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Android Oreo

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The most interesting part is the way they are planning on tackling fragmentation in O onwards with Project Treble [0]

If your device ships with O it should be running an immutable semantically versioned HAL. In essence you should be able to be able to flash AOSP on every new device. No matter what the vendor does.

Edit: I can see it now, in the technical specs of each device you will see a list of HAL Versions. The newer your HAL the longer you can expect support from AOSP if not your vendor.

[0] http://androidbackstage.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/episode-75-pr...

So you'll still be vulnerable to kernel bugs but most everything else will get regular updates? A bit better I suppose.

I think the idea is that you can update the HAL portion as well, and the system on top of it can be verified to have not problems with that HAL independently (and you can wait for that or or just update the HAL as available if you think it's important enough).

Since it's semantically versioned, you can theoretically have fairly high assurance of what updates might cause problems and what should purely fix a bug that doesn't affect normal functionality.

Actually it also helps for this.

O standardize how HAL interfaces between the framework and the low level vendor implementation.

So you can update either, as long as the interface contract is respected, it should be transparent. It is of course more work for Google since the framework will need to keep supporting old version of this interface but that's a necessary evolution.

Have we reinvented Windows CE yet?

huh .. I always suspected Fuchsia/Magenta were going to be a basis for Android going forward to get around the fragmentation situation. They still could be in the future, since no one is really sure what they're being developed for.

i haven't read up on fuchsia/magenta too much yet, but my impression is that it's going to be a much larger shift in general.

If Google can take some less drastic strides to fix this problem before a huge change like fuchsia, theres probably a better chance for an easy(er) transition.

There cannot exist an easy transition because they are completely different,

Java/Kotlin/C++ vs Dart for user space, Linux vs Magenta for the kernel and drivers.

this is why I should stop commenting I stuff I haven't gotten super familiar with. I didn't know Dart was the choice for user space. I suppose they could theoretically include an compatibility layer for java/kotlin userspace apps, but that seems like a lot of baggage depending on what the real goal is.

Android have been promising to finally tackle fragmentation in every release since KitKat. It seems people have a very short memory.

While I agree with the skepticism because, frankly, Google can not be trusted to deliver on most product promises they make...

... they have gotten better at this.

The code speaks for itself. Any Android implementation is now split in two halfs, one which is easily replaced and one which is not.

If vendors choose to not use this feature it is on them.

Actually since Google is still allowing customizations, it will hardly change anything.

Actually, this is not an allowed customization.

Then spend one hour of your life listening to ADB Podcast, where Android team explicitly states that, saying that they don't want to encumber the work of them creating unique experiences.

http://androidbackstage.blogspot.de/2017/08/episode-75-proje...

I sit next to Iliyan; I mentioned your comment to him and he chuckled.

That'd be a significant change to the Android license. AFAIK no such change has taken place.

They can impose whatever they want to OEMs who want to ship the Play Services and Google apps. That's pretty much all of them.

If they say "install it this way or no Play Store for you", every manufacturer will follow.

That is what I have been wishing for years, and yet they still choose not to do it.

They almost certainly cannot do that in Europe at the moment given the regulatory situation. Indeed, I expect to see far fewer restrictions going forward, not more.

Why would they do that? Isn't Play Store the way Google monetizes android?

And they have been, gradually. Treble is a relatively big step, comparatively, but it's not like it's the first thing they've done.

There's a reason that "new emoji" is a headline feature now, a lot of the system has been pulled out and is distributed seperately to the OS now so it doesn't have to go through the vendor's QA cycle.

Functional planned obsolescence. Hardware vendors will find a way to break hardware abstraction layers... so they can sell more hardware. Its the business model.

I bought a series of Nexus phones.

The Nexus 5 no longer works.

The Nexus 4 still works, but its battery is puffing out.

The Nexus S has no hardware problems at all, but it's too underpowered to run modern software.

The model "phone vendors nefariously build products with short lifespans, regardless of what people want to buy, so that they can sell more hardware" has trouble explaining why the longest-lived phones are the earliest ones. It seems more likely that the phone vendors of today build phones with short lifespans because bitter experience tells them that building a robust, long-lived phone is all cost and no benefit -- the phone costs more, it's heavier, it's fatter, and all your customers replace it before the cheaper, sleeker, more attractive phone would have failed anyway, meaning they actually get zero minutes of extended lifespan.

It's the same reason animals age and die.

> The model "phone vendors nefariously build products with short lifespans, regardless of what people want to buy, so that they can sell more hardware" has trouble explaining why the longest-lived phones are the earliest ones.

Maybe because first you try to make your earlier products good to get customers, and then once your business is going and you've grabbed a portion of the market you find it profitable to take risks like this?

My phone did died too (Nexus 6P). This doesn't mean all Nexus phones will die within opening the box.

I am still using my Nexus 4 from 2012, the only issue with it is that I don't get any upgrades anymore

> It's the same reason animals age and die.

With the difference that younger (newer) animals are better built. :-)

I think most 50+ would disagree on this point... :-)

In the context of how much longer the item is likely to last, I expect I'll still agree even after I turn 50.

What difference?

The Nexus S appears to be immortal. That means that when young, it was terrible (by modern standards), and now that it's old, it's still terrible, but no worse.

The Nexus 5 is mortal. When young, it is good. When old, it is even worse than an old Nexus S. Just like an animal, it's strong in youth and decrepit in age.

This doesn't make any sense. It assumes there's no competition between manufacturers, and that users don't switch. If older phones were actually "better", manufacturers would just make those and steal customers from anyone making the newer devices.

The phones of today aren't "built with shorter lifespans in mind", but they are built with more tightly packed components, more energy-dense batteries (to support their power-hungry CPUs and large amount of RAM), etc. Because that's what you need to do so you're not "too underpowered to run modern software." Which is necessary to sell phones to people.

If you made a phone and said "hey, this will live as long as a Nexus S, but it's not going to run FB or Clash of Clans or VR or take very good pictures (HDR is compute intensive)".... good luck selling that.

Did you mean to respond to me? It seems like we agree, but this is basically how I would have responded to throwaway613834.

You're right. mis-replied in the thread.

I think they did a great job at reducing fragmentation by pulling out most of the OS into upgradable components.

All applications are upgradable, even Play Services are upgradable, and developers get the support library to get all the new things to all devices.

So I believe they did a great job at reducing fragmentation in the sense that it no longer really matters what version you have, you still get all the newest stuff. Just look at every iOS version announcement: 3/4 of the new features are in the apps: iMessages, maps, home screen...

> by pulling out most of the OS into upgradable components.

That's not true (the most of the OS part). They untangled their own stuff (Play Store, Google services and so on) and can update those as they see fit. The OS stuff is still monolithic. Most of serious security issues still require full OS updates. Also supporting a new major version of Android runtime still require a full OS update.

Most security issues are handled by security updates, which don't require a letter update. They're issued as patches, so OEMs can issue them for an older device without updating it to a new release. https://www.android.com/security-center/monthly-security-upd...

They can, but most don't.

Most of the major OEMs do. The security update rate for upper tier phones runs about 75% within 3 months these days.

Anyway, I was responding to the comment "Most of serious security issues still require full OS updates." This is demonstrably inaccurate since the security patches do not require a full OS update.

"WiFi Assistant

Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google."

Let's hope the VPN can be set to non-Google too, or it's optional or opt-out feature.

You can already have an always-on third party VPN that has nothing to do with Google.

This is just a feature that was on some phones that's rolled out to the base OS now. It's opt in AFAICR, there's a prompt to enable it when you first boot the phone.

It's not when you first boot, it's when you first connect to an unsecured public wifi network. the opt-in is per-network, not just a single opt-in.

and it's not rolled into the base OS either, it's part of "google connectivity services" which is distributed separately.

As someone who knows nothing about this, I wonder (and hope) if this is helpful for UBPorts/Halium.

https://ubports.com/ https://halium.org/

Intuitively, it seems that it would be since it provides a HAL that these projects can target.

I'm very skeptical of the level of optimism that is thrown towards Project Treble.

In the end it's just a way to make OEM's lives easier while developing updates. It will still require them to actually make updates for devices. Despite Project Treble they will still not have an economic incentive to update devices. And that is the core issue here, really.

My expectation is that Project Treble will help speeding up Android updates - they should come to devices sooner than they are released now, because Treble shortens the development process of updates. I don't expect devices to be updated any longer than they are now, or receive much more updates. OEMs will remain economically unpunished for not updating and likely will just pocket the money saved in the development process.

The only way to solve this problem is to build a "Windows Update for Android" whereby system components are updated in a modular and OEM independent way. The fundamental issue in Android's update problem is that OEMs are fully responsible for device updates and not motivated to do this job well, and Project Treble does not signficantly change this [1].

Don't get me wrong, Project Treble is a great move for Android. I however don't think it will make a huge difference in the Android update story.

[1]: EDIT: it's worth pointing out that Project Treble looks like a necessary move to make a "Windows Update for Android" happen though. Let's see if that becomes a reality.

>and Project Treble does not signficantly change this

This hits the nail on the head. ProjectTreble thing will make no significant change in the long run. OEMs don't care about updating Android, they only care about selling hardware and developing shitty custom launchers.

Google is the only one that could change this. They could "tie" the Android licensing (Play Store and their custom bits) to forcing the OEM to release n major version updates . But they won't do this because it will hurt them financially (less licenses sold in the long run..)

To be honest, I think Google has LG, HTC, Sony, Nokia, Lenovorola, and almost every other Android manufacturer in the pocket here. These companies don't have the capabilities to independently make a competitive OS and app ecosystem and will have to comply with Google wherever it goes. With the exception of LG, all of these companies have even significantly dialed down their efforts to customize Android from AOSP or "Google's Android flavour" (that ships on Pixels) in the first place.

However, when Google would make such a move then they will see Samsung leave immediately and Huawei shortly thereafter. And Samsung makes 50% of Android devices - it will be a very hard business decision to justify destroying their ties with Samsung over device updates [1]. Note that Samsung periodically trots out their Tizen operating system to remind everybody that they can be independent of Android should they want to. Huawei will probably just fork Android and attempt to maintain their own app store.

The Android device market is rife with politics and the consumer is mostly on the short of the stick for it. And Apple is the real winner there - they can sell more expensive devices because people are rightly happy to pay a premium not to deal with Android's bullshit.

[1]: Ironically, Samsung is likely the best Android OEM for device updates - if and only if you consider their high end Galaxy S and Galaxy Note lines. The real issue is that Samsung wants to also flood the market with cheap crappy devices and never update them - and will likely happily ditch Android for Tizen to continue to do so.

Couldn't Google use an immutable HAL as a way to make updates themselves? Let users drop manufacturer customizations and get stock android on an older phone.

They might. In an edit above, I remarked that for such a system to exist indeed Project Treble is a necessity. But taking centralized control over the way Android updates will be a very ballsy political move by Google to make.

Some smaller vendors might appreciate that these responsibilities are taken away from them. Sony, HMD/Nokia and Lenovo/Motorola are basically only adding some apps, themes and tweaks to AOSP at this point anyway, but do tend to have relatively good update reputation (or used to). But other vendors will not appreciate giving away this control at all. Some vendors are likely partially motivated to not have devices updated in the first place.

So will Google make such a ballsy move? They themselves barely have good business reasons to do so. Android completely dominates the market anyway, without Google upsetting the politics amongst the vendors and pouring money into doing things that vendors refuse. It seems Android's bad reputation in regards to updates doesn't really hit anyone that hard.

Having said that, Project Treble does seem to be a move in that direction. Maybe Google cares enough about theirs and Android's reputation, or maybe they even care enough about being responsible. Maybe they'll make "Windows Update for Android" an opt-in thing for vendors. Maybe there are other ways they can create a more responsible market (and better repution for Android) without upsetting vendors. Let's hope they find a way at least.

> Android's bad reputation in regards to updates doesn't really hit anyone that hard.

I think this is an issue for Google when they want to introduce new platform features for developers, e.g. Project Tango. If updates take years to get to users, it handicaps Google's ability to be innovative.

Honestly, I'm not sure it's any threat from Samsung that means Google won't do this. I think it's (justified) fear from their legal team that adding any additional licensing terms to the Play Store right now given the European Commission are about to come down on them like a ton of bricks under anti-competition law is suicidal.

Shame Google wasted a lot of capital they had trying to do some really silly things in Android for a few years, and didn't lance this boil while they still had the chance.

There might be another way.

I heard from "Security Now" podcast that there is a new law that require all government purchased IOT devices must be update-able to fix security issue.

Expand the law a bit:

Make all internet connected device makers (Include phone maker) liable for any loss of private consumer info, hack for 10 years from any internet connected devices release.

Anyone can file lawsuit against them easily or in class actions against the vendor if they don't provide security fixed/upgrade within 4-6 months of from being notify of the vulnerability.

Establish an ISO security standard for IOT (and all Phone): such as

1) Standardize SW/FW update requirement, method and audit. ssl, security hash, CA, etc.

2) Requires system to monitor and log all program/critical system components creation/execution/all internet connection and download for auditing by owner of device.

3) Require system vendors to have source code / tools chain / build system in place to rebuild and fix security issues.

Once the vendors are liable for hack. They will need Insurance. The Insurance Company can follow the ISO security standard to audit and estimate the potential cost.

At least for companies rolling mostly stock Android, rather than the Samsung's of the world, Treble may well make it possible for them to simply forward what is coming from Google without the SoC source being an impediment. Something Google themselves were burned by when Qualcomm dropped support for the SoC used in a Nexus model, forcing Google to cut their support time short.

Project Treble is the most important thing in this release

>The biggest change to the foundations of Android to date: a modular architecture that makes it easier and faster for hardware makers to deliver Android updates.

With any luck, this will end the huge security/update problem Android has. Right now an update is dependent on the chip manufacturer's drivers, then the OEM adding them to the ROM with their custom "improvements", and finally the carrier pushing the update to devices. Right now it just takes one break in the link and a device goes without updates, which is a security disaster. If Google can push updates from the Play Store (presumably the end goal of Treble), none of this will be a problem.

God, this can't come soon enough. It's awful out there. Even manufacturers that promise updates don't come through (ahem, HTC, ahem).

Verizon especially makes it miserable. Ah, but who am I kidding, I'm sure Verizon will still find a way to ruin it.

And even then, in the US HTC rolled out a recent update for the HTC 10, while we're still on the January patches in the EU (and the rest of the world).

Or even if just gets the chip manufacturers out of the equation, that alone fixes most of the problems.

The OEM side is usually pretty easy / trivial in comparison. And there are a number of OEMs who would happily push updates but can't, because they can't get hardware packages from Qualcomm / Amlogic / Freescale / etc.

That, more than anything else, holds back new Android releases on lots of hardware.

Supposedly the carriers are real pains as well. I've heard horror stories of months-long approvals processes on Verizon and AT&T ROMs.

It's a game I wish they'd get out of entirely. There's no such thing as a useful carrier overlay.

True. That's a totally different problem that Treble isn't intended to address, as far as I'm aware.

> I've heard horror stories of months-long approvals processes on Verizon and AT&T ROMs.

Six months and counting, waiting for Verizon to approve the Nougat update on my HTC One M9. It has literally hit everyone else:

[0]http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/09/unlocked-htc-one-m9-...

[1]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/02/23/android-7-0-nougat-o...

[2]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/21/t-mobile-variant-htc...

[3]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/04/12/htc-one-m9-sprint-ge...

[4]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/05/16/atts-htc-one-m9-upda...

Verizon is the Comcast of wireless. The next omen of the apocalypse will be when the Trump administration approves their merger.

Good thing their lawyer literally runs the FCC. They also have the best coverage, also like Comcast. Unlike Comcast, however, you don't have to get Verizon depending on where you live.

