, given that it's apple, it just confuses me why e.g. meta would not develop their own OS)

Re: WTF is up with everything using Android?

#2
There are only two choices in mobile OS: Android vs iOS.

Android is more open and at the core it is Linux. Yeah, I dislike JVM too.

What I don't get is that even a simple app, e.g. FB Messenger (not the whole of FB) requires an 84MB download. What on earth lurks in that massive download when the actual app could probably fit into a couple kB?

Re: WTF is up with everything using Android?

#3
So, you want to develop an AR/VR device, and start shopping for hardware.

You’re not a mega company (yet), wanton get to market fast, so you want to focus on the AR/VR features, not on getting an OS, drivers and libraries for (3D) graphics up and running. You also want something (somewhat) portable, and assurance that you still can get hardware to deploy your stuff on X years from now.

You also don’t want to order a million units up front.

Given those constraints, I think you’ll find Android is your best option.

Re: WTF is up with everything using Android?

#5
Google is far more privacy invasive than Apple, and Apple has an ecosystem that works fairly smoothly across devices. Yes, it infuriates me at times. But anything with the Google touch on it can be counted on to be spyware.

I do find everything on the desktop to be vastly more efficient, powerful, feature-full and stable than mobile (stable as in text box cache like this not vanishing with an app switch ) so I expect little from mobile except to be usable on the easy chair.

Do you really need more from mobile? Size matters!! The smaller the device, the more you pay for miniaturization.

Re: WTF is up with everything using Android?

#6

There are only two choices in mobile OS: Android vs iOS. Android is more open and at the core it is Linux. Yeah, I dislike JVM too. What I don't get is that even a simple app, e.g. FB Messenger (not the whole of FB) requires an 84MB download. What on earth lurks in that massive download when the actual app could probably fit into a couple kB?

Right, I'm saying for a VR devices, no a mobile phone. It makes perfect sense why android would be the choice for a mobile phone. I'm rather confused what you are replying to.

Re: WTF is up with everything using Android?

#7

It is simply the superior product, who wants the other locked-in, locked down, horrible designed, overpriced, product that basically has to bought each year while features are taken away from it and it's price seems to increase yearly in a logarithmic manner...

I'm rather confused what you are replying to.

Re: WTF is up with everything using Android?

#8
post #3

So, you want to develop an AR/VR device, and start shopping for hardware. You’re not a mega company (yet), wanton get to market fast, so you want to focus on the AR/VR features, not on getting an OS, drivers and libraries for (3D) graphics up and running. You also want something (somewhat) portable, and assurance that you still can get hardware to deploy your stuff on X years from now. You also don’t want to order a…

> You’re not a mega company Right, I'm asking why Steam, HTC and Meta did this, which are in the top tech companies by market cap and spend billions on this stuff. Totally get why a small VR device dev would not do this.

> OS, drivers and libraries for (3D) graphics up and running Right, except that I am not saying one should build a kernel, and webgl, cuda, etc are kernel dependant not OS dependant

> assurance that you still can get hardware to deploy your stuff on X years from now I am unaware of android-specific hardware features to date (linux specific, maybe, but not android) -- you can literally add any bootloader and load a linux kernel and get drivers running on most phones even, w/o android, and where "android" is necessary it's simply an artifact of the company maintaining the phone having build the drivers into their distro and not released them separately.

> You also don’t want to order a million units up front. Again, seems unrelated, I'm talking about building the VR hardware i.e. not order off the shelf and white label (unless your claim here is that meta, htc, steam etc are doing white labeling, which doesn't seem to be the case)

Re: WTF is up with everything using Android?

#10

There are only two choices in mobile OS: Android vs iOS. Android is more open and at the core it is Linux. Yeah, I dislike JVM too. What I don't get is that even a simple app, e.g. FB Messenger (not the whole of FB) requires an 84MB download. What on earth lurks in that massive download when the actual app could probably fit into a couple kB?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...
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