Android 2.2 and developers goodies | Hacker News Reader

Android 2.2 and developers goodies

android-developers.blogspot.com

58 pointsmcantelon22 comments

There's an "update all" option (providing permissions haven't changed) in the market now -- that should quell a few complaints!

> Applications can now request installation on the shared external storage (such as an SD card).

Finally! Maybe now some of the devices stuck at 1.5 and 1.6 will be able to get an official upgrade.

I don't understand why applications should specify where they get installed. Shouldn't that be something handled by the system, possibly with guidance from the user?

Does your post imply that this feature will help some of the 1.5/1.6 devices be upgradeable to 2.x or is that unrelated?

Applications currently can't be installed to the SD card at all (rooted/modded phones excepted). I don't know what say the user will have.

Many of the older phones have limited internal storage, which the newer releases don't easily fit into, so presumably some applications could be offloaded into SD storage to make upgrades possible.

For older Android phones like the G1, it has been difficult if not impossible to upgrade to 2.1 because the devices do not have enough space in ROM to store the entire firmware and userspace applications. There are a few custom firmwares that use an "Apps2SD" method of running applications from the SD card, but it tends to be flaky, and requires special partitioning from the user.

If 2.2 makes the Apps2SD method a reliable part of the core firmware, combined with the JIT/V8 performance boosts, it should be quite possible to breath new life into an older model with 2.2.

I'm guessing application developers could pick because many of them are paranoid with piracy.

Since Android is much more open than Android once you have an application file you can easily share it.

So since the file system is open, couldn't you still trivially get to the files and move them to the SD card or FTP them to a friend? Is this really much of a barrier?

Unless you have root on your phone (you don't on most phones unless you exploit a security hole) then you can't access files owned by applications.

This is an important feature for all Android devices. The N1 is only 6 months old and has 512MB of built in storage. Only a smaller subset of that is actually available for applications to install. Probably enough space for most people today but with games, GPS mapping apps, etc it's really just not enough. As the OP noted it's even worse on the older models where you typically have less than 200MB to install applications.

Now they just need to release FroYo for phones other than the Nexus One, Droid, and at some point EVO.

I want it for my MyTouch, so I can finally have all the new goodies :(

Please yell at your carrier. If Google had their way, every phone would already be on Android 2.1, but unfortunately carriers and manufacturers are still demanding to be in control of what firmware gets pushed to "their" devices.

Yell at Google too. They're the ones who opted to give that control to the carriers/handset makers.

Retaining central control over usage does not match with releasing the code under an open source license.

Google does exercise control over many Android phones (http://mobilespoon.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-google-exper...), so it wouldn't be a stretch to mandate OS upgrades.

I'd imagine that if they hadn't given that control to carriers and manufacturers, we wouldn't have had a carrier to release a flagship model on...

Am I being stupid, or does the SDK not contain the hardware update? I've spent an hour digging around in the apparently false hope that I would be able to update my N1 today :-)

Nope. Android SDK updates have never yet (to my knowledge) contained updates for real live phones. The SDK is released, but Android 2.2 isn't out for any phones yet. Which makes sense when you think about it. Dev's should have at least a little time to test their apps under 2.2 in the emulator before 2.2 starts rolling out to phones.

On the Google developers blog, it does say:

"As I said at the beginning, Android 2.2 will be here soon, and some devices will get the update in the coming weeks. I invite application developers to download the new SDK and tools and test your applications today."

so hopefully that means we won't have long to wait?

I'm interested in the fact that the new Android browser runs the V8 JavaScript interpreter, which is a C++ program with an x86 JIT, so they must have ported or completely rewrote it from the ground-up for Java and the Dalvik VM.

There is also a native interface for Android, maybe they were able to use that.

The NDK is only needed for including native ARM code in Android packages (APK files).

The Android kernel and system libraries have always been native code. This includes Dalvik itself, and WebKit and V8 (or JavaScriptCore), and many other libraries like SQLite, Speex, BlueZ, BSDiff, and zlib. They are installed directly on the system partition, not in APK files, and this has been true since before the NDK existed.

The "Browser" app is an activity written in Java, but it uses the Android WebView API to embed WebKit, which is written in C++. The Java code handles the browser "chrome" - menus, toolbars, everything except the page content. (This is similar to Firefox which uses the C++ Gecko engine with JavaScript/XUL chrome.)

The Android browser (WebKit) has always been written in C++.

They definitely had to port the parts that generate x86 bytecode to generate ARM bytecode instead, but they almost certainly used the Android NDK (http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html) since V8 is written in C++.

It seems a JavaScript VM is the very definition of "perfomance-critical".

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