Verizon wireless being evil is exactly why I stuck with T-Mobile for such a long time even as they keep making billing "mistakes" to the tune of about ten dollars every month for a while. (I believe they're just supremely incompetent but the errors somehow always are to their benefit.) With Verizon or Cingular, I assume it is just pure malice.

I've talked to people about how Verizon is trying to use its network as an advantage for advertising with supercookies and such on one end and Yahoo!/Aol on the other end but it seems to alarm nobody.

Can I ask what some examples of these "mistakes" are?

P.S. also, was Cingular a joke about AT&T? I think I missed what the joke is...

Two in particular.

1. Cramming https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/t-mobile-gives-u...

2. They had a "free for life" 200MB? data plan for the Nexus 7 tablet kept billing me every month. It was a monthly ritual for about six months. Call, explain, get adjusted.

Huh, I see, thanks for mentioning this! I'll have to let people know to watch out...

Honestly, even after years of following Android, I still don't understand what the carriers even do to the ROMs. It's not like it needs special proprietary software tweaks just to connect to an ordinary GSM band. And it's also not like I get any kind of visual voicemail, WiFi calling, etc baked directly into the system either. Those carrier features are usually still separate apps, anyway.

Honestly, what are they doing, and why does it take them multiple months to do it?

Carriers generally have deals with other companies for preinstalled apps which may or may not still be active by the time it comes around for an update. Also they have to test the devices, but considering the sheer number of Android devices they probably prioritize new high end devices first.

This problem is made worse on Verizon and Sprint which use CDMA 3G networks, as opposed to the worldwide GSM standard.

Also this could be a result of marketing as well. You can get the latest Android on a new device, or you can wait an indeterminate amount of time (a few months to never) to get a free update on your old device.

This is about cost: updates sometimes fail (incredible, I know), and carriers are the first place people go to get their phones back in working order. This kind of support is quite costly so carriers don't push too hard for updates to happen.

Every fifth security vulnerability in Android should cause the radio to spam reconnect attempts or similarly onorous behavior.

I imagine carrier responses would look a lot different then.

They want you renting a new phone from them every year. Dragging their feet on updates shifts sales to their newer lineup.

But if a carrier has the nerve to actually block updates to my phone and I find out, I'll switch my phone to another carrier the next day.

What's in it for them?

Most people don't think about such things when buying (renting) a new phone. If you do consider it, you're an exception to the rule.

What do you mean rent?

I buy my phone. It's mine. I can put it on any network I like.

You certainly can't put whatever software on it that you like. They go well out of their way to ensure that.

> carriers are the first place people go to get their phones back in working order

That only applies to phone bought from carriers.

Most people buy them in electronic shops where they buy tvs and laptops and stuff (since that allows you to get the best deal any carrier can offer, and not just be restricted to one).

This is half true and I think it falls neatly along generational lines, with exceptions for "really good deals". Most iPhone owners became first time AT&T customers when the iPhone came out. When Android hit the market, people went to their carrier because before this more or less was how you had to do it.

More people are just buying whatever phone and sticking a simcard in it but there is still a huge number who live by what their carrier gives them.

> More people are just buying whatever phone and sticking a simcard in it but there is still a huge number who live by what their carrier gives them.

Interestingly enough I see that as the wrong way around.

Going to a carrier specific-store is also guaranteed to offered me inferior choice both in phones and subscriptions. What's in it for me as a customer?

My electronic store is giving me the phone and carrier which provides me with the best deal. I have no reason to give a carrier, a transparent transport network, any sort of loyalty.

I don't have a "my carrier" which I care about. I do however have a "my phone", and I care about that deeply.

> Also they have to test the devices

Why? The whole point of GSM is that carrier and phone can (and should) be entirely disconnected, decoupled and only connected through the means of whatever SIM the user puts in his phone.

The notion that a carrier needs to be involved in the making of a phone makes about as much sense as if my ISP needed to test and "approve" what Ethernet hardware I use at home.

It's frankly none of their business.

> This problem is made worse on Verizon and Sprint which use CDMA

So don't use them, just like you wouldn't use an ISP which doesn't speak IP.

Pretty much any argument for network/device tie-in is fallacious on its face for the simple reason that there are many countries out there which don't have that arrangement. And yet the phones there work fine, and so do the networks.

It is none of their business, but they desperately want a piece of the pie so they brand their phones (and probably sell them at a small discount - this is the value proposition here). Branding also results in shifting responsibilities from OEM manufacturer to carrier with regard to testing and stuff.

Also, plenty ISPs actually do sell branded wireless routers with branded firmware, so it's not uncommon practice in other neighboring industries.

Probably because they have to test the ROMs on their network in different regions, with different frequency bands, with roaming, etc. That work is tedious given all of the phones they support.

Good thing they don't have to test these iPhones!

They do. Apple makes them available to carriers pre-launch IIRC.

Probably, but they won't delay the launch for months if the carriers drag their feet

The iPhone doesn't suffer from this problem. It should be up to the phone manufacturer (HTC, Samsung, etc.) to test their product.

The carrier can still, of course, test the new firmware all they like - they just shouldn't be able to interfere with its release.

TBF, Apple did release one update that caused issues with the radio on the Verizon network[0]. Carrier testing should have caught that.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13306776/apple-iphone-7-...

The iPhone doesn't suffer from this problem. It should be up to the phone manufacturer (HTC, Samsung, etc.) to test their product.

Moreover, in some European countries it is normal to buy a phone and a subscription separately. In some countries bundling is even illegal. I have never had a carrier-branded phone since I switched to smartphones, including my Android excursion (Nexus 4, Moto X 2013, Moto G, Moto X 2014) and some Windows Phones that I played with (Lumia 710/920/640). They all worked on multiple carriers.

Everyone should stop perpetuating the carrier testing myth. For this we have the GSM standards and in many parts of the world a large number of phones are not carrier-branded.

Apple makes products available to carriers pre-launch for testing IIRC. I don't think they skip the line.

They certainly have the market power to skip the line, but they still go in the line, unlike some suggestions here.

Do they do all this testing for all GSM phones in the world? All new and old? All GSM phones ever sold?

I guess not. I guess instead they rely on the GSM specification to allow seamless independence between the phone and the carrier for 99.999% of the phones out there (if not more).

So why do they need to "test" the remaining 0.001% when they have a update in user-facing functionality the carrier will never see or interoperate against?

No carrier in Europe does this.

Does your ISP control what OS updates you can download? No. And why should they?

That carriers needs to do testing is a lie perpetuated to allow for customer-hostile business-practices. Stop repeating it.

Err... all carriers in Europe do this.

It happens with Apple OS updates too, Apple just have sufficient market clout to tell networks they must complete the testing in the week between the gold master release and the public release.

GSM isn't some magic specification. It's entirely possible for a crappy radio firmware to cause significant disruption to a network it connects to (indeed, I've seen a pre-release firmware from a mid-tier Android manufacturer that managed to cause a reboot in every cell tower it connected to from one of the UK's networks). That's an extreme example, but carriers frequently do testing on that basis, and it often holds up the European releases of Android software updates.

Resources are finite. I don't know what your point is? That they should simply give up and do nothing?

>That carriers needs to do testing is a lie perpetuated to allow for customer-hostile business-practices. Stop repeating it.

Other than your opinion, what evidence do you have that this is a lie?

All of Europe? Where GSM was invented?

This kind of bullshit only happens in the US where carriers are free to bullshit as they like due to absolutely lacking regulation.

In Europe we know better, we do better.

I'd rather say the burden of evidence is on the other side of the argument: prove to me why do you need to do testing as a carrier.

>I'd rather say the burden of evidence is on the other side of the argument: prove to me why do you need to do testing as a carrier.

And yet you make absurd claims without evidence yourself. So because you're confused as to the reason, that makes them a liar.. Nice.

Carriers are a red herring. The world at large couldn't care less about how the customers of AT&T can supposedly only install AT&T-approved firmware. Most people can, but they're not seeing any updates.

Google needs to fix their upgrade story. Even if the North American customers continued to run old vulnerable versions forever, updating everyone else's systems would be a tremendous improvement. (It would also make it difficult for the US carriers to continue those particular business shenanigans.)

Do you have any facts to back this up?

Prior to the iPhone changing how phones were sold-- carriers meddled with everything so they could get their hands in media playback, app sales, feature upgrades etc. I don't think much has changed in this where anyone gives them an inch (which is nearly everyone but Apple).

Note: I worked for T-Mobile for four years prior and a little after the originals iphone came out.

Before the iPhone, how prevalent were software updates to phones? I know of no one who ever got had an update.

There is absolutely no reason for carriers to need to do anything at all, else it would not make sense that I can change the SIM card out and voila I’m on a new carrier. The manufacturer is the one doing the testing, and the carrier simply provides the infrastructure.

I feel US perhaps has a different experience, because of their ridiculous CDMA infrastructure. Is it Verizon or what, where it’s not a SIM card but the phone itself that’s setup to a specific carrier?

It's not just just Verizon. AT&T, in particular, has a habit of locking important features (VoLTE, Wi-Fi Calling) to phones running AT&T-branded and certified software. So unless the device you want is sold by AT&T and you get the AT&T-branded version, you're SoL. They even do IMEI blocking, so even if your device could otherwise work...

I have the impression that Nokia had trouble getting into the US market because they refused to let US carriers modify phone firmware to disable features.

In particular when Nokia tried to introduce SIP support.

Near the end of the dumbphone era I remember getting an OTA update to mine that added a chat-style view to SMS text messaging. I don't think the iPhone would even get OTA updates for years, it was all purely through iTunes.

Bingo.

Both Nokia and Sony Ericsson were doing OTA firmware updates at that point, for "featurephones" no less.

iPhone didn't get that ability until iOS5, in 2011.

Nokia had firmware updates, but only technically savy people would do them.

It was done via the desktop application to manage the phone.

However one would ususally only get bug fixes on the Series 30 and 40.

On Symbian towards the end of it, there were some OS updates still, but usually only once.

By the time iPhone hit, Nokia were doing over the air updating on their more recent models.

And Nokia was not alone, my Sony Ericsson C702 were capable of being getting new firmware OTA as well.

Keep in mind that this was back with the original iPhone that needed to be wired to a computer with iTunes installed.

Frankly the iPhone introduction feels more of a rollback than a upgrade from non-American point of view.

I only started using around Android 2.3 time frame, because I held to my trusty Symbian until it died on me, by then Nokia was already showing signs of not being sure what to do after Belle.

Belle already had lots of features that took Android and iPhone years to catch up with.

Nokia were sadly caught in a innovators dilemma.

they had Maemo, they had Symbian. But they were afraid that focusing on Maemo would lead to Symbian dying before they could get Maemo to the same level.

And then boardroom meddling was added, and they went much the same way as HP...

Sony Ericsson's non-smart phones (e.g. K800) had OTA software updates. They would pop up a dialog from time to remind you to check for updates, then download them and update, all on the phone. (Carriers would often hold them back, though, if you had a carrier-customized model.)

I'm pretty sure I got an actual update at least once.

My Nokia 5800 went through several UI redesigns via OTA updates.

Where I lived it was common before the iPhone for people to go to electronics stores or carrier-agnostic "phone stores" to buy their phones. You could get an unmolested phone on subsidy/contract and everything. This was in Europe though, where cheap prepaid SIMs for young people and MVNOs were already very popular.

Indeed.

You would walk in, and find a wall of phones, alongside a list of carrier plans.

Then you could pretty much mix and match plan and phone to find some price you were comfortable with.

Come the iPhone's "worldwide" launch however Apple sat down and insisted that only one carrier would get the iPhone, and defined in detail the kinds of plans that said carrier could offer.

Facts to backup what? That most mobile phone users are outside the US? Or that most of the world buys phones in home electronics stores, not from their carrier?

The iPhone brought a bit of the outside world to the US telco market. This was only a matter of time, as the market becomes more globalized there is increasing competition in the consumer market, and carrier bound phones are less flexible and more expensive in the long run. Everybody knows this.

(I believe that even the US broadband market sooner or later will transformed in much the same way. For a long time it looked like Google was about to do it, but with that seemingly stalled for the time being we might have to wait a few more years.)

It is not reasonable to describe the iPhone as changing how phones were sold outside of a select few countries. Therefore we should not accept that explanation as to why Android phones do not receieve updates either. Those markets are small on a global scale, especially for Android which clearly dominates the lower end of the market, which is predominantly deregulated.

Funny, i felt that the iPhone brought the US mobile market crapfest to the world. Especially when i watched Apple play favorites with what operator in my country, down to dictating the style of plans the iPhone could be combined with.

The carriers are not the problem. They may be an additional problem but even when they aren't involved (i.e. outside America) Android updates still suck.

Except, of course, getting your hands on a phone that has Oreo.

For instance, the Galaxy S8 is the hottest new thing on the market right now, and it launched with Nougat. It will probably be six months to a year before Samsung pushes an Oreo update to it, if at all.

Samsung actually has a decent track record of updating their software -- my family's Galaxy S5s on T-Mobile (purchased 2014) are actually still receiving security updates, despite being on Marshmallow API level.

Only on the S series, the other ones is a guessing game.

well, he did use an S8 as an example.

Honestly though, I think all of the company use the same strategy. Only the flagship line is the one getting extended support for update

You kidding me right?

They literally didn't update note tablets once!

There was an implied "in my experience" on that. My family has used S-series devices, and those have generally gotten prompt security updates.

Do those security updates also include kernel vulnerabilities?

LineageOS is the cure to all ills.

It doesn't help with things like firmware vulnerabilities (without some extensive reverse engineering). I can get LineageOS on my Nexus 5 just fine, but it doesn't have broadpwn fixed.

(note that I wasn't able to actually replicate broadpwn on Nexus 5, if anyone was, some info would be appreciated)

I'm cautiously optimistic about Treble. I welcome userland updates not being subject to device/soc manufacturers whims, but wonder if this means devices will see kernel updates even less frequently than they already do.

Then again, this new architecture likely makes it easier to move the Android userland to a new (non-linux) kernel, so maybe it'll be a moot point.

As I commented in another HN story, I don't believe OEMs and telecom operators will release updates, if Google doesn't force them to do so.

They already admitted on the ADB Podcast that they don't want to remove the ability for OEMs and mobile operators to customize their forks of Android.

We will still be forced to buy new devices even if they are VTS certified.

I completely agree. It's good they broke it apart to make updates, in theory, easier but after working for a company that modified software that was delivered to them and then reshipped elsewhere it really never mattered how module the original was; the updates still go through the same channels, testing, etc and the OEMs will likely want to modify things not as cleanly separated (an API design never passes its production usage without warts).

I doubt we'll see much change. I hope it'll make it slightly faster but without an agreement with OEMs that has teeth forcing them to be more expedient I can't see this getting much better.

> VTS certified

If it passed VTS it should be able to run AOSP. The new CTS will be an AOSP System image running their VTS passing "drivers".

Even if your vendor doesn't push any updates. At least you should be able to run a number of newer versions of AOSP as long as Android doesn't deprecate those VTS drivers.

Usually common users don't flash their devices and that is what matters for the Android dashboard.

Providing your bootloader can be unlocked, of course.

You've said this in a few different places, do you have a source for that? You are saying you could load AOSP on an S9 regardless of what Samsung does?

If so, this is indeed huge, but I have some serious doubts about it, perhaps because I have felt so very burned by Android so many times in this respect on anything but Nexus devices.

Maybe - the bootloader must allow you to run that AOSP ROM, which only is possible if the bootloader isn't locked. Lots of OEM:s lock their bootloaders. But otherwise, yes, there's nothing else stopping you.

There are a bunch of things potentially stopping you in practice. The HAL isn't a total wall, and I expect to see many OEMs go around it in some places, either due to incompetence, the HAL being inflexible, or timescales.

