Android N developer preview 2 is out | Hacker News Reader

Android N developer preview 2 is out

android-developers.blogspot.com

110 pointsdeepakkarki75 comments

I much preferred the generic yellow gumdrop emoji. The people feel a little too bland.

Absolutely, emojis shouldn't have a race, gender or sexual orientation. They should be round and yellow. When they're yellow genderless blobs, they're universal, they transcend categorization. They're abstract representations of an emotion. This racially diverse politically correct human emoji movement is just ridiculous and can be more racist than not. [1]

EDIT: What's more, if you go this route and truly want to embrace diversity you get to take a mandatory lesson in combinatorics. Consider the "couple" emoji. A couple should be any combination of two human emojis of any race and gender with repetition allowed (to allow same sex and/or same race couples). A family of three or four has even more combinations (consider interracial couple with adopted children). What about unconventional families, single parents, anyone? Why is there no emoji for an extended family? No wonder the family emojis are still nuclear and yellow.

I really wonder about the combination of ignorance of Unicode, stick-in-the-mud attitude to diversity and appetite for accidental irony that makes someone write a long paragraph (570 characters - that's at least 10^170 combinations of characters - basically impossible to store) about how it's impossible in 2016 to apply combining characters to emoji (which is how the diverse emoji are already implemented).

I didn't imply that it's impossible. I just mean it is silly. Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations. Perhaps you would need to enter your race when you create a Google or Apple account to alleviate this. Or perhaps the vendor has already analyzed the cloud stored pictures of you and your family members, determined the age, race, gender and the resulting family tree and handily preselected the appropriate emoji for you. I mean this is an exaggeration, but that's how ridiculous I think single "human" emojis already are.

If you want to respond in a way that shows who you personally are, send a picture, today's messaging apps together with front and back facing cameras make it easier than ever before. If you want a quick impersonal throwaway response, there's always a yellow emoji. The in-between "catered to you" emojis are an awkward, uncanny middle ground.

> I just mean it is silly.

What's your point in bringing up combinatorics then?

> Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations.

Imagine using the most trivial kind of UI (literally a LRU cache would do the job) so that emoji you use more often are presented first. In fact, you don't even need to imagine, because this is how they already work on Android.

I have to wonder why you are dedicating so much energy to problematizing uses of emoji that you disapprove of without really seeming to know much of them. If they don't work for you maybe just don't use them?

I'm going to leave this link in the rather forlorn hope that something about it might take root:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality...

These days when I have to send the :thumpsup: smiley on IMs I am presented with a list of 6 different coloured smileys, I end up not using smileys at all, it is rather annoying to have race/sex/colour to a smiley. Come on they are cute little pieces of graphics, don't put a sex/race/colour to it! It all started with whatsapp, they'll say in the future.

Whoops, lost the footnote [1] while editing the comment.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/10/...

Suddenly emojis becomes embedded SVG images...

yeah I'll miss them too.

Read a blog post recently about emoji[0] that pointed out that by going to human emoji, you end up having to make weighted decisions about diversity. For example, the kiss emoji in the Google set was two genderless blobs, but in the new version the default one is M/F....

Basically the blog goes on to point out how Apple has kind of taken control of emoji design decisions thanks to the ubiquitousness of iphones.

App developers having basically only iphones has taken its toll. People include apple emoji even in android versions of their app! Basically you end up seeing google emoji only inside hangouts...

[0]:https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/

I understand the point here and agree to some extent, but on the other hand I think using a standardised set of emojis makes sense for cross-platform communication apps such as Whatsapp, as I think the meaning of some of them is reasonably subtle and those subtleties are very much influenced by the specific design - for example, the Apple "person with folded hands" shown in the article clearly represents prayer to me, whereas the original Google one looks kind of creepy with its screwed up face. I found this to be an issue when I had a windows phone - for better or for worse, emoji are used quite a lot, and I sometimes had to think back to the iOS equivalent to make sense of them, as they looked so different.

