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Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

So there is android-go[0], which is a Goland thing; and Go Mobile[1], which is a Golang thing; and now there is also the other Android Go[2], which has nothing to do with the Go programming language.

Right?

[0]: https://github.com/xlab/android-go [1]: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Mobile [2]: https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/go-edition/

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I for one was wondering if they spoke to their Google Go (Golang) team when they named the Go edition 'Google' app 'Google Go'. There will be some very confused users when they search for 'google go' from now on.

It's probably intentional: "Go" is a great word for marketing, it's simple and short and easy to remember and implies getting stuff done or being active, it's the first two letters in "Google", it's overall a good fit for this use-case, and these probably all outweigh the fact that some programmers already have a different idea of what it means, given most Android users aren't programmers, and this is a user-facing word (if I understood correctly, "YouTube Go" will be the name of the YouTube app on the home screen, etc).

Definitely better than the more logical goo (which is half a google). It just doesn't sound as fast :)

Hey, Gwyneth Paltrow has a highly successful beauty-product brand called GOOP.

Its similar to when blizzard had two games to market "Heros of the Storm" and "Heart of the Swarm" (HOTS). The are taking up more and more of the search space for the phrase "Go" so if they have 10 products that say "go" and a competitor has 1 product then a search might just bump that company away from ever being known and as long as the confusion still takes you to google, google will take that burden.

I'm a software dev and it confused me initially as well since I thought now you can write Go native apps for Android...

Google's just been in some kind of a brain freeze lately... they still can't get a useful chat client that everyone uses (i.e. like whatsapp, or viber even), they royally screwed the pooch by removing the 3.5 mm jack on the Pixel 2.... had screen issues with it as well...

Somebody is asleep at the wheel at Google.

I doubt the target demographic of Android Go is going to know (or even have ever heard of) android-go or Go Mobile.

That's the point. They will be very confused when they Google for help with their phones.

Will they though? If I search for stuff like "Android Go" or "Android Go [insert theoretical troubleshooting issue here]", I don't see anything related to Golang. (I actually see more irrelevant results for Pokemon Go for some reason.)

I think our search results look very different from theirs.

I really don't think that the choice of a very common two letter sequence as the name for go the language was made with even the faintest expectation of exclusivity. It would be wrong to grant the language something it never asked for.

the word go/ is the go word at google

If they wrote Android in Go, then it most definitely would be more lean than the current Java clutter that is underlying the platform. Add to that the dev tools would use about 100x less resources!

it also would align with their Futter on mobile efforts as flutter can run on top of go...

This is probably the first feeler in the new Android OS being go and moving towards a native go on android solution replacing java...which declaws the Oracle judgement entirely..

Looks like Android native is heading to Go from Java..

What? They don't mention anything about Golang.

Who knows, maybe Fuchsia will go in that direction. It might help native Android apps get to the performance of native iOS apps, if developers are willing to invest in a new toolchain. They'd probably have to redo the whole API though.

Native Android apps launch faster on slower previous generation hardware than native iOS apps and have for years[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/hPhkPXVxISY

> It might help native Android apps get to the performance of native iOS apps,

I'm curious as to the performance differences of Android and "native" iOS apps. Their primary languages are both compiled down to native machine code and they're both garbage collected. Any performance differences that exit would appear to be minor. In fact, considering the iPhone CPU's are about twice as fast you would think this performance gap would be greater, yet it is not. Now, I realize speed tests between these platforms isn't an accurate metric in measuring app performance, but it is interesting nonetheless how an Android phone with a CPU half as fast can so easily beat the best of what Apple has to offer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qARozmOb9PY

Apparently some Java apps are replaced with Go versions.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/google-releases-andr...

This doesn't say anything at all about Go the language (golang).

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