So even in situations where you can install such a ROM, there's very little guarantee key bits of hardware will operate properly. Any non-standard hardware/hardware feature is also fairly likely to break.

How in practice would you go about putting AOSP on a device without the vendor cooperating? Is there some kind of secure boot system that always accepts AOSP images?

I think the idea is that they cooperate once, and then Google promises to stop breaking the HAL interface for x years at the cost of increasing their development difficulty.

You would still have to jump through hoops to boot a new ROM, but when you did it would actually work rather than having some drivers missing.

The sad thing is that it shouldn't be on Google to force them. It should be Google to enable them and the users to "force" them.

They have argably been enabled for a while, but Treble is making it even easier. Hopefully this pushes the needle over the line for at least some OEMs/teclos.

In Germany there are quite a few stores still selling budget Android 4.4 and 5.1 devices, which people keep on buying.

Same is in Bulgaria. And when you ask them "Hey actual version is 7.0. Why you use outdated OS with vulnerability? How you buy that devices?" They told "I have seen 7.0 there was nothing new."

But no one want to get computer with Windows 95 (or 98) anymore. Just Android 4.4 is "OK".

There are no cheap windows 95 computers where everything works on the market. Android 4.4 does do everything people need (like running whatsapp), and the devices are out there to buy.

Security vulnerabilities? Nobody was ever affected by those (at least in the social circles of the people buying the devices), so why should they care?

Tons of sites full of "amateur porn" think you shouldn't worry either. Who cares if all of your pictures are freely available to anyone on the planet, right?

> But no one want to get computer with Windows 95 (or 98) anymore. Just Android 4.4 is "OK".

They should do a yearly release (eg. Android 2018). Then at the store when they display phones, they'd have to write "Android 2013" instead of "Android 4.4 KitKat."

Doing yearly releases is such an obviously great idea that there must be a big reason why they are NOT doing it.

In the UK last year, I bought a Samsung android tablet for the kid (my first Android device). It was running 4 and I ass7med Samsung would have an upgrade available. Ha! No chance.

It seems people have made their choice they don't care. If they cared about updates they wouldn't be buying Android.

They didn't choose, they just didn't know.

This is why software/hardware needs best before dates.

You're thinking like a technical person. Aunt Susan doesn't know her phone is an Android phone. In her mind, it's a Samsung phone. It's not a question of not caring, she simply doesn't know.

There is such a thing as not knowing because you don't care, and I wouldn't even say that it's irrational. There's simply too much to know and care about in the world, so you have to be selective and event driven.

Some of them do care, but with an average salary of 500 euros or less, they have better things to do with the money than spending on iPhones.

The only viable alternative was Windows Phone, but that is gone now.

That is very true, and I have to say it's disappointing and baffling how Microsoft dropped the ball on this one.

Microsoft are the only ones who ever managed to make the separation between OS vendor and hardware vendors work (at least on the PC side). They are sorely missed in the mobile space.

You can get a Nougat device for as low as Rs 3500($55) in India. Which would be considered low end mobile.

I agree. There are two parts to the Android update problem. I'd wager OEMs having no motivation to release updates is bigger than them having no ability.

Why do you think so? On that page is just this sentence and nothing more. I don't believe in a significant improvment unless Google takes ownership of all OS updates themselves.

Treble is the first step to Google updating devices themselves. Now that drivers are more or less independent from the rest of the operating system, Google has the option to push updates to the OS without having to tailor it specifically for every device

I remember many years ago when a few carrier and chipset execs stood up on Google I/O stage and announced a new program to ensure Android devices get updated quicker. Nothing came out of that.

The proof here will be when they ship.

Thankfully, 'Google Play Services' and distributing more and more services through the Play Store is a step in the right direction.

> I remember many years ago when a few carrier and chipset execs stood up on Google I/O stage and announced a new program to ensure Android devices get updated quicker. Nothing came out of that

Google remembers that too, and this change allows Google to bypass those same execs when pushing out updates. The HAL layer will not change from version to version, meaning no driver support will be required from the OEM for new Android versions.

They were supposed to not put any user app on the system partition but rather install them using play services when the user logs in. I've only seen one device implement it and it was a low end device so it kind of choked anyway.

I've seen plenty of devices implement this. Of course, they were all ones I'd flashed with CyanogenMod...

> Thankfully, 'Google Play Services' and distributing more and more services through the Play Store is a step in the right direction.

A move towards replacing an open OS with an entirely proprietary solution full of tracking by a single vendor is "a step in the right direction"?

There's thousands of solutions for how you can update core OS components, none of them require what Google's doing to open source.

Look, the reality of the market is that most people are a lot more concerned about getting timely (security) updates than an 'open source' mobile OS.

Good point. However, that's a short term benefit at the cost of long term is what we should all remember

>There's thousands of solutions

Yes, but only if you declare the business models of everyone involved a non-goal.

You can still have a Google-branded version of the same product that provides additional, Google-only features.

An open core business model was always what Android was like, but now the opem core is shrinking with every further commit.

All true, but what does that tell us about any solutions to slow or non-existant updates and fragmentation? What are some of the thousands of solutions? Or are you saying that there never was a problem in the first place?

The issue: apps that are only updated with the OS end up outdated.

The current solution: Move them out of AOSP, into Google's internal projects, distribute updates via the Play Store.

An alternative solution: Move them out of AOSP, onto GitHub, distribute updates via the Play Store.

Yes, Google had to decouple them from AOSP. But that’s no reason not to put the code anywhere else in the open. These issues are entirely orthogonal, and Google uses it as a way to force more people onto the proprietary ones.

Open sourcing Google's apps is not a solution to Android's core problems though. Not every part of the OS that needs to be updated can be moved into open sourced apps.

Also, open sourcing the apps takes away any leverage Google has to recoup the costs of developing Android.

All the apps were open source in the first place. Google Music, Books, Search, the Phone Dialer, the contacts, the SMS app, Google Talk, all of them used to be open source.

This all worked in the past.

No it hasn't worked in the past if we're talking about the problem of fragmentation and timely updates.

Wow! This implication to open source software is largely overlooked in the discussions here. Good catch.

It should have been possible for Google to open up much of what they are pushing, but they don't. And i wonder if that has to do with the likes of Amazon and Xiaomi.

As an Android developer this is a big pain in the arse if you intend to develop apps using google apis.

The development is easier, but if you plan to distribute on other stores, google play services are useless and will make your development more time consuming as they are exclusive to devices with google play store.

It is nice to see the updated Bluetooth 5 stack as a feature of Treble

That's good, but I really, really want to set the Supervision timeout to something other than a rudiculous 20 seconds:

https://blog.classycode.com/a-short-story-about-android-ble-...

Every time I seriously consider the Android platform, I hear about this kind of shortcoming and I'm immediately turned off. I want to buy a phone, not a carrier. This fragmentation per device/carrier is killing this amazing platform. They need to lock it down Apple style (at least for phones).

Not saying that everything else is bad, but one thing that strikes me is how much they have run out of interesting things now that they had to use fillers[1] like:

Tooltips

Support for tooltips (small popup windows with descriptive text) for views and menu items.

Normally, this would be relegated to a git changelog in the support library. But this is on the global marketing landing page.

I like to imagine a fictional internal mail thread going like this:

> Folks! please, give us something, anything, to put on the landing page!

> Someone replies duh, maybe tooltips

> What's a tooltip?

> uhh, small popup windows with descriptive text

> What's a popup window?

> uhh...

> Nevermind, its on!

Obligatory /s and yeah its Google, but seriously I can't imagine any other circumstances on how this specific copy, which tries to explain what a "tooltip" is by using the words "popup window", "view" and "menu item", came up.

This could be a good sign though, of the maturity of the platform (and harder to feel left out if you didn't upgrade).

1: https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/

Honestly, I prefer this over the popular alternative of making UX changes for the sake of adding something new.

I'd probably give most places the benefit of the doubt — companies will rarely make UX or UI changes just because. There's usually a problem they are aiming to solve, and the solution they choose is some sort of interaction. Is it always the right answer? That's up to the users.

Raymond Chen (core Windows engineer) once explained in his book that some UI changes are near-mandatory (at least for paid product) for most people to feel that the upgrade is/was worth it.

Say the engineers have done massive internal performance and stability improvements, better filesystem and what not; but those things are almost invisible to regular users. Most users want something more tangible, otherwise they will have hard time to justify spending few hundred bucks as they will feel "it's the same as before, I see no difference".

It's also (my theory) a bit of identity thing. All big companies slightly tweak their logo (even if it's just changing or removing shadow thickness) every decade or so that it feels fresh. The same applies to UI of applications and OSes.

And here i sit, using a WM that has not changed in ages...

Noticed the same but for a different item in the changelog. "TextView autosizing" - it's such a minor thing and could well be a minor changelog item in the support library update..

That actually got some decent cheers at Google I/O iirc, it's bigger than it sounds at first. It's scaling the font size of the text to fit the available space, which is a fairly unique twist and is great for localization efforts (looking at you, German...)

Don't get me wrong, the feature itself is indeed useful.

It's just that its so.. minor. If you ever wanted to implement this in your app then there are multiple ready-made solutions for this or you could write your own in a short amount of time. Presenting this as one of the key new features in a major new OS versions seems just strange.. like there wasn't anything else substantial.

It's really hard to do well, and in a performant manner. I'm glad they built it.

Measuring glyphs, dealing with reflow, kerning, whitespace breaking rules, etc is no fun

Not only that but would non Android developers even understand the feature?

I imagine there are plenty of instances where apps do not account for space well

Frankly i get the feel that most apps don't care.

They develop for a certain size and resolution, maybe what is currently on the Samsung flagship, and if it also work outside of that box they are happy. And if not they simply flag it as not supported in the Play store.

Android has had from day one all manner of capabilities for fitting a UI to different devices. But still i run into UIs that seems fixed in some manner because of some Photoshop designer with a chip on their shoulder.

> Photoshop designer with a chip on their shoulder.

I think you are attributing malice to something where laziness would be an easier explanation. As an occasional Android dev, I know the laziness problem all too well when trying to get UI to fit multiple devices.

That got some internal cheers in my company(s Android team) as well.

I'd imagine there are a lot of performance updates which would be too technical for the marketing page, so they filled the space with minor enhancements instead

I think a lot of major changes are in Google's apps, not Android itself. For example a big update to the Photos app would be part of a major OS update in iOS but just another regular app update on Android.

Bingo.

That is one of the big things that annoy me when i hear people talk about iOS updates.

Because when Apple announce their big updates, often the items they present will not be present on older devices for various "reasons".

Thus what most people got where perhaps some security updates and some spurious API changes so that all those apps have to be updated or stop working.

Apple, during Jobs both terms, were more marketing than anything. Watch them slowly slide back into 90s mediocrity outside of USA now that he is no longer around to apply his "reality distortion field".

You had to scroll past quite a few animated announcements and read past several lines of other updates in order to find this 'also-ran' item in the footnote.

To be fair, I have an iPhone and I'm still waiting for the "remotely sane text selection" feature to ship. Just in case you think this is hyperbole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhWz7rMj56Y

That is nuts. I had no idea such a basic feature was so broken on the iPhone.

So it's not just me? I thought I must be doing something wrong between all these people talking about using their iPads as their main work machines and then text selection just doesn't work for me most of the time.

I really wonder what's going on here.

I just tried the 7+'s text selection and it works great unlike in that video.

Good to know. This is probably my biggest frustration with the iPhone. Any interaction with text is miserable, and it has been forever. Somehow Apple has not seemed to care for 6 generations.

Pretty horrible indeed, though limited mostly to Safari (which incidentally is one of the places you want to use it more often than in others in my experience)

How do tooltips even work on a touch based OS?

The only place I can recall using tooltips (if I understand what you're referring to) on iOS is to read the extra caption on XCKD (the title attribute of the img element), which you access by press and hold.

Android has long has deep support for keyboard and mouse navigation where this could be more useful.

Indeed. It is one of those things that seems to go unspoken of, because even Google don't want to acknowledge that they once tried to pitch Android as more than a media consumption platform (Android 3.0, aka honeycomb, aka the tablet/landscape focused Android variant).

Which lead to the situation that although Windows Phone failed in the market, Windows 10 seems to be on good track to win the hybrid tablets market.

All the consumer stores on my city have mostly Windows 10 hybrid laptops on sale, with the exception of a few Samsung and Huawei ones with Android.

In particular as Microsoft has waved the license on smaller screens.

The other day i found a 10" tablet with a keyboard dock and no less than two A ports on the tablet part.

I am presently contemplating grabbing one to use with a RTLSDR dongle i picked up on a lark.

Devices with a stylus (like the Galaxy Note series) can use it by hovering on the element.

Speaking of the note series, I wonder if the note 8 will ship with Oreo and if so how well it keeps the treble stuff.

In android it works right now on the app toolbar with a long touch of a button for which you want to see the tooltip (if it is programmed right). The text shows up sort of like a toast message.

Chrome OS has first class support for Android apps nowadays. You can use a keyboard and mouse through USB OTG or Bluetooth on an Android as well.

Something that has been with Android since 3.0.

Really wish i could find an android tablet with a full size A port these days that didn't run a ancient version...

Dunno exactly what they are referring to, but on Fragment UIs one can tap and hold on buttons to get a small popup/tooltip.

Just put LineageOS on my Note 3 and it turns out the touch screen is sensitive enough to implement a "Touchscreen hovering" feature.

At least they are bringing back PIP. This was such a great regression in N for Samsung users.

PIP somewhat exists already. Some apps, like tinycam already do it.

That's an overlay, rather than using windowing features. And they don't scale quite the same way into full-screen apps. This ought to be easier to implement for most apps since Android itself handles most of the window management and since rendering shouldn't change too much.

Am I the only one who's really disappointed by the platform's shift in its stance on background execution? I was originally drawn to Android because it wasn't iOS. I wanted to develop on a platform where I could run a service in the background if the user wanted that. Apps that were bad stewards of battery life and phone resources were supposed to be scrutinized by users and removed if they were too poor. You can be a good steward, it's just harder especially when your monolithic app is an uninformed port of some legacy iOS code.

By issuing a hard restriction on background usage Google has brilliantly improved battery life for the masses while condonig the same lazy architectural patterns of the past, locked people into Firebase Cloud Messaging--a Google service not part of the AOSP, and potentially stunted Android adoption in domains outside of mobile. It's the turning of an era for Android, and my interests have moved elsewhere (from an app platform perspective, embedded Android is still vialble since everything you ship runs as a system app with no restrictions).

Elsewhere to what? What are you gonna do, run Windows Mobile?

I like native app development because it's not a browser. Android was the most honest manifestation of that on mobile (iOS is basically a "client OS"). I look towards domains where people are still putting powerful applications on connected hardware. Mobile is starting to look like a commodity web experience with half the history of JS, so why not just use that?

Point being the delta between what a native app and what a browser app can do has all but disappeared. BT and Graphics are the last few notable things and both will be supported by browsers soon (webgl already is and webbt is incoming). I'm not saying go use JS.. I very much do not enjoy it. Im asking why we need to build native when there's increasingly less to justify the overhead.

WebGL is a poor cousin of OpenGL 4.6.

Even comparing WebGL 2.0 to OpenGL ES 3.0, which it is based on, there are nice features like geometry shaders missing.

Nitpick: Geometry shaders came in GLES 3.2 (there was also a geometry shader extension for GLES 3.1).

In WebGL 2 you can still do geometry processing, and store results in buffers for subsequent draw calls, using transform feedback.

You are right, I mixed it up.

Like that idea for WebGL 2.0, will have a look into it.

Apps that were bad stewards of battery life and phone resources were supposed to be scrutinized by users

If HN allowed emoji in comments, I'd have a U+1F923 here. Since I can't do that, you're adorable. The users, eh? The users are supposed to be burdened with checking the wake status and radio activation schedule of their apps? How was that supposed to work, exactly?