In my opinion Apple's take on emoji is both the most visually attractive (the proportions of the old Google ones are way off and the "slug" creatures quite visually unappealing) and the richest, so it's no wonder they have become the de facto standard. In fact, I'd wager emoji wouldn't have taken off anything like as well as they have if everyone saw the original Google versions, for example, as they lack the "cuteness" and charm of Apple's versions.

What might be nice is if Apple were to make them fully open source - I've wondered before what the legal status of apps like Whatsapp embedding them in their app is.

> the Apple "person with folded hands" shown in the article clearly represents prayer to me, whereas the original Google one looks kind of creepy with its screwed up face

I don't think Google's version of the character is supposed to represent prayer, but rather asking for a favor (which seems much more useful):

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PlaWxKgYl60/TSvvov-JHbI/AAAAAAAAAB...

http://stat.news.ameba.jp/news_images/20150114/10/9a/z1/j/o0...

http://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/r/ranmaru-24me...

yeah it's supposed to be the typical Japanese "pretty please?" pose. Extra reason why I really don't get what apple was trying to accomplish with the prayer hands.

The issue I have with Apple's emoji is that some of them (like the "praying one") just do not follow the "spec" described.

The hands totally don't match the "person with folding hands" definition of the Unicode codepoint. Might as well use wingdings...

The unified look is useful, just wish they would stick to things that match the description at the very least.

That's a fair point, didn't even occur to me!

I wish Google had added the emojis to the appstore years ago and made them updateable independent of the OS release. My phone will not get the upgrade to N so I am stuck with the old emojis unless I install CM14 in the future.

Another problem is that there are way too many emojis on the keyboard and it takes ages to find the right one. There should be a "long press -> hide this emoji" option in the keyboard to get rid of the 75% you will never use.

Rather than hide, I'd have them "sink to the bottom" or add a "hidden page" with the opposite semantics (unhide on long press). This prevents mistakes and allows people to create a workflow where they only whitelist (or filter to top) certain emojis, while still having access to ones they didn't think they needed.

That sounds like a good idea. For each category/page you can move your 20-30 most favorite emojis to the top.

No need to install CM14, with root you can replace NotoColorEmoji.ttf in /system/fonts

Better yet, a search function where each character has proper descriptions.

If you've ever used LINE, they have a really nice inline emoji suggestion function, where as you type words a list of possibly related emoji appear (presumably they have them tagged with various keywords).

Everything else about LINE is terrible, but I'd love it if everyone just copied that particular interaction.

Swype does this too, although I never really use them, it is a cool feature.

Swiftkey has this, and it really changed the game for me because it baked emoji discovery directly into my typing flow.

Slack places the "recently used" emojis on the first page. That works really for me.

Yes, but the "recently used" emojis constantly move around based on their usage. I'd rather have them in a fixed place for muscle memory.

As does Android, actually.

And iOS.

Here is the Verge's take on the new emojis http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11423722/android-is-finall...

Slightly off-topic point about that article/the Verge.

Is it just me, or is it in the Verge’s style guide for writers to assert their opinion as if it were one everyone holds. I guess it’s supposed to be light-hearted and funny, but it just seems snarky and pseudo-authoratative.

Here the writer’s tone is “well thank God for that, finally Google has listened to the overwhelming majority of people, for whom this was a big problem.”, and as evidence they link an article which provides none for that point.

The Verge isn't doing its research (as usual): The blob emojis are not going anywhere (it's just the "people" emoji that are being changed). See screenshots at http://www.droid-life.com/2016/04/13/whats-new-in-android-n-... for example.

Agreed, and make them green or blue if the yellow is not racially generic enough.

I hate them. They look like something out of the 90's design.

Vulkan was there before? As everyone talks only about stupid emojis. I am confused. Vulkan seemed to me as a great big news.

I'm still bitter about my nexus 4 being dropped from M for no technical reason. Other phones with similar hardware got the update.

You don't have to stay left behind, there are other high-quality android-M distros with full support for your hardware.

https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_mako

Which aren't from Google, meaning it can be trusted as much as any other OEM.

you could build CM or AOSP from source if you want

And void the warranty of a device in the process? No, thanks.

Do you still have a working warranty for your Nexus 4?

Nexus 4 isn't the only one that suffers from lack of support.

but thats what this comment thread is about.

Anecdotally: I have had a smartphone hardware fault repaired under warranty, despite having an unlocked bootloader and a custom ROM installed.

The seemingly dropped support for the Nexus 5 from N. Their "end of life" policy is the main reason I won't get an (Nexus|Pixel) tablet or anything else than a mid-range phone (in case they release one again). Maybe from a Silicon Valley perspective, 3 yrs old hardware is ancient but my old hardware is still 100% functional and has been battle tested.

I think phones should get security updates for at least 4 years. Quite a few people use them that long themselves, as I have in the past, but even more people get them used from others, which means a phone gets to be used for 4 or 5 years pretty easily.

Those should shouldn't be affected by a myriad of security vulnerabilities that come up by then just because they are poor and because companies would rather have planned obsolescence. It's the digital divide between rich and poor. The rich get security if they buy a high-end phone every year (if we are to consider Android's average security update lifetime), and the poor do not.

The Nexus 4 was excluded from dev previews but still got Lollipop. I think it's possible that the same may happen with the Nexus 5 in this case.

> 3 yrs old hardware is ancient but my old hardware is still 100% functional and has been battle tested.

True, but so is your software. Especially on Android where Play Services and the Chrome browser are updatable via the Play Store, being on the previous version of Android isn't such an issue any more.

I wonder why they release monthly updates with security fixes then.

What would be your alternative?

I think they're saying they won't get a high-end nexus phone. I'm price-sensitive as well. For example, I got my current nexus 6 in October 2015 only because it was on sale. I would be disappointed if I'd bought this phablet for $499.

I just got a 5X but of course I'm going to get the last update at the same time as anyone who bought the 5X back when it came out.

No phone is dropped from a release cycle for a technical reason. It's just "we promise to give you updates for n years" at best.

which was good when it was first offered, at that time lots of carriers were not passing on updates, this is better than that...

Well I guess we're past the point of no return of trying to stop the ridiculousness of some unicode characters (e.g. Pile of Poo)... what should happen is all these "emoji" should just be different font sets that we can pick and choose in our software.

Does Android N allow the choice of different "emoji font sets"? I'm guessing probably not.

Well except for you cann't have everyone agreeing on what fonts to include in their app. J

You mean like https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Yeah... Like google's current emoji set could be called... "PC Emoji" and if people liked them they could just keep using them. The new one could be "Material Design Emoji".

I think only Samsung allows fonts to be changed easily without root. There are some several font-changing apps that work if you do have root though.

Edit: Apparently this doesn't change emoji though, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496788

Hopefully this fixes the random freezes/slow downs/reboots I'm getting on my 5X. Running the beta on my main phone was my mistake, admittedly.

Luckily for you, everyone at Google has a 5X so it's bugs should get tons of attention.

http://9to5google.com/2015/12/13/googlers-nexus-5x-holiday-g...

Seems like a hardware issue to me. I've never had any of those on my 5x. I had a 5 that had to be replaced because it did have a hardware issue. Bad RAM can cause the symptoms you described, and I believe that was the problem with my 5.

I had this bad then uninstalled the FB app & Messenger and it all cleared up. Maybe coincidence with a OS update that I didn't register but many online said FB was major stability issues on 5X so worth a try!

I've gotten the exact same thing. Also hoping it clears up

> Developer Preview 2 is intended for developers and not as a daily driver; this build is not yet optimized for performance and battery life.

So probably not.

How does one invoke these launcher shortcuts? Long pressing an app icon?

They'll probably just be additional entries in the launcher, my guess is they'll only take a normal tap.

after Android 4, was there any single feature that wasn't self-serving?