I'm not sure what your point is here and your tone indicates you're not really looking for honest discussion. But FYI Android reports energy usage statistics to the user on a per-app basis. What I don't like is Android the platform telling me the user how my phone is best used. It's pretty crippling. Let's say I'm deploying Android on hardware that is always plugged in--something kiosk-style. Why shouldn't I be able to have an app that keep a persistent connection open to a network service for say real-time communication? You can't do that now.

And if Android itself didn't tell you enough, there were apps line OSMonitor that could give you more detail (at least until Google shitcanned the permissions that it relied on for "security" reasons).

Blame shitty mobile developers who screwed the pooch on Android. Even if you avoid shovelware, the quality is abysmal.

My Android phone still randomly lights up its screen several times a day, without a new notification having come in. Reporting overall energy usage doesn't help me track down the culprit.

It's not like anyone's written apps for real work on these devices anyway. It's all just second class software.

And what about the mysterious Android OS/Android System "apps" that show up on the battery usage screen? How do I know which app is hogging resources here? Should we expect users to inspect wakelocks?

That might be good for power users, but for the average user it's a disaster. How many people actually read the app permissions when they install something? Most apps request background privileges and if you don't like that your only other option (until recently) was to not install the app.

Users blame Android when Facebook and other popular apps started eating all their battery by running in the background. Google's only choice was to aggressively punish these apps.

All developers think their app is the most important thing running on the user's system, and that is how we get into situations like this.

Yeah I understand why we're in this situation. I'm lamenting the fact that it's reached this point. Maybe I'm a minority but I don't think my apps are the hottest shit around and I try to make an effort to be a good steward. IMO engineers should push back when product asks for things that clobber system resources. However the few bad examples should not ruin it for the use cases where you really do need something running in the background. I also partly blame these DI solutions that encourage devs to stuff everything in a graph they do or don't realize is tied to their application instance. I've seen this multiple times in production apps.

What are these apps doing in the background? I've always assumed they're collecting/streaming device and user metrics. Running apps, location, WiFi SSIDs, etc. If that's the case, then a reduction in data collection could mean a reduction in metrics/income.

Its a mix of things.

Android by design leave apps in the background when you exit them via the home button.

Before 4.0 introduced the switcher button, and the accompanying swipe action to fully close an app, the only way to properly exit an app was to hit the back button until you exited back to the home screen.

This because the initial design of Android was less about apps and more about "activities". These were the individual parts of an app, and what enables that one app launch parts of another app to complete a user action (the most prominent likely being the share menu).

This was presented back in the day as a metaphorical stack of cards. As more user actions where taken that opened more activities, those activities would be added on top of the stack. Then as the user hit the back button he would be flipping backwards in that stack. To enable all this, Android keep apps around in RAM until it runs low, and then start to close down the oldest ones (first by waking them up and telling them to exit gracefully, then forcing them).

Thus often an app will sit in the background even though it is doing nothing.

One good way to observe this (until recently) was to run something like OSMonitor and look at CPU time of various app processes. Often they would be present but basically show no indication of actually doing anything. They would just sit there idle, waiting for user actions.

So make it an opt-in mode, just like sideloading apps.

What part of that page indicates that you can't use the platform like that? They just say "more control over how apps run in the background".

Presumably you can still give your users a good reason for why you need to run uninterrupted in the background and they can approve it similarly to how they now approve other permissions.

The way this is implemented is that the system will kill any background services your app has after a grace period, just like iOS. In order to have a background service that "good reason" equates to a persistent notification in the tray and icon in the status bar--which nobody agrees is a good product experience.

Why is that not a good experience? Now I need to dig through Settings to find all these background services. If they're important enough to be running constantly they're important enough to take up some space to prominently show me that they're running.

Yes, and you're okay with having 20 to 30 notifications at all times just to run open source apps, or would you say "this is too annoying, I'll switch back to the closed ones that spy on me".

If you want the open source products to win, they need to be able to provide the same usability as the proprietary solution. This is not possible here - you need Google's FCM or you get major disadvantages, and this is problematic.

I've filed a complaint with the EU, this seems like the only option I've got left. I can't tell everyone running a bouncer to register with Google, I can't relay all messages of all IRC users through a server of mine, and I can't bake in a Google API key into IRC bouncers (as that violates Google's ToS)

This doesn't inherently have anything to do with open source, but the problem that whatever license the apps on the phone are under they can't all be implementing their own push/pull message queue, having 30 open network connections constantly waking up the phone is going to drain the battery.

If I install 100 apps that have their own messaging implementation should the phone just not be showing that to me, even though my battery is now drained in half the time as a result? I'm pointing out that as a user this is very pertinent info to be showing me, if I have 30 apps running in the background I'd like to see it.

That’s a fallacy. I tested it, the battery impact is zero if properly implemented.

I implemented a prototype before, where I had a standardized protocol, and apps give the GCM library (I modified microG’s) a URL to connect to, and an auth token.

microG’s GCM library would keep all those sockets open, just as it does with the sockets for Google’s several cloud messaging services, and upon receiving a message, wake up the app.

As result, only one app runs in background, every app can use its own notification service, you have no battery loss, and you can keep everything open.

All this can work. Google just doesn’t want it to.

There are a few things here. From a technical level, how do you think GCM/FCM is implemented? A socket is hardly a scarce resource and keeping 2 open is only 1/65535 more "expensive" (from a kernel standpoint not power/energy) than multiplexing two streams on one connection. It's possible FCM uses some micro polling strategy so that the radio can sleep for short bursts, but I don't see why the same mechanism can't be exposed to other apps if that was the case.

Second, from a product level there is a double standard now. Apps that build infrastructure using Google's platform services don't have to put a persistent notification in front of users and clutter the phone ui. Apps that choose not to depend on google (the "open source" as it pertains here but you're right it's not limited to open source apps) do. That's a pretty obvious power play.

If you want to see all the stuff going on in the background why are things that buddy up with google exempt from that in your eyes? I could flood your phone with a high priority FCM message every 500ms effectively making my app run all the time and you wouldn't know. There will be apps that do it (as there are with APNS on iOS) and it is in fact far worse for battery life. Maybe we differ on this point but there are certainly things I want happening in the background that don't need a ui. That's the precedent on the desktop anyway.

BTW The ordering of FCM messages is not guaranteed so they're not even as useful as a TCP connection.

You can disable "Battery Optimization" per app, so this isn't very restrictive. It just applies by default.

I'd like to do that, but when I 'exit' an app and/or swipe it off of the list of program cards I want it to ACTUALLY exit (at least within 30 seconds).

What if that app is say and open source messenger app that doesn't use GCM/FCM. For that to work you need to maintain a connection with a remote service. You don't need the UI hogging memory the whole time but you definitely want messages to come in immediately. IMO the system should offer a way to completely kill and app but "killing the UI" should not stop critical services utilized by the app.

Okay so maybe you could argue that if you never "swipe kill" the app it should be allowed to have background services executing much like e.g. Slack on macOS. But you can't even do that. Having your ui in the recent tasks list does not exempt you from background restriction.

There is a way to kill an app process, but it's in Setting and takes several clicks. I think it's for the best that killing isn't easier, because users don't generally know the implications of killing an app. In Square's Register app for example, force killing the process could prevent the app from uploading important payment data in a timely fashion.

You just don't know much about android dev it seems.

When an app gets put in the background it gets an event from the OS it's then the devs job to not keep everything loaded in the background but most don't.

> swipe it off of the list of program cards I want it to ACTUALLY exit

Swiping it away instantly kills the app unless it has a foreground service with an associated notification.

At least in Android 7 you can explicitly allow this for a specific app. This question can even be triggered by the app itself (e.g. Conversations and Signal ask you to do this if they can't use GCM). This is hopefully still possible.

> It's the turning of an era for Android, and my interests have moved elsewhere (from an app platform perspective, embedded Android is still vialble since everything you ship runs as a system app with no restrictions).

Google making it more and more difficult to avoid gapps is nothing new.

Can you point me to the relevant info? This is news to me (and sounds exciting).

No doubt we've seen it coming for awhile. But I'm still sad to see it finally come to this, at least ideologically. iOS is a closed ecosystem that's been opening up. Android was an open ecosystem that's becoming more locked down.

[1] Seems to do the trick but I don't do Android dev so I don't know any details about this.

[1] https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/blob/2b9cdde558ed96c2...

I looked into this. It seems this is something that was added in M pertaining to Doze and App Stanby modes and is not related to the new O background execution limits (which apply generally). In any event, app exemptions must be approved by Google so we've already crossed the open platform line. They do list that voip-style/message apps will receive approval if they can't use FCM for some technical reason: https://developer.android.com/training/monitoring-device-sta...

There is some level of opt-out, but it doesn't work reliably, and your app might still get killed.

Even the K9 team had issues with that, and many other open apps did so, too. I've been trying to work some kind of push messaging into the IRC bouncer for which I wrote an Android client, but the issues with legality (I can't just connect to a third party without explicit opt in), API keys (people who host an IRC bouncer don't want to register with Google), liability (I don't want to relay all messages through a server of my own), Google's ToS (I can't just publish an API key for everyone to use), confidentiality (I can't actually put content into the FCM messages due to legal issues), etc are so problematic that it's basically stalled everything.

Has Google ever released a report on how much time it takes an average flagship device to get the latest android version? Even if you've paid $$$$ in getting Samsung Galaxy S8 just recently, you're not going to get Android O tomorrow morning. But that's definitely the case with iOS. That makes a huge difference in the world where Software updates play a huge role in performance and functionality than hardware update (read. Image processing vs 13Mp to 16Mp camera) Google hasn't been successful in that.

Vertical integration has its advantages. Also, due to people buying new phones every 6 months those seem to be the two things that disincentivze Android phone makers to not do those things.

You can change that: don't buy a new phone every six months, and buy from a maker that supports your phone longer. Maybe you cannot get the latest, but when you support the companies that support their phones for more than a few months you support that business model which in turn ensures that someone who updates their phones exists.

You might have to leave the major names behind, and might have to skip a few features. Do you need the latest and greatest anymore though? When Android was new (2008) CPUs were much slower and upgrades did help your experience. (I remember missing calls because my phone couldn't switch to the phone app quick enough).

> You can change that: don't buy a new phone every six months, and buy from a maker that supports your phone longer.

I cannot change that. The ~5,000 I have spent on smartphones and laptops in the past 10 years is hardly enough. My buying choice, yours, and the GP's are just not strong and valuable enough to cause a manufacturer to pander to our desires.

The economies of scale and the greater money available from the opposite are so bad that no one even makes an expensive phone to capture our tiny segment of the market. They all chase the thinner, glued-up, bloatware-filled, non-repairable, closed-source, 2-year-or-less buyers. Same story on laptops.

In fact, my purchases seem to have the opposite effect: the Nexus is now as expensive as any other flagship. Motorola's cheap stock Android phone line shut down. LG stopped installing removable batteries. MacBook Pros still have nice hardware, but they are completely glued up. Thinkpads still have crappy stock screens.

That's not really true on Laptops. Apple, Lenovo, and Dell all make sturdy high-end upgradable repairable laptops. Not the kinds of products you'll see at your local West Fry though.

I'm a huge fan of Apple products in general - and firmly believe their laptops are the best on the market.

But there's incredibly little ground to call any of their current laptop lineup upgradable or repairable. I'm not sure there's a single upgradeable component left on any laptop they currently offer. The Macbook and the Macbook Pro have both moved to soldered CPU, RAM, and flash memory. The Macbook Air I believe still has a replaceable SSD but it has the proprietary connectory. To further complicate things - the batteries in the Macbook and Macbook Pro are both heavily glued in, so even that's difficult to replace.

I've worked with a Lenovo T60, a W520, a T430, and checked out the T560. They are steadily getting less repairable.

> and buy from a maker that supports your phone longer.

Who would those be? And who of those is not on the high end phablet side of the phone market?

Just like you have to buy an Apple phone to get Apple updates immediately, you need to buy a Google phone to get Google updates immediately. Pixel and Nexus rollout is starting nowish (and beta participants are already getting the OTAs).

This is really not a secret at this time anymore and should be taken into account when you succumb to Samsung marketing.

Everybody else will be probably 4-6 months late.

But Apple supports iPhones for 4-5 years. Google has said they will only support their flagship Nexus and Pixel phones for no more than 2 years. For a $700 device this is unacceptable.

That's not entirely true:

Pixel phones get security updates for at least 3 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store, or at least 18 months from when the Google Store last sold the device, whichever is longer.

https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705

Apart from what Ironlink said below, there's also the fact that Google and Apple support mean different things.

For Apple, updates often mean some subset of the full operating system updates, or a crippled version.

Whereas Google updates tend to be all of nothing - meaning if your phone does get the update, it gets all of the features of that particular version.

This seems to have changed somewhat with moving a lot of the stuff to Play Service (and now obviously with Project Treble), so you get the best of both world (in theory)...

I’m fine with receiving years and years of security updates. I paid for the features I got. Anything new is a bonus. But an up to date secure OS is non-negotiable.

If it's non-negotiable for you, you have a choice: Google phones or Apple phones. Everything else is out, unless you want to try your luck with stuff like LineageOS and hope that they support your device for whatever timeframe you consider reasonable.

Well I don't consider Google's collection of my data to be a secure practice from the standpoint of my privacy. So the one remaining option is Apple.

There's also Copperhead OS. (You pay quite a bit for the privilege of security though.)

No, Apple updates include the full operating system update. The only time features are disabled is when they require hardware that doesn't exist (e.g. you have no finger print reader so you can't use your finger print reader) or they are too intensive for the phones CPU/GPU. That's it. Apple's propensity for hardware accelerators may make this seem like it's crippling (Eg: there is a voice recognition hardware accelerator on Apple CPUs, IIRC) and people may not know why, but Apple does not use crippling software as a strategy to force upgrades-- as you seem to be implying.

I think they do. The original iPhone never got MMS support for alleged hardware reasons that were bunk. Siri was originally on the AppStore but once bought by Apple suddenly couldn't run on anything less than an iPhone 4S. There are probably other examples but those are the two I remember.

> For Apple, updates often mean some subset of the full operating system updates, or a crippled version. Whereas Google updates tend to be all of nothing - meaning if your phone does get the update, it gets all of the features of that particular version.

Eh? Aren't you swapping something here? On Apple you get OS updates with nearly all features for at least 5 years, of course they can't create a NFC device into a phone that doesn't ship with one... I would love to see _any_ Android phone with support for 5 years, that does not come from google directly. it would be a no brainer if something exists in the 200-300€ range. because I don't care which phone I have, it just needs to be long liveable and have a price below 400€. currently I use used iPhones, which I get relativly cheap.

I think he's pointing out a vital difference in update paradigms here. Taking an example of an update that added NFC processing to a phone, iOS devices would get the update even if NFC were the only feature in it and their device didn't support NFC (and that feature would just be turned off or "crippled"). Android users, on the other hand, just wouldn't get the update at all.

In reality, what we see is a bunch of features bundled together into a single update. If one of those features is NFC functionality, iOS phones will get that update minus NFC (and any other features their hardware doesn't support), while Android phones often just won't get that update at all if any of the features (e.g. NFC) aren't supported by the hardware. This also explains, in a basic sense, why iOS devices get updates for longer periods, while Android devices "fall off" or aren't promised updates for as long.

There's, of course, pros and cons to each of these update strategies, as many times it becomes "mandatory" to update (for security updates, to get maintenance/support, to get some other necessary features, etc), and iOS-style updates have historically been too much for device memory/processing/resources to handle (effectively making the phone so slow you're required to buy a new one[1]), while Androids not getting the update at all also requires you to buy a new one.