I'm still waiting first class voip. or even a single sms client that doesn't try to force me to use g+

The AOSP built in sms client does not use G+

Google's "Messenger" client does not use G+

You can also use Google's Hangout client purely for SMS (you can sign out of hangouts)

If you don't like any of them, there are hundreds in the play store that have no G+ requirement, and any of them can be set as the default.

As for first class VoIP; again, I have no idea what you mean. Android has a full SIP stack that's built in.

The SIP settings are tricky to find, the phone will fall back to the mobile network really quickly, there's no codec selection and no incentive to improve because PJSIP is pretty much abandoned (and seems to be the stack that all competitors use)

try any of those: default im, hangouts, messenger.

and try to use the "full sip stack" or even Google's own gvoice. oh and then add a couple sim cards on the same phone and maybe two Google accounts.

now good luck trying to control which number will be the outgoing on any of those clients

On Android 5, most Nexus devices dropped all SMS apps for Hangouts.

And Dialer, Launcher, etc also require Google Play Services now.

I'm currently using the AOSP Launcher3, and it doesn't even properly align icons in a grid, because it's missing the autoscaling of Google Now Launcher.

Nexus is not an AOSP device, it is a Google device. It's an important distinction. That's why Dialer looks up the unknown numbers using Google services and Launcher has Google Now integrated (yes, when I used Nexus 5, I disabled both).

On the other hand, if you have device from another vendor, you will get their apps. Samsung or Sony launchers and dialers do not integrate with Google Play services. Their devices have their own account system though (not mandatory to use, fortunately).

>On Android 5, most Nexus devices dropped all SMS apps for Hangouts.

Just install Messenger (supports Android 4.1+): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

It's actually much nicer than hangouts for SMS and has features hangouts doesn't support (search, group messaging) and is updated regularly by Google (with no tie-in to G+ or Play Services) so it's not like it's an abandoned app.

>I'm currently using the AOSP Launcher3, and it doesn't even properly align icons in a grid, because it's missing the autoscaling of Google Now Launcher.

Get a different launcher? For eg, Nova Launcher (paid, but does not have any dependancy on Play Services) is basically Launcher3 (in terms of looks/functionality) with a ton of extra features.

Is your complaint that Google is letting AOSP apps languish? In which case I'd agree, but it's not like you're short on alternatives (and as time goes on Google seem to be opening more parts of Android to be replaced by third party apps -- in fact, the main components left are just the settings app and the notifications menu that you're stuck with whatever comes with your phone. Everything else is replacable by the end user)

> so it's not like it's an abandoned app.

The AOSP version is.

> Is your complaint that Google is letting AOSP apps languish? In which case I'd agree, but it's not like you're short on alternatives

Well, I am short on open source alternatives.

I always have ideas of features I’d want, and wish to integrate them into the apps I’m using – like integrating with the local phone book data for reverse caller lookup, as that has far better data than Google or OSM.

But I can’t do this with the closed apps.

Sure, I could replace everything now by installing other apps, but when all of them use SecureNet to prevent me from tinkering with anything, then I honestly prefer the good old days where I could just mod anything.

> Get a different launcher? For eg, Nova Launcher (paid, but does not have any dependancy on Play Services) is basically Launcher3 (in terms of looks/functionality) with a ton of extra features.

This is the very same issue.

I want a minimalistic launcher, with some special features I wrote myself already for Launcher2, but the AOSP Launcher3 is totally broken, and Nova Launcher is not even close to anything I’d want – minimalistic, not "accidentally swiped over an icon and half my screen is full of menus".

Since Google continued to drop work on AOSP apps, I’ve had to spend more and more time.

By now I have to maintain my own apps for music, notes, etc, now Launcher and SMS are becoming an issue, too. Sure, I’m a student, but my time is limited, too, and I’d like to not spend it rebuild things Google took from the community.

> On Android 5, most Nexus devices dropped all SMS apps for Hangouts.

AFAIK you can download Messenger from the Play store.

and can't uninstall hangouts.

There isn't a single sms client that doesn't try to force you to use G+? I don't remember even the stock sms app doing that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com