Neither approach is foolproof, but I think that's what he's referring to by "Google updates tend to be all or nothing" and "Apple updates often mean some subset of the full operating system updates, or a crippled version".

[1] There's enough resources out there that no single one tells the whole story, but there's plenty at https://www.google.me/search?q=ios+update+made+phone+unusabl... and at least one previous class action lawsuit over iOS updates rendering phones "inoperably slow".

> For Apple, updates often mean some subset of the full operating system updates, or a crippled version.

A bit harsh, no? If new software requires hardware, why should that be considered "crippled"?

I find amazing that my 2013 iPhone5 can play games (Hearthstone) that some 2015/2016 Androids can't.

> If new software requires hardware, why should that be considered "crippled"?

Because I do not own that hardware, so for me uses the software is effectively crippled. I don't care why, only the outcome matters.

I wouldnt even mind not getting new features so much, but this also effectively means that my security updates are tied to new hardware; how is that acceptable?

What iOS update only included security updates based on hardware features?

Yeah... I didn't realize how annoyed I'd be on this when I bought my Nexus 6.

Not getting the latest just seems lazy and makes me want a flip phone that has good audible support. All of the crap that is getting added is just obnoxious and does little to help me use my phone.

Bonus points if anyone can tell me why enabling bluetooth will make it so my phone can't charge to 100% anymore.

What can it charge to instead?

It seems to change. For a couple of days, it couldn't charge and all. Even turned off, it would stay at 6% when plugged in. Cycled all of the radio devices on/off and it got to 25% but wouldn't go higher. Did one more cycle on/off of Bluetooth, and it went to full.

I'm blaming Bluetooth because it has been going to full charge fine for a few weeks and I turned Bluetooth back on to connect some headphones and the pattern repeated.

It's 3 years from the device's release. You get the next two major OS updates (which occur at ~1 and ~2 years after release), and then another full year of security updates, up to but not including the third major OS version.

The catch is that you can buy an Apple phone everywhere, but for instance Google decided simply to not offer the Pixel in my country.

Also, they stopped updating my Nexus 4 long time ago, something that Apple does not with their devices.

Hence, I am not "succumbing to Google marketing" again. I have now updated to a Moto, which used to be a Google company. Let's see how long it takes to update...

This round of updates for Moto will be interesting, as it has a light skin. Completely dependent on Lenovo ownership, and they haven't been making the best choices lately.

FWIW, I still get security bugfix system updates on my 2015 Moto 3G, as recently as two months ago. Here's hoping they keep up this level of support.

My Moto X Pure (2015) has no carrier relationship and a very lightweight Android skin. It's still running Android 6.0.

I can't imagine them putting in development resources when they could just sell you a new phone.

Supposedly Lenovo has mentioned that future devices will drop even that skin.

Reflect for a moment; what was the 'new' price of the Nexus 4 vs the 'new' price of the iPhone at the time?

A Nexus 4 was a 2012 phone with 2GB ram, and 8GB storage (entry model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_4

An iPhone 5 is the comparable year device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5 It had entry specs of only 1GB of RAM, but 16GB of storage. The apps would also be native binaries instead of 'java' apps, meaning less storage was needed.

IMO what killed support on the older Nexus phones was /mostly/ the insufficient entry level storage.

I'm sure 1GB for iOS is comparable to 2GB of RAM for Android.

not to diminish the rest of your argument, but my understanding is that java apps should be smaller than native apps (not significantly, since a huge part of apps' storage requirement is for assets, not code)

My experience around this time was that Android apps where much much smaller than similar iOS apps. Somewhere on the order of a 10x difference for apps without a lot of assets.

The iPhone 5C with 8GB storage is still supported by Apple. Although not for much longer as it won't support iOS 11, and the OS takes up almost half the space on the phone.

IMO what killed support on the older Nexus phones was /mostly/ the insufficient entry level storage.

This is provably false. The Nexus 6 plenty of storage space (32GB or 64GB) and does not get Oreo. Google's Nexus policy is to provide security updates for 3 years (or 18 months after the device stops selling, whichever is longer):

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/01/google_eol_for_nexu...

Also, the average Android app size is smaller:

https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/

I thought the reason is Qualcomm not giving what it takes to support a newer firmware on their soc. I have a Nexus 5 on lineage and I'm on Linux kernel 3.4.0.

Yes but Lineage OS can indefinitely support a fair chunk of Android 7.x on an old kernel without official help from Qualcomm.

Google chooses not to with AOSP past a timeframe.

My Moto G3 (2015) came with Android 5.1.1, and got an Android 6.0 upgrade. That's it. It has had two or three security updates since then, but it's still Android 6.0.

Despite that, it's been overwhelmingly the best phone I've had: cheap even unlocked, stable, no bloatware, waterproof.

My Moto G1.5 came with KitKat and was starting to suck on Lollipop after an update caused incurable excessive battery drain and constant app crashes. LineageOS Nougat restored the old hardware to its former glory. You would do well to do the same. Lollipop/Marshmallow is a liability.

Yes, the limited availability of Google Store and Google hardware in general is a huge failing of the company.

I really don't understand why they so commonly fail to bring best Android devices to markets with most Android penetration - they're practically giving the market share away to Apple's aggressive price cuts lately.

My understanding is that it is not enough to ship the device to a country, you also need an very large ad push and deals with local operators in order to actually sell it.

However, it should be mentioned that the pixel was sold in even less countries than the previous generation ..

Google really need to step up its game.

Not having an ad campaign is an extremely poor reason to refuse to ship EU-wide when they ship to Germany. The operator excuse is not valid in the EU. The EU is supposed to be a single market.

The reason is they simply cannot do it. It's very different shipping a high end phone in units of 100 million vs shipping a high end phone in units of 500,000.

This is why most android high end devices are really tiny market share.

They can't compete with Apple-- AT VOLUME. Apple's supply chain is where they are hugely competitive. This goes for Samsung etc.

So on android, genuinely high end phones are prestige items to make android look good, but the mass of android phones are low end cheap phones that can easily be mass produced.

Apple has been known to buy 10,000 prototype modeling machines and put them into production because they were the only ones on the market that could do a particularly manufacturing step that was needed for that model... google is never going to do that.

In fact, I don't think google has ever made any phones (excluding Motorola) themselves-- all the Pixels are rebrands of other makers devices.

The Nexus line are the phones that are manufactured by various other device makers. I think the Pixel is actually made directly by Google.

The Pixel is made by HTC.

But we still don't know (do we?) who made that pixel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook_Pixel

Google made that one.

I would really like to see Google take Oreo as an opportunity to set an example and push the pixel 2 with something like 10 years of support.

I am not holding my breath though

That's a pretty unreasonable desire. Technology changes so much in 10 years that it wouldn't be feasible to support a generation of phones for that long.

10 years ago was the original iPhone. How much of a money sink would it have been for Apple to support the original iPhone until now?

10 is almost certainly high. However, the rate of innovation does seem to have slowed down. To the point that all of my other devices from 5 years ago still act like new. My phone? Meh.

What will really kill this is lack of user servicable batteries.

I agree. I am very happy with my Nexus 5 and I intend using it until the hardware gives up.

For context, 5 years ago people were still using the iPhone 4S, as the iPhone 5 wouldn't be announced for another 2 months.

That's not really comparable.. the ecosystem is mature now.

But sure I am going far with 10 years.. and phones would need serviceable batteries to last that long.

What ecosystem becomes mature after just 10 years? A hard drive 10 years after the first one was invented in 1956 looked like this[0]. Is that mature? Phones are mature compared to 10 years ago, but whatever they evolve to in the next 10 will dwarf them.

[0]: http://images.computerhistory.org/storageengine/1966_Ferrite...

The smartphone was invented long before the iPhone. This is 10 years after it went mainstream.

And in ten years that iPhone has not changed much, except that the CPU/GPU rapidly caught up to current standards. The only other dealbreaker toward using it today is 3G support, and that's a 9 year old feature. If the iPhone 3G had the same relative performance to 2008 desktops as the current iPhone has to 2017 desktops, it would probably still be viable.

Maybe 10 years is a bit too high, but we're talking about high end phones here. I'd be surprised if the actual hardware wasn't acceptable 7 years down the line.

Okay, let's say 5 years. I'm still using my first generation Nexus 7, and it's still working fine.

There's no rocket science in maintenance support (eg security patches) for 10 years. That's the only thing that is necessary to keep the device usable.

All the apps on the app store will be written assuming more powerful devices with newer API versions.

And yet, most PCs built 10 years ago can still run most modern software that is written for modern PCs.

Demonstrating how much Microsoft bends over to maintain backwards compatibility. Something that for all their other flaws they should be applauded for.

You mean the APIs. But I wasn't talking about those, but rather the hardware - the only thing that you need there is ABI (or at least API) stability for drivers. So you can pull the same thing off with Linux, as well. Basically, modern desktop OSes can run on decade-old hardware, although they will have reduced functionality due to some missing features.

Which is why the sales have dropped more than 30% over the last couple of years.

Obviously, OEMs don't want this trend to continue.

or atleast ~4 years like iOS devices get.

iPhones now seem to be supported for 5 years now:

- iPhone 4s was supported from iOS 5 to 9.

- iPhone 5 receives iOS 10 updates, but will be out for 11, so iOS 6 to iOS 10.

- iPhone 5s will receive iOS 11. That makes iOS 7 to 11.

To be fair, Samsung phones do sometimes get software features years before the Google and Apple phones (e.g. split screen multitasking).

I don't have to buy a new Apple Phone for immediate updates to the OS .... my 6, 6+, SE, and 7 will all be able to update on day one.

Am I missing something about your comment?

> Everybody else will be probably 4-6 months late.

I am on OnePlus2 and still using version 6 because maintainers do not give a crap about 2 year old phone and it will never get updated at this point.

Flagship my ass.

Typically it's somewhere between 12 and Infinity months

That's the common thinking that if you don't have latest Android it's a problem. But some manufacturers like Samsung push security updates monthly even for old devices such as Note 4. They do have many features years before the stock Android gets them (e.g. aptX, multiwindow or even Android O "tooltips" were in Note 4 when it was announced). So what exactly is the benefit of having everyone use the same exact, latest version? I most certainly would not switch to stock if that meant degarding my "experience" w.r.t. other features.

"Be together. Not the same."

This is spot on. In fact, for most users Lollipop brought lag and excessive battery drain for little user benefit.

Another point of view is you don't need an update if you bought a galaxy S8. It already has everything important and many more features. In fact, S7 actually regressed by updating to N. The multi window feature was perfectly stable and feature rich and most apps supported it. Google forced Samsung to replace it with their rudimentary implementation. Now it lacks features, is much slower, full of glitches and even after one year there are fewer apps that support it. At this point I'd rather Samsung keep sending monthly security updates and forgo on Google's OS update altogether.

When I used to have iPhones, every software update degraded performance, until eventually, an update would make the phone so unbearable to use you had to buy a new one.

Running Nexus 6P with Android Beta Program enabled. Got the stable Android Oreo in a couple of hours of the release.

I know this is a non-issue for many, but those emojis look really dated. Every update they get harder and harder to read in small form. One of the things I observe, mainly on Instagram Stories is only people with iOS post with emojis attached, I never see Android ones. Too bad there is no way to install custom emojis in any system (without rooting/registry tweaking), like we do with fonts.

The yellow blobs were adorable, and sidestepped all the identity politics guff associated with the more anthropomorphised styles.

I like them too. Was disappointed to see the latest ones.

Personally, I find it kind of ridiculous that new emojis are considered flagship features of mobile OS updates. I'd think that it would be possible to decouple emoji updates from kernel/security updates, so I imagine that Android/iOS tie them to the OS updates solely as a way to motivate non-technical users to update.

Mobile OS's aren't just for grumpy old people.

I'm younger than emojis themselves, to be perfectly honest, but I hardly think that an (incorrect) ad hominem makes my point any less valid.

Emojis have no relevance to how technical someone is

Exactly, they have appeal to people independent of technical skill; hence my hypothesis that they make sure to emphasize the things that are more likely to resonate with larger groups of people (like emoji) rather than things like Project Treble or a "native C/C++ API for high-performance audio", even if the former really have little to due with the OS itself.

If we're going down that route, it's also worth noting that "old people" such as GP referred to also can like emoji; my parents and grandparents enjoy using emoji.

GP's point wasn't that emojis shouldn't be updated, but that it shouldn't require MAJOR/BREAKING VERSION updates (kernel, libraries, the works) to simply update a sprite font.

Who is saying it does? They are just releasing them at the same time.

I don't think they're retroactively releasing them for versions of Android prior to Oreo, though, are they?

Android actually recently released a support library that apps can implement for this.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/...

I suspect it's probably just that "by the time we realised this would be important it was too hard to change it" rather than anything sinister. Though I wish they would pull them out so I can swap or update them externally to software.

"All current iOS emoji will now work on my phone" was genuinely a highlight of the Nougat update for my Galaxy S7 .

I used to hate the blobmojis, but after a while I started to grow fond of them. The weird gradients on the new emojis are a bit jarring. In my opinion the clean, flat style of the old emojis is a lot nicer.

I don't think they're jarring at all. They feel familiar, very reminiscent of early 2000s AIM emoticons.

I absolutely hate those emoji. It's the gradient and outlines, it looks like bad enterprise design. The flat blobs were great.

Yep, new emojis look absolutely awful. They are so out of touch with what their customers want. It's like the emojis were made by some robot or algorithm that is trying to optimize the wrong parameters. I mean, just look at this comparison: http://i.imgur.com/apqo9Ry.png

They're not out of touch with what their customers want. Many of them didn't like them because of the whole "Android is cheap" dilemma (which is BS). The users asked and they got. The people who did like them are a very small, specific, yet vocal group of people.

Where do you take that from? To me, the new ones look way "cheaper", like ripped off WordArt.

They look more like the iOS ones. That's what's important (even though I think the overuse of gradients makes iOS emoji look dated too).

Oddly Facebook Messenger seems to have the best set [1], for my eyes.

[1] https://emojipedia.org/messenger/

No they don't. They look like a shitty replica of them made by someone who understands nothing about art. Just because they both have "gradients" means nothing. iOS has smooth 3D gradients. These have a plain and awful looking linear gradient from top to bottom with two colors. The messenger one you linked has so much detail and personality. These ones have neither. They are, as mentioned above, like cheap Clipart. If you honestly can't see the difference between the one you linked and these new Android ones, then I don't know what to tell you.

I suspect the reason for the update was to bring the Android emoji more in line with Apple's, which are generally considered the standard emoji.

The look like phpBB or IPB smileys with gradients.

The new emojois are in the top 50 of all time posts in /r/crappydesign https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/6elhjc/the_ne...

From kawaii to krappy

looks like bad 00s clipart

Does Google pay these candy companies to use the name or do they pay Google?

There's obviously some contractual relationship but I can't figure out who's on which end of it.

Would they need to pay them? Cookies and mobile phones are completely different lines of business, right?

Though the name is a direct reference to the sweet, so that maybe makes it more complicated.

Well and they have a picture of the cookie itself on their landing page.

Oreo's probably a "famous mark" and therefore qualifies for dilution protection, and this would be pretty in line with what "dilution by blurring" is considered to be. Not that it would come to anything, but there is something there.

They made a deal with Nestle/Hershey for KitKat, so I'm sure they did here as well.

You would think it would be the other way around considering the amount of free advertising Orea is getting from this. Like, in the KitKat release, I doubt there was any financial arrangement.

Reminds me of David Foster Wallace's concept of "subsidized time" in Infinite Jest

Year of the Whopper

Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad

Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar

Android Heath Bar (TM)

Android Pocky (TM)

http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/ind...

Really OT but since you brought it up, I legit just started reading the book yesterday and this is my first DFW book. Looks kinda daunting, any advice?

keep an organized notebook while you read this book. of characters, ideas, events (which happen non-chronologically), etc.

not being pretentious -- you will actually need it. I've been reading this book on and off for about four years now, and wish I had started with a notebook from the beginning.

don't get discouraged if some passages are boring -- make a note of them and just power through them.

it's so, so worth it. I think I'm probably really only "getting" 10% of this book but it's still incredible.

I like to read but I don't challenge myself all that much so I'm afraid I'll be in over my head, would you recommend checking something out to sort of "prepare" myself?

Like watching Tarkovsky straight from Michael Bay is not something I'd recommend, I'd tell them to watch some Nolan for contemporary, then Kubrick and stuff before going for Solaris. Is there an equivalent?

you could read some of DFW's short stories to understand his style a bit.

other than that, don't be too afraid -- Infinite Jest is intentionally complicated and convoluted, being a bit confused is part of the experience. even if you aren't quite sure what's going on in every chapter, the writing is gorgeous and funny even on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

You'll meet one character, then move on to another character, then return to the first character four hundred pages later. You'll read footnotes on footnotes that refer to other footnotes. There will be plays on words that appear on page 20 and then are reprised on page 600. Extended metaphors are introduced and return without warning.

Just start reading it, and if it gets too hard, put it down a bit. It's still a book for entertainment (the whole story is _about_ entertainment), so don't treat it too much like it's homework. just have fun with it :)

Thanks, that puts me at ease. I haven't read Pynchon but I watched Inherent Vice and had a similar experience with stuff happening without context or anyone understanding what's going on.

I've only read Roger Federer as Religious Experience and that was pretty fun even though I don't watch tennis or care enough to know the rules, it was pretty fun to read the actual thing with extended footnotes open in a different tab.

This was the story behind Kit Kat, I'd assume it will be something similar https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/3/4691040/android-kitkat-the...

Google is the largest ad company in the world. Selling ad space is what they do. What is Android naming if not one giant ad space?

Long story short I'd be extremely surprised if Google didn't sell this.

I believe they explicitly stated that no money exchanged hands over the KitKat naming. I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true here. It's easy cross promotion for both companies, and it's not like there's a wealth of "O" named confections.

I believe the kitkat one was a joint promotion, so kitkat did som android promotion and Google did some kitkat promotion and called it equal.

Wikipedia says the same.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_KitKat (see history section. Sorry can't figure out how to do the deep link on mobile)

They could've probably called it "Hydrox" for free.

Yeah, but Hydrox doesn't start with an O.

There is absolutely no way that money went from Google to Nabisco on this one. The Nabisco marketing department would be crying tears of joy at landing this coup.

I've never understood why they'd want to associate the brand with cheap candy.

Ice Cream Sandwich used to evoke thoughts of sticky fingers and an over indulgence of sugar.

I don't think people really care all that much to be honest.

That's exactly what I would associate Android with- cheap, low quality and pervasive.

It's been "planned" since 2014

https://twitter.com/Oreo/status/522460831070822400

The awful scroll hijacking implementation on this page really distracts from the content.

Yeah I tried scrolling down to see if it had any information regarding how or when this update would be released to their own phones and the scroll was just all over the place.

I really wish everyone would stop hijacking scrolling.

I guess it is pretty common for sites with parallax. It's pretty damn annoying.

Enroll in the beta to get the release version (on Pixel).

Thanks; it took way too long to figure out this was the path (maybe the release version is rolling out soon? I see zero indication anywhere).

Browsing with NoScript in default deny JS mode, I just had to turn of style sheets to be able to read the whole article, unimpeded by any scroll hijacking.

NoScript definitely improves most sites, but scroll can be hijacked with CSS alone: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/scroll-beha...

Firefox users can set "layout.css.scroll-behavior.enabled = false" in about:config and never have to worry about this nonsense again.

Did you read the article you link to? It says that it only applies to CSSOM (JavaScript) and navigation (presumably clicking links). Not scrolling by the user.

Whoops, sorry I guess my understanding of the setting was incorrect. I remember troubleshooting this a while back and I thought this is what resolved the issue I was having.

Just want to hear your opinion.. What exactly is the problem with the Scroll Hijacking - is it not a way for a Vertical Slideshow ?

This ranks highly on the worst webpages that I've ever been to. Shows off nicely that it takes a lot of effort not just to make good webpages, but also to make the truly atrocious ones.

I'd just like to point out that this isn't really "scroll hijacking." You have full control over scrolling on this web page. Rather this is uses what we call a parallax layout (https://envato.com/blog/parallax-scrolling-in-web-design/), which can also be annoying, but is actually not the same as scroll hijacking.

(Compare this to the Mac Pro landing page which actually hijacks scrolling https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/)

It’s uses scroll-linked effects that are every bit as bad as scrolljacking.

Android has really been annoying me lately. Maybe I didn't care before but now that I can't root my phone I am forced to deal with it.

Still can't disable or customize to stupid "share" menu that puts you one click away from accidentally sending something to a stranger you contacted once on sms or facebook messenger or email.

Still can't revoke certain permissions from apps (like vibration). There is zero reason why my browser should need to ever vibrate or use the accelerometer/gyro.

Still no good system wide ad blocking solution. (not likely, but one of the biggest things I miss from having a rooted phone)

How about those superpowers, Google? I have been an Android user since 2010 but I am quite sure my next phone will be an iPhone (with a headphone jack).

> zero reason why my browser should need to ever [...] use the accelerometer/gyro

It might not be a good reason, but I made a game a while back that used tilt input instead of arrow keys on mobile: http://nfriedly.github.io/space-jump/

A bit related, do ad companies use the tilt/gyro to guess if someone is actually looking at the video? It seems they could adjust payout based on if there was an actual view, or at least get some metrics on which ads people actually pay attention to.

Not sure.. it wouldn't surprise me though.

> Maybe I didn't care before but now that I can't root my phone I am forced to deal with it.

Why not?

maybe it is a company phone

it locked by by his carrier (eg verizon pixel)

he wants to use android pay\netflix\other apps that detect root

etc.

There are many reasons.

All of which can be summed up as "don't work with shitty companies".

give me an alternative to android pay and netflix on a google device

I suspect their UX people nixed the whole "revoke individual permissions" thing because then aunt Tilly would accidentally revoke something and complain that her phone is broken.

Seen the same kind of reasoning play out in other contexts where user customization has been curtailed.

They could have put it in the developer menu for goodness sake.

So you're upset about not having enough niche power-user knobs, so you're going to a device that has basically zero power-user knobs? How does that make any sense? Why not just flash an AOSP-based ROM that does what you want, which Google officially supports for their devices?

Exactly. I need to customize, so I'll go to Apple, the most user-infantilizing software company on the face of the planet, world-renowned for their repeated refusal to let users tweak the user experience of their $1000 phones on the grounds that some people in a board room in Cupertino know what's best for you better than you do.

They usually know better. I've been iPhone user for 6 years and I've never wanted to customize something. Android, on the other hand, would need a complete customization, redesign and rewrite which I don't have time to do.

I'm happy with my relationship with Apple and their products over the years.

I trust them to do the right thing, and they usually do - for my needs. Obviously many other people feel the same way too. I don't want to customize anything, I want things to work and work well. I don't want to be in the driver's seat, I want to be driven.

Your view of Apple and their relationship with their customers is very skewed. The same thing that seems to infuriate you is the thing that makes them so incredibly successful.

> Still can't revoke certain permissions from apps (like vibration).

You can revoke individual permissions from apps. Settings > Apps & notifications > App permissions on Oreo. I think this has been in since Marshmallow (6.0).

You can manage individual notification settings (including vibration) from Settings > Apps & notifications > Notifications.

I'm not sure about accelerometer/gyro settings for apps. I feel a bit different about this one. Why should I care if my browser uses the accelerometer/gyro?

You can't revoke a lot of permissions (such as vibration) from apps, even in that settings menu.

>Still no good system wide ad blocking solution.

Theres multiple non root solutions that use a local vpn to accomplish this.

System wide ad blocking is available on Android. You just need to buy the correct phone (hint: Samsung galaxy).

On a serious note, Samsung is so far ahead of every other manufacturer (including Google) I wonder why people buy anything else. For me, whenever I need to buy a new phone, there are two options to consider: Samsung or iPhone.

You can use the VPN api, and run a local vpn server on the handset, with adblocking. That's what I do, without root on my new phone.

DNS66 is super annoying if you regularly use a VPN for anything else.

Try this app[1] for customising your share menu. Lets you remove a lot of the cruft that clogs up your share menu too.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andmadesof...

Last Updated: January 21, 2013

Pretty much abandon-ware.

It still works though (and looks nicer than in the screenshots). No need for an update if it already works as described.

Is anybody else getting seriously bored of the share menu being totally different in each app?

> Android Oreo helps minimize background activity in the apps you use least, it's the super power you can't even see.

I'm looking forward to this. It seemed to me in the switch from iOS to Android that the battery life definitely suffered. I wish the Samsung Galaxy's "ultra power saver mode" was available in more devices. The "battery saver mode" in my current Android phone is decent but doesn't seem as effective.

> Integrated printing support

> Compatible with all Mopria-certified printers, which make up 97% of printers sold worldwide.

Gee, I've never heard of "Mopria" but this sounds interesting.

>Gee, I've never heard of "Mopria" but this sounds interesting.

97% of printers sold now - the initiative happened in 2014, and I assume that it took manufacturers a few years to ramp. So probably don't expect it to work with your 5 year old all-in-one.

If it supports prior services like Google cloud print, perhaps even uncertified printers could work

Cloud print has been supported since KitKat, you just need to install the driver (sorry, "print plugin"): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Yeah, I meant the printer, not the phone/tablet.

All I want is for my stupid phone to stop annoying me with new features I don't want. Google just now suggested with a notification that I should ask its voice thing a question and try it out.

Every time I think I've blocked every $_#&#- thing that annoys me, more show up. As of a week ago I now get these Throw notifications that cannot be dismissed or blocked.

I also despise apps that insist on being updated and disallow being uninstalled.

These itches are so bad now that I'm pretty disenchanted with Android altogether.

I want a no nonsense phone that literally does nothing out of the box except the app store and make phone calls.

Give me a phone like you describe that also doesn't track you and I'm sold.

It's called an iPhone: https://www.apple.com/iphone/

Can I uninstall all the apple apps be that come with it?

Most except safari

And you can kill that under "restrictions" if you want to...

Effectively most of them, yes.

Can't we assume everything you do on an iPhone is also tracked?

Google Now is malware that can't be removed and is constantly showing you ads and spying on your behavior (look at the app integrations menu). The best you can do is go through the disable-athon menu, but that only works until the next update.

It's an impressive bit of technology though, I've never seen an app so good at telling me exactly what I didn't care about, exactly 10 minutes after I would have cared about it.

Now is optional. I've never used it.

If it can't be deleted then it's not optional. Even disabling it is obfuscated behind signing out, but I don't know if it still sends data to google or not.

Wondering if the following feature is enabled by default:

"Wi-Fi Assistant

Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google."

I really do not want to tunnel my whole traffic through Google's servers.

It's already available on older Androids (my stock Android 6 Nexus 5 has it).

It asks to enable it on a per Wifi basis, if it detects any traffic is being mitm mangled, and you have to agree to enabling it for that Wifi.

I don't know if it is on by default but if enabled it will connect to "High Quality" open networks. If it does this it connects the VPN.

So the VPN is "required" by this feature but you can turn it off globally, or manually connect to networks where you don't want to use the VPN.

Doesn't this violate the computer fraud and abuse act, for unauthorized accessing to a networks without permission? More specifically, piggybacking [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking

I know programming within the constraints of mobile devices isn't easy and I want to take nothing away from the release, but when you are still used to Desktop computing it's kind of funny to see how seemingly trivial nice to have features like picture-in-picture or notification dots get all hyped up in the press release.

Does desktop have good PIP? It obviously matters much less when you have multiple monitor, but I'd love to see OS level PIP support on desktop. Aka, have a video "always on top" in the corner that I can move around and resize while browsing the web, all on the same monitor. Some programs have "always on top" support but there's nothing OS level.

Window Managers like KDE and Gnome have workspaces and window pinning (shown as "Show on all workspaces") for decades.

Windows 3.1 was able to have two windows side by side before Android even existed.

macOS has PiP

Like someone else below mentioned, MacOS has built in native PIP support for videos at the OS level. Browser-wise it only works in Safari though.

It's also a little hidden in YouTube's site because YouTube hijacks the first right-click. Try this if you have MacOS and want to see how it works with YouTube:

1. Open Safari

2. Go on YouTube

3. Go to any video

5. Right-click then right-click again immediately

6. Select "Enter picture in picture"

It should be available in the right-click menu in the native MacOS video player that most apps build on top of (unless said services hijack the right-click like YouTube). Works well with Netflix, Vimeo, VLC, you name it.

It's one of my favorite things.

> features like picture-in-picture

I wonder whether YouTube will let you use this without subscribing to Red.

"new emoji" is an OS-level feature now. Welcome to 2017.

Well, there was a lot of distaste for the previous style, it's a pretty notable difference to users. (For the record, I liked the original "blobs" and will miss them.)

I didn't think I'd miss the blobs until I saw these new ones. The new ones are embarrassingly bad. Maybe it's just me, but I feel Koreans and Japanese do much better emojis.

I'm fairly sure anyone who has actually had a proper look at the new emojis much prefers the old ones. And I'm not talking just about the blobs (which were only a small fraction of the emojis), but rather the overall style with the gradient and border, and the drawing for the animal emojis too.

> "new emoji" is an OS-level feature now.

System fonts have been an OS-level feature since the advent of OS with bundled GUI. Support of a larger part of the Unicode space in system fonts has been an OS-level feature since Unicode. New emoji has been a visible aspect of that, especially on mobile, for quite some time.

Why is it tied to the OS version, though? I would (naively) think it's a matter of just sending the new font as an OTA update?

Given that it's apparently a fairly compelling feature for many consumer end users, maybe it's a way of convincing OEMs and carriers and to actually deliver updates.

There's the EmojiCompat library that can be used now by apps to support the full set in previous versions of the OS: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/...

So it looks like it's not a "ploy", but an actual technical reason. Baffles me.

I hoped they wouldn't follow through with the new emoji style. Going to miss the blobs a lot.

why? those expressions were completely incompatible with what other phone users were seeing or sending

I've only ever seen them inside Google hangouts, but I will say that I thought they were kind of cute.

I don't know where they could keep them since I agree it would be a good idea to have something very similar to other oasis.

You are correct in some cases but not in a majority.

No they weren't.

Some of them did not match perfectly with their counterparts in other Emoji sets. I wouldn't call that "completely incompatible" though, and it doesn't imply that one or the other is wrong.

If the purpose of this was to bring them in line with other emoji sets, they could have just redone the few that show somewhat different expressions.

Agreed, miscommunication was a serious problem with them. See https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125701/googles-18-month-quest...

Oreo now has new font handling that allows apps to download new (emoji) fonts so these shouldn't be necessary anymore.

And perhaps for the final time. Google has released a support library[1] to put the onus back on individual app developers to integrate support for new emoji, and it is compatible all the way back to 4.4 (Kit Kat).

[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/...

Does that make the new emoji a non-feature for Oreo?

I hear ya...of the two bolded feature headings in the story we get: 1. Supersonic speed ( always welcome ) 2. League of extraordinary emojis ( the last thing I would care about in a new os release )

I remember that when Apple started announcing that they were new emoji's in the new iOS versions all of a sudden people updated WAY faster instead of waiting a few months.

It really does seem to be something that drives adoption.

I'll admit it. The thing that got me to update iOS this last time were the iMessage effects (slam, confetti, invisible ink, etc.).

I rarely use those now, but I'm not immune to superficial hype. It's fun.

I love the invisible ink one the most. I use it pretty often actually. Yes it's dumb, but I'll be damned if I can't have some dumb fun.

Invisible ink is very useful. I've used it to text people minor pieces of privileged information at work when I don't know who can see their phones. After all, most people just leave their phones on table tops with notifications on. It's also great for texting with my wife when she is with her parents or traveling with co-workers.

For a lot of people, new emoji are a great reason to upgrade and not miss out. Apple's been training customers to do this for years.

Really sad about the loss of the blob emojis. Will probably have to root my phone to use a third party emoji switcher app to preserve them.

And it's not that the new emojis are all necessarily bad. My issue is confusion over what the recipient will see when I select one of the new emojis. I'm still not 100% clear on the emoji set mapping between OEMs/OSes. :-/

Isn't that one of the points of the new emojis, though? That unlike the previous ones, they're compatible with what other systems use.

If emoji are in Unicode, why can't I choose how to represent then? Isn't that the job of the font?

If you want total control over what the recipient sees, send an image.

It would be like if a webpage requested Helvetica and you are using Linux the text simply wouldn't render.

> If you want total control over what the recipient sees, send an image.

Is this for real? You rather people have to stop using emojis and send images in their stead, than the different platforms give them the same meaning?

They have the same meaning, namely the one encoded in Unicode.

Just because different platforms have different fonts does not charge they meaning.

An "a" in Helvetica has the same meaning as in Times New Roman, but the glyph is different. "" means the same thing, even though I inputted it as the Android yellow blobs, I see it as a simple black and white symbol and an iPhone user reading this will see another different image.

When people look for an emoji in their phone's keyboard to express something, they don't read the Unicode description for that emoji. When people receive them, they don't read the description either.

Thus why it's important that, even if they don't have the same style across platforms (like an 'a' in Helvetica and in Times), they have to depict the same thing.

For example, if from your HTC phone you send a smiley that looks pretty content and calm, users of most other platforms will receive it as "I'm freaking sick of this". The meaning encoded in Unicode for it is "face with look of triumph" ( https://emojipedia.org/face-with-look-of-triumph/ ), which isn't what you meant, nor what your receiver understood.

They were always technically speaking compatible (Nougat and iOS10 have Unicode parity iirc, now Oreo pushes ahead with new Unicode points).

However, the blobs didn't always socially have the same meaning as iOS emojis. The push to the more circular emojis was to normalize them against iOS emojis, which for better or worse are the primary target of emoji use.

One can use https://emojipedia.org/ if one knows the recepient's device. While there's still cultural impact, i.e. is a praying emoji or high five? Or is laughing or whining?

I plan to. The blob set was a real design triumph. I loved the flat simple style, and they were in line with Material Design guidelines. The new ones are a joke.

"Coming to a device near you"

Yeah, but not on my device. I didn't even get Android 7 :)

It says "a device near you", not "your device". ;)

Isn't his device the nearest near device to him?

Doesn't say "nearest" either. Just near.

Technically, "a device near you" != "the device nearest to you".

Which is exactly what I said.

Going to take advantage of an Android thread here to ask something that has driven me crazy for ~3 years:

How do I disable "pop-down" notifications? i.e. facebook messenger, on receiving a message, drops down a little message box from the top with that message. It stays there for about 2 seconds and then disappears... unless further messages in that chat appears.

The only way I can disable this is by muting that chat, which is not ideal. Same for Hangouts and other messaging apps. It drives me insane.

You can disable app notifications from phone settings. But that's the extreme case.

In the Notifications settings, you can adjust every app's notification settings and disable this.

Not the OP, but my experience is some apps(integrated?) use "android system" for notifications despite the app's notifications being disabled. May be a 'root' issue, but root also makes fixes via terminal or adb viable.

I'm pretty sure this is called 'peeking'. You can disable it specifically in the power notification controls. Level 2 is (iirc) what you want.

Level 3 actually.

Swipe a notification to the side a little bit, and you get a gear icon. Tap that, and you can set that app's max allowed notification importance. You can block all notifications, relegate them to only being visible when you pull down the notification bar, or allow normal icons but not "peeking" notifications.

Yep, there's a new feature in Android O that gives you full control over notifications. You can have them make a sound and pop up, only make a sound, make no sound, or not show up at all. And you can set that per app, and even per notification type if they are targetting O api

I believe the feature you're talking about is "Heads Up Notifications" introduced in Lollipop (5.0). Go into Settings > Notifications, find and turn off Heads up. Then you'll just see the icon in the top bar, but no drop down.

Yup this is a big annoyance. Earlier ticker type notifications were so much better.

I have an HTC One M8 which I purchased in summer/fall of 2015. The phone works great but it makes me sad that I am still on Marshmellow and the phone is no longer supported.

lately I have been been wishing there is a way I can just run some version of linux like debian/fedora on my phone and be able to run apt-get update and upgrade (or yum) as updates are released.

IIRC it cost $600, and technically it does more than I need, but the fact I am becoming more and more concerned that security updates are not being received is making me call into question I actually want a 'smart' phone.

I understand android is based on linux but it is above my head to compile this realease on my own and it is difficult for me to trust rooting the device if there was an option to install oreo on htcone m8 with my 'old' chipset.

any thoughts? did I miss any truely 'free' linux smartphone OS that I would be able to use?

Any consumer concerned with software updates should consider buying Google devices, and not third-party OEMs with shaky history of releasing updates. Your best bet right now would be rooting and flashing newer ROMs, unfortunately.

Fellow HTC M8 owner here. I've been running LineageOS for awhile now, and while it hasn't been entirely painless along the way, it's at least running 7.1.2 and has the August security patches. Worth considering, anyway.

I also have a One M8; mine is currently rooted and running CyanogenMod. (I keep meaning to update to LineageOS but haven't gotten around to it yet.)

Rooting is nice, and I believe it's important from a philosophical standpoint, but I probably won't with my next phone because the features I want are getting built into the OS, and I am missing several apps that just refuse to work when they detect they're running on a rooted phone. (Everything from games to my work email.)

It definitely increases the longevity of phon but, while it mostly works, it has lots of little quirks - especially with the various radios. E.g. I occasionally have to re-pair bluetooth devices, wi-fi will disconnect and then re-connect for no apparent reason, etc. Also, sometimes I just find it getting warm in my pocket and I have to reboot it to make it snap out of whatever endless loop it's stuck in. (I assume that updating to LineageOS will fix a few bugs and introduce a few others.)

I'm going to replace it with either the next Pixel or the next iPhone when they both get released in a month or two, depending on which one I'm more impressed with. I am going to miss my headphones jack...

One of the recent Lineage nightlies made Google Maps unusable on the M8, so there's that :). OTOH, the fix is landed and due to be in this week's nightly build. I really wish there was a more stable channel to be on, though.

The only reason I root my phone any more is for an adblocker. Which the iPhone conveniently has built in... It will probably be my next phone.

Yea, I use Firefox + uBlock Origin on Android, which doesn't require root, so I'm covered there either way. (Annoyingly, the regular Firefox on iOS doesn't yet support adblocking, but I think that will be changing soon.)

Browsers on iOS are just wrappers around safari. Apple doesn't allow 3rd party browser engines. So you will never see feature parity on iOS.

Yea, I know; and to make matters worse, there's no way to apply Safari content blockers to other browsers on iOS.

But, Firefox Focus has a built-in adblocking and I believe that feature will come to regular iOS Firefox sometime soon.

Every time someone asks me advice for "I have a 2-year $600 phone which is not updated" I simply suggest of installing LineageOS.

I've been running it on a few phones. Zero issues so far, the install procedure is trivial once you do it once, it self-updates and the changelogs are clean.

Although I have to say that I agree with this sibling comment:

> I really wish there was a more stable channel to be on, though.

Having nightlies installed automatically on your phone is creepy. So far nothing bad has happened, though :)

Thanks for sharing I will look into this further. I noticed no one mentioned sailfishOS, any reason why?

will my phone work with tmobile and still make calls with my sim card by using lineage OS?

Not saying that everything else is bad, but one thing that strikes me is how much they have run out of interesting things now that they had to use fillers[1] like:

Tooltips

Support for tooltips (small popup windows with descriptive text) for views and menu items.

Normally, this would be relegated to a git changelog in the support library. But this is on the global marketing landing page.

I like to imagine a fictional internal mail thread going like this:

> Folks! please, give us something, anything, to put on the landing page!

> Someone replies duh, maybe tooltips

> What's a tooltip?

> uhh, small popup windows with descriptive text

> What's a popup?

> uhh...

> Nevermind, its on!

This could be a good sign though, of the maturity of the platform (and harder to feel left out if you didn't upgrade).

1: https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/

(for some reason my comment got double posted, pls ignore this dupe, other comment is somewhere on top)

Nice Marketing coop for an OS where 50% of devices won't get updates.

I don't get it. They bring frequent major updates with such important features like 60 new emijis or antivirus software instead of just doing their homework and implementing the number one feature for an OS: Direct OS updates from the OS vendor and nobody else.

Don't tell me it's a problem and the driver situation is so difficult. This is just a bad excuse. They want to keep people buying new Android phones.

This release introduces Project Treble with the goal, I believe, of fixing this exactly this problem.

I don't think it will solve the problem because they still want the hardware makes to distribute updates.

Don't think of Android as windows. Think of it as Debian and Samsung and others releasing Linux mint or Ubuntu. Obviously Debian updates will take time to trickle through.

> Native C/C++ API for high-performance audio. API function for high-performance audio including Native C/C++ audio API.

I wonder if this will be good enough to close the gap with the rich music creation ecosystem on iOS.

The lack of momentum will awfully hard to overcome.

I sure hope so.

Google has been a gold-level sponsor the last couple of years at the JUCE Summit/Audio Developer Conference with a motivation to push developers in the direction of the Android NDK. It's good they acknowledge they are behind it that regard, but there's still a fair amount of catching up to do considering there's now AUv3 on iOS and no competing standard on Android yet.

> that makes it easier and faster for hardware makers to deliver Android updates.

They still don't get it. Google as the OS vendor should update all phones and NOT the hardware makers. Hardware manufacturers can still update their special features on the side after an OS update got deployed but I want that the OS and its core become updates directly and only from Google. Why is this so hard?

Google doesn't want to bear the cost of testing and releasing updates for all of the hardware. Most Android manufacturers barely manage to break even (or outright lose money) trying to sell and support Android hardware. (Samsung makes money, most others don't.)

Blaming the OEMs for your security issues is free.

I don't think that MS tests all hardware when updating Windows. Sometimes some hardware doesn't work after an Windows update and then you just head to the respective hardware manufacturer and try to get updated drivers. This model could work for phones too. Google updates and maybe my S8's camera is not working anymore but at least we have secure and patched phones. And the good thing is: Samsung has to quickly fix the broken camera, so you create a totally different urgency.

But Android is an odd OS, we will never see a proper update policy from them.

It depends what we're talking about. Specifically with ARM processors, it isn't trivial to add drivers separate from your OS deployment. Microsoft DOES work with (and update) third party hardware directly for Windows 10 Mobile devices. And this is true for their third party phones from HP, Acer, etc. as well.

(Note, I have a Windows Mobile device from 2014, and I still receive the latest security fix on Patch Tuesday around 1 PM, every month.)

> ARM processors, it isn't trivial

This is what they tell us for decades. You can just disable parts of an SoC if no driver is available. This is just an architectural decision Google is not willing to address.

And ARM reference designs from a handful of manufacturers are not that different.

> You can just disable parts of an SoC if no driver is available.

So you want Google to ship updates where parts of the hardware just stop working? That sounds fucking awful, no thanks.

And yes ARM's ecosystem has largely still not standardized on self-discover or self-configuration because they have no incentive to. They just hardcode whatever configuration they need and call it a day.

Devils advocate: why should google do that? That would be a pretty big outlay of money/time and they may not be getting paid at all by OEMs.

I agree it's probably the only way to actually fix this, I just don't think it will happen.

Except Google is not the OS vendor for these OEM's. Each OEM forks and creates their own version of Android that they build from source. If you want a phone with Google as the OS vendor that gets updates every month and new OS versions every year then you have to buy a Pixel. If history has taught us anything it's that OEM's cannot be trusted to update their devices.

Don't let the project treble eclipse the limitations imposed over background services,

Android seems to have taken iOS approach towards saving power,

"When an app goes into the background, it has a window of several minutes in which it is still allowed to create and use services"

Though iOS's background restrictions goes up to socket level (e.g VPN, which android O seems to have whitelisted entirely); this is going to be a huge impact over consumers and of course pain in the * for developers.

Has google forgotten how to do great marketing?

You open the page. Scroll down. What should be the first thing you see? Obviously it should be the greatest, the best feature of the new OS. What is it instead? "Quick boot up time". Really? That's the best thing in Android Oreo? That when I reboot my phone once every 4 months, it's going to start quicker? Surely they could have picked literally anything else as the first thing to mention?

A lot of people complaining about using a brand name here -- isn't Kitkat (the 'K' release) also trademarked?

That was a cross promotion, this probably is as well. Google is an ad company.

Nabisco for one, Nestlé for the other, it looks like. I wonder if there's tension there.

Yes, Oreo is trademarked, and Google has licensed it from Nabisco.

http://www.androidauthority.com/android-8-0-oreo-announced-7...

Android has been improving so much in the performance department I think the phone that will replace my aging S3 will be... another S3 if I can find one.

Seriously. Software has improved so much but the hardware nowadays is trash for my needs at least.

Uh? I replaced my S3 by a S7 and the hardware changes are huge: better CPU obviously but also much better screen (the S3 was unreadable during sunny days..)

Can you replace the battery with an extended one?

That's a deal-breaker for me, and battery cases are not a good replacement since I can't rely on the phone's own battery indicator, have to manually turn on/off and looking at ZeroLemon's case for the S7, it seems to require a headphone extender.

As for the S3's screen I have no complaints. It's readable in the sun with max brightness, I keep it at minimum the rest of the time.

Finally, the S7's native screen resolution is 1440p, meaning it will munch on battery much faster for no perceptible gain (at the distance I hold my phone). And manually lowering the resolution will render a blurrier image than native 720p so that's out.

I'm using an S7 edge and it's on the default 1080p resolution. It's not blurry at all. The difference in quality between this screen and the screen on S3 is very noticeable. The non removable battery is the only downgrade I see. Everything else is a huge leap forward. Even battery life is much much better. You likely would not need an external battery.

I'd have to see it for myself. My 4k laptop makes me gouge my eyes out in 1080p mode.

As for the battery life you mention, that's probably just the Android upgrade. I've easily doubled my battery life in 3 major Android version upgrades. 10-15 days (depending on usage) is normal now with a 7000mAh battery.

But really it is faster and smarter :)

First two words on the page after the "Introducing.." title say so.

Which makes me look cynical at everything else.

Would be nice if they added a switch to disable connecting to open wifi networks. Or at least to realize that the wifi is connected but its waiting for a sign in so internet traffic should still be routed through 4g.

My Android 7 device is pretty good with realizing when the wifi doesn't actually give Internet access, and it then routes data through the 4g/mobile connection instead. Nexus 6, stock Android 7.1.1.

Yup this has been the case since KitKat.

That's great it works for you. I have to stare at "Could not connect to server", wifi icon with a cross and a notification asking me to sign in to some telco's hotspot. Only thing that gets me back online is switching the wifi off

Do you have this enabled? http://imgur.com/a/LAjDL

Used to be that Android distinguished between connected wifi and a internet connection by trying to reach a Google server or something.

At least my 4.x tablet used to have a 3-state wifi icon, off (not present), connected (gray), internet (blue).

I would love to have something like this. When I call an Uber/Lyft as I am walking out of my apartment, it always takes forever for the WiFi to disconnect, long after it has lost internet connection. So I constantly get the "Unable to Connect to Network" error, and I have to turn off WiFi and restart the app to actually call a ride.

If anyone knows of a solution to this problem on a Galaxy S8 I would love to hear it.

What you're experiencing is different. The WiFi still has internet access, your signals aren't reaching the AP. The phone has no way of remedying this without switching to LTE very aggressively. I'd assume that would cause unnecessary battery drain and unneeded switches for many people.

That said, I haven't needed to restart the uber app to fix this. I just disable WiFi from the notification toggle and the app connects in about a second after that.

This "WiFi assist" feature exists on iPhone, but there were quite a few complaints from unexpected cellular data charges, including a class action lawsuit [1].

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/10/24/apple-wi-fi-assist-lawsuit/

It has that switch.

System Settings > Wi-Fi > Gear Icon > "Use open Wi-Fi automatically"

"Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google."

Hmmmm. So Google can have even more of your data.

So according to the release the new features are:

-Picture in picture (dual app onscreen)

-Notification dots and "force-touch-like-feature" (my words, not Google's) to preview

-Google Play Protect (an antivirus) [0]

-Minimize unintentional overuse of battery from apps in the background

-Faster boot speed

-Support forAndroid Instant Apps

-Over 60 new emoji (sic)

Under the hood stuff, not in the release (thanks u/izakus)

- Project Treble that splits hardware HAL layer away from the OS layer. Plan being that this allows updating the OS without having to update the whole hardware driver stack (and thus avoid being dependant on Qualcomms of the world to update their proprietary blobs for each release) - GPU drivers are now updatable via Play Store (by OEMs)

More new features listed on the main Oreo page [2]:

-Accessibility button: Allows you to quickly access from the navigation bar accessibility features, like magnification, and functionality within accessibility services, like Select to Speak.

-Accessibility volume: Accessibility services can optimize the audio experience for users with disabilities.

-Adaptive icons: Developers can now provide a full-bleed square shaped icon and OEMs will mask the icon to ensure intra-device consistency.

-Ambient screen: Highlights the incoming notification with larger font, highlighted app name and immediate access to actions.

-Background execution limits: More control over how apps run in the background for better overall system performance.

-Background location limits: Limits the frequency of location updates in the background for better overall system health.

-Deep color: Enables applications to render richer visual content with more vibrant colors and subtler gradients. Supports full color management which allows applications to render images in the format and quality they were intended.

-Downloadable fonts: Applications no longer need to bundle custom fonts, which helps reduce their size.

-Install unknown apps: Hostile downloader apps can't operate without permission; users now permit the installation of APKs per-source.

-Integrated printing support: Compatible with all Mopria-certified printers, which make up 97% of printers sold worldwide.

-Linkable files: API that allows you to share files across the Internet via web links.

-Native C/C++ API for high-performance audio: API function for high-performance audio including Native C/C++ audio API.

-Notification categories: More granular and consistent control over which notifications can appear and how intrusive they are.

-Notification snoozing: Lets users hide notifications for a period of time, similar to Inbox snoozing.

-Pointer capture: Pointer capture allows the app to capture all mouse input.

-Project Treble: The biggest change to the foundations of Android to date: a modular architecture that makes it easier and faster for hardware makers to deliver Android updates.

-TextView autosizing: Developers can now let the size of their text expand or contract automatically based on the size and characteristics of the TextView, making it much easier to optimize the text size on different screens or with dynamic content.

-Tooltips: Support for tooltips (small popup windows with descriptive text) for views and menu items.

-Wi-Fi Assistant: Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google.

[0] https://www.android.com/play-protect/

[1] https://developer.android.com/topic/instant-apps/index.html

[2] https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/

Missed important under-the-hood stuff:

- GPU drivers are now updatable via Play Store (by OEMs)

I think -- better power management for background apps and instant apps are real features I'd care about. For the later, I always hate to install an app just to check it out and then uninstall it quickly. Thats too much inconvenience for me.

Where did you see that it has "force touch" to preview? I can't find that information in any of the links.

Sorry, they where my words, and a poor choice, I have updated that point. The feature I was referring to is this:

Notification Dots: Press the notification dots to quickly see what's new, and easily clear them by swiping away.

Protect is their (re-)branding of the existing automated checks Google does on Play store apps (and third party apps if you pick the "scan with google" (iirc) install option for non-Play apks).

> Compatible with all Mopria-certified printers, which make up 97% of printers sold worldwide.

I wonder if every Mopria-certified printer prints anti-privacy tracking dots.

Seems like the most notable part of this release will be the emoji upgrade :-P Rustaceans will appreciate the crab

The crab is a must.

Instant Apps: I think this can impact very positively the environment but there are almost not mentions to it.

Environment? How so?

You don't need to have all apps installed. For example: you can go to facebook web page and launch an instant app, so you have the native experience without having the app installed. Also with places like amazon or anything that you don't use very frequently. Moreover you can test an app without installing it.

Ok I get that you don't need to install all apps. But again, how does it affect the environment?

that you don't have to install apps to use them? Like you go to a web page and can have native experience, with its animations and everything. Much better than a web experience.

Please use a PNG for the emojis image... it's so painful to see the JPEG halo/bleeding artifacts...

How can you send time constructing such a fancy webpage, and not notice that jpeg mess?!

Quite excited by the "high-performance audio API". Could drive a different consumer segment.

Not related but does Google have to pay Oreo money for using its name/image?

This seemed like the best choice in name and yet I wonder if they'll draw the same ire from the community as they did when choosing Kit Kat.

Honestly I like it; it was better than basically all the other alternatives.

No, it wasn't :) [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovos_Moles_de_Aveiro

A non-generic brand name for their O-release? Did they strike a deal with Nabisco/Cadbury? I can't imagine Google doing this without some form of legal go-ahead from the trademark owner.

Of course. Would be interesting to know what the exact quid pro quo is for deals like this though (who pays whom, and how much, etc.).

Yeah, I wonder which brand benefits more from this. I would imagine Oreo since there are far more cookie brands than mobile OS's.

Something tells me no one is paid but Oreo benefits with free advertising for their cookies/biscuits

At first I thought so too, but the brand dilution that is going to happen has to have some negative penalty.

Oreo will receive "free" marketing, but now will have to share the name with a version of a mobile OS.

When Kitkat came out, they decided it was mutually beneficial and didn't pay each other.

They did the same thing wit KitKat.

Getting ready for Android Raiders, with doubled security through two fingers fingerprint reader.

I'm holding out for Android Diet Mountain Dew

They licensed KitKat as well. Yes, it was an official deal - They even had android themed/branded KitKats that they gave out at launch events.

KitKat is also trademarked by Hersheys and Google use it. This was of course done in partnership with Hersheys.

edit:// a little late with this

Actually, KitKat is trademarked by Nestlé. Hersheys has a limited license to produce it in the US, and the ad campaign for Android was done with Nestlé.

(And the Nestlé version actually uses real swiss chocolate, and tastes a lot nicer)

Fairly obviously a licensing/marketing deal.

"The world's favorite cookie" right in the first caption. Almost subliminal images of Oreos in the background as you scroll.

They did, of course. Little known fact: Google is one of the largest tenants in Chelsea Market, which used to be the factory were Oreos were first made.

I wonder who paid who..

And in cookies or dollars

In case of 4.4 KitKat it was the idea of Nestle's advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson [0]. It was novel at the time, and it as more than just jumping on the letter "K", because it tied the "have a break, have a kitkat" line with the idea that people reach for their smartphones when they have a break. Now I imagine it's just people in suits negotiating the deal for the next release name.

[0] https://jwt.co.uk/work/android

Disclosure: I have worked for a JWT subsidiary at the time.

I think you're overselling JWT's involvement. That link just says that the brokered the deal, not that it was their idea.

All the stories I've heard[1] say the idea came from Google as Hiroshi Lockheimer (now head of Android & Chrome OS) was a big fan of KitKats.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/3/4691040/android-kitkat-the...

Well, Google/Alphabet are an advertising company.

>Google Play Protect:

> Working to keep your device and data safe from misbehaving apps by scanning over 50 billion apps per day, even the ones you haven't installed yet!

Also known as anti-virus.

Google has rebranded viruses as "PHAs" or "potentially-harmful applications". They don't want anyone to know that Android devices get viruses. ;)

Yeah, also known as a feature that has been around for years but now is being shoved in my face whithout providing any additonal benifit. (I guess I am supposed to feel safer?)

https://www.android.com/security-center/

This page says 8 billion a day, which seems inconsistent. Also how many apps are there on the Play Store to scan that many?

Yeah, I can't even imagine there being 8 billion apps in total. Like, that's more than there are humans on Earth. If every 50th person would be an app developer, then every app developer would still have to publish 50 apps all by themselves. I doubt that even the studios that just rebrand and rerelease their apps over and over again get to such a quota.

It checks the apps on the device. Considering the amount of Android devices with Google Play Services that number seems consistent.

Phones don't get viruses.

> "Native C/C++ API for high-performance audio"

This is good to hear. But, this makes me wonder about Android's ability to prevent people from pirating apps. Due to the nature of Android, I've never wrote an app that wasn't free.

On iOS, there are a number of audio apps that do quite well. I'd be hard pressed to port an app to Android, if taking the apk was as easy as it's always been.

So, it was announced during the eclipse (dark and bright). It's called Oreo which is the same but they still didn't bother with a dark mode?

>> Swift moves, behind the scenes

Translation: we developed better compression algos for uploading your personal data to our servers

> Wi-Fi Assistant: Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google

VPN back to Google?

I wonder if the visual play of the Oreo mimicking a solar eclipse on the homepage [1] is a coincidence, seeing as how it was released on the 21st.

[1] https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/

I'm looking forward to Google finally allowing PiP to work in the YouTube app on iOS...

Say hello to the MAFIAA...

My experience with my Android-based TV is that every Android update and every update of Google's own apps (e.g., YouTube) is a regression is so many totally unnecessary ways that it almost seems deliberate at this point.

I remember being excited about new Android releases. Boy times have changed.

This looks interesting:

"Linkable files: API that allows you to share files across the Internet via web links."

Will this mean that I don't have to download a pdf to view it? I wonder what this feature means.

I am still wondering what it is. Theirs no documentation.

Not on my LG and Asus devices, no sir.

And I don't believe OEMs and telecom operators will release updates even with Treble, if Google doesn't force them to do so.

Reminds me of a windows release.

Except that, if mobile OS's could still disrupt the desktop, there's still many features to go?

Did google forgot how to design web pages?

I love the intro video of Android Oreo launch as they used the context of Solar Eclipse on 21st August.

Too bad most Android devices will never get this update. This is where Android sucks compared to iOS.

FYI Oreo Battery Life on the Nexus 5X is really bad. Don't upgrade if you have one.

Really? By how much? Since when were you using the developer previews?

Dev previews for over a month - 1/4 to 1/2 less battery time. Same with the release - perhaps a tiny bit better.

Express yourself in more ways than ever: Share the feels with a fully redesigned emoji set, including over 60 new emoji.

http://nedroid.com/2014/08/phone-home/

classic hacker news thread on new tech: i only learned negative things.

Finally Android will stop Facebook apps from sucking my RAM secretly!

I've found a fantastic solution that works on any phone! Uninstall facebook and facebook messenger. Then use Chrome and facebook's mobile site. Life changer, man.

I haven't had much problem with FB Messenger, and it's app is more useful then the mobile site.

However the main app is a total dog and the mobile site is quite complete. Would definitely remove it.

But then you will not know, what to do with all that extra battery life!

New EMOJIS? O-M-G finally! I've waited so long!

I love doing "Two things at once, at once."

Why on earth did they go with a restricted trademark, Oreo?

Oreo must have payed a good sum of money I suppose?

Coming up with the legalese on how and where Google is allowed to use the Oreo trademark seems difficult.

https://www.android.com/versions/kit-kat-4-4/

Does INTERCONTINENTAL GREAT BRANDS LLC have a trademark for Oreo in the "computer and scientific" or telecommunications categories?

If not, then there is no trademark issue. Google isn't selling a food, it's selling an operating system.

Are they really selling an OS? It's free right? They sell something else with android but can't figure out what...

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not sorry.

Android is in itself a loss making project. It makes money as a marketing vehicle for other Google products (and therefore ultimately advertising).

Only they're marketing it with oreo cookie mascot, look at all the material. I highly doubt you can just do that.

It's the same with kit kat, they probably couldn't just use that, either.

But it's a win-win for both parties, I doubt either of them paid.

It seems like unnecessary legal risk for Google, and probably restricts how they can market it.

There's no risk. They talked to Nabisco, said, "Hey we wanna call the next OS 'Oreo', coo?" And Nabisco said, "Ok."

Maybe money was paid one way or the other. Or not.

What restrictions are you imagining?

Even with negotiations, If a engineer said in a Google youtube talk "Oreo is Americas favorite android," they could set themselves up for trademark infringement.

If Google had a line in a blog post that said, "It's better than real Oreos", they could likely be sued.

Oreo would not like Google saying either of these things. So Oreo needed to make up legal documents to map out all the things Google is allowed to say about Oreo Android. It seems like an unnecessary legal headache - one for dubious marketing gain.

Licensing a trademark means not having to worry about such fine-grained details. There's no reason anybody would have a problem with "Oreo is Americas favorite android" What is there to sue over? The damn thing is called "Oreo"

Same with your other example. That line is clearly humor, and keeps the cookie brand's name in people's minds.

I think you're overthinking all of this.

They can't, without permission.

The logical conclusion is that they have permission, not that one of the largest companies in the world made a legal mistake that the "We Are Not A Lawyer"s on HN can see right through... for (at least) a second time. Keep an eye out for Oreo packages with Android branding material on them, in the style of: http://cdn.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/kitkata...

I do find myself curious what the negotiations look like when Google wants to not just use Oreos, but not slather all their material with "Oreos are a registered trademark of blah blah blah", which is pretty unusual.

They definitely had permission. Android was cross marketed on Kit Kat bars as well, e.g.: http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1444541.13782299...

Interesting point - the origin of trademark laws is as a way to reduce "consumer confusion." Few people are gonna try to eat their phones as a result of this naming convention so it's hard for Nabisco to claim that consumers are being misled.

Google is an advertising company that sells ad space on their own pages. This is probably just an extension - put your brand's name on an open-source project, similar to putting your brand's name on a sportsball stadium.

These scroll to reveal sites have to die now.

The easter egg is the worst ever.

> Swift moves, behind the scenes

Seriously?

All these releases are meh... I'm waiting for the Reese's release to bite

Don't name Android versions after brands. Now we're stuck with 2 (k,o)

feel the same!

mjjhmmj .

For people complaining they cant get this, it's their own fault. People keep buying carrier phones knowing fully well the problems with locked, bloated androids. Either just buy unlocked phones that you can control or face the consequences.

I don't like the product placement in the release name.

I think this is not the first time...

Have a break.

If by "product placement" you mean that Nabisco paid Google for this, I doubt that is the case. If anything, the money would have gone the other way.

I see there seems to be a dearth of common, easy o-names, but is the name that valuable, and they refused to punt to "orange _______"?

"Allows you to see two apps at once, it's like having super strength and laser vision." really

As a half-black, half-white man, I find this name incredibly offensive. #halfblacklivesmatter

I'll leave it up to you to figure out if I'm serious or not (and yes, I really am mixed so this is plausible).

I think from a certain point of view, "Oreo" could be a great compliment. It is an explicit association with everyone's all time favorite candy snack... (fuck off if it is not yours).

Sincerely,

The Marketing Manager at Nabisco

So I get to be eaten alive under the pretense of being a delicious snack treat, cool.

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