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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely a problem but in practice it's not as dire as this article makes it sound. So many of the essential pieces have been factored out into the support libraries and independently upgradable components that Android devices actually get more regular updates in some respects than iOS devices do.

For example, I have to update my entire iPhone OS to get an updated web browser or photo library or keyboard. Google can update all of those every day without a reboot.

As an iOS developer I can't use new OS features until all my users have upgraded. As long as what I need is in the support library I can adopt the latest and greatest for Android right away.

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Hi, author here

You're right about platform features used within apps, many (most? all?) are made available to developers with the support libraries.

However, users will get none of the following until they get Pie (for example)

* ML adaptive battery

* App actions (ML predictive app shortcuts)

* Digital well-being dashboard and limits

* A lot more, as shown on this page (there's a lot of smaller items in the collapsible categories at the bottom): https://www.android.com/versions/pie-9-0/

Each update has a heap of interface improvements, and users miss out on these

> * ML adaptive battery

> * App actions (ML predictive app shortcuts)

> * Digital well-being dashboard and limits

These sounds like gimmicks to me (ML buzzwords). I'd welcome an update that would sort alphabetically the apps I want to share content with for instance. No AI needed for that.

Adaptive battery works extremely well. The ML-side might be a slight in-vogue thing, but as long as it works I don't really care how it works (and it does work).

I have no opinion on App Actions/Digital Web-Being.

> No AI needed for that.

These days, I'm beginning to wonder if it's even possible for a company to alphabetize without ML.

Languages sometimes have different sort order, even when they use the same script. So I could see using ML to detect the language, in order to select the proper sort order.

Including merging in name in different languages and scripts... And trying to figure out whether the user really wanted an English interface when they set up the phone, or just had prior bad experience with poor localizations...

Isn't the language a setting in the OS somewhere? I don't think you need any ML to figure out what language a user's phone is currently using.

The ML adaptive battery update is awesome. I got it on my Moto One Power and the battery life has substantially improved

> Adaptive Battery, in a nutshell, is about figuring out which apps you use frequently and keeping those apps in memory, while the apps you don’t use often are purged once you’re finished with them. Put another way, Android Pie can adapt to your usage patterns so that it only spends battery power on the apps Adaptive Battery thinks you’ll need. https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/28/how-android-pies-adaptive...

I don't know. Wouldn't be easier to simply close the app when a user closes it ?

Fully-closing apps requires them to re-initialize them from scratch after each re-open, which is cpu-heavy (thus also battery-heavy) and slow.

A frequent usage pattern, also, is quickly switching between several apps. There's no definite “close” on mobiles apart from force-quits, which are unhappy for all apps, too.

> Fully-closing apps requires them to re-initialize them from scratch after each re-open, which is cpu-heavy (thus also battery-heavy) and slow.

Thanks for the explanation, I didn't know starting from scratch was so expensive. I had always wondered (and fumed) about that but it makes more sense now.

Android is designed so that users never "close" an app (there's no close button); instead, they switch between apps. The system closes apps in the background when necessary to free memory, but all apps are supposed to save and restore their state so that the user is presented with the illusion that the app never stopped running.

This is untrue. You can close an app manually by pressing the bottom right software button, which shows your foreground apps, and then swiping the app window off the screen.

The state is lost and, for most apps, background processes are killed.

> Digital well-being dashboard and limits

Whenever a for-profit company introduces a new feature, one must ask himself, what is the business case for it.

Personally, I see this feature as a way for Google to legally track which apps people use, and how often. Essentially, it does for Google what Onavo VPN did for Facebook.

From the data collection point of view, whoever came up with this idea at Google must have been worth a promotion. Especially, after GDPR came into force.

They can and do already track your app usage (you can see this if you check your usage history on the Google data dashboards).

This specific change is pretty much just a good thing, unless you want to get meta-cynical.

> They can and do already track your app usage (you can see this if you check your usage history on the Google data dashboards).

Is my Android data usage by app stored somewhere online by default? I thought the stats are only kept locally at the OS level, and are not connected to my Google Account.

In any case, "Digital well-being" seems to be about tracking screen time, not data usage. And as far as I understand, it sends that data back to Google.

Sign into your google store account on another device with a web browser, it gives you full information about what apps you have installed, how long you have used them, and even the ability to install apps remotely (!).

This is a normal functionality of every app store: keeping track of what and when was installed.

But as far as I am aware, Google Play doesn't collect data about the actual usage of each app in terms of screen time.

That's where "Digital well-being" fills the gap for Google.

> ML adaptive battery

That sounds like a gimmick.

> App actions (ML predictive app shortcuts)

More stuff I don't want. I don't want "predictive" app shortcuts. I want shorts that I specify. I want to control which shortcuts are shown and in what order. I don't want anyone (developer, carrier, whoever) to see what shortcuts I've selected, used, or how often.

> Digital well-being dashboard and limits

This sounds like stuff that should have been in the first release.

> A lot more

I don't see any improvements here whatsoever. All of this is the wheel which should have been shipped with my phone is being reinvented.

> interface improvements

"Improvements" is a buzzword for "let's change everything and give it a facelift and make all of our users waste time relearning how to use their device". No thanks. Actually, not even thanks. Just no.

Edit: Dear Me: less swearing plzkthx

> "Improvements" is a buzzword for "let's change everything and give it a facelift and make all of our users waste time relearning how to use their device". No thanks. Actually, not even thanks. Just no.

Which can be a traumatic experience for non-technical people, like my mother or my niece, the end result being them learning to automatically refusing any kind of update, out of fear of change.

I really don't get this unhealthy obsession of the tech industry wit change for change sake, what most people want and need, is stability, so they can take of their lives.

By that argument shouldn't you be using Android 1.0?

Or a 90s Nokia?

You have no idea how much I miss my N95...

You could say the same thing about iOS and browser technologies. Every iOS device is 5 years behind in web standards support. Every Android device has access to the latest Chrome or Firefox.

I would love to update my Nexus 5X to Pie but Google is not giving me this opportunity. How is this my fault?

I have android 9 and frankly its not that special. Google is just scraping the barrel to find new things to put in their updates. Oh look another redesign!

Downside of updating support libraries independently is that it balloons the QA matrix and makes integration bugs inevitable. The iOS approach means the entire OS is properly tested as an entire entity.

There are definitely some very big upsides to being able to move your entire user base to a new major OS version in a year. Apple benefits a lot from this and Google and the vendors and carriers need to somehow get their heads together and deal with this because it is a serious issue.

I just wanted to point out that there are some good things about a more decoupled model too.

I would think two of the richest companies in the world could figure out how to manage that sort of complexity. Maybe they need to poach a few people from Microsoft to learn how it's done.

> Maybe they need to poach a few people from Microsoft to learn how it's done.

It seems Microsoft needs some help in this department as well https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/4500988/windows-upd...

So you're telling me an OS with 1.2+ billion users has bugs? I'm shocked! :)

On a more serious note, Microsoft is (was?) famous for its QA processes. They have (had?) huge computer farms, tens of thousands of machine to be able to QA with every strange configuration out there. Windows, despite the hate it gets, is one of the most QAd pieces of software out there.

And considering the shoddy architecture it has to support for backwards compatibility (CP/M, MS-DOS, Win32), it works amazingly well.

Yea, I always wondered about the (frankly amazing) backwards compatibility. Windows could probably be a much better system if they just get rid of support for these old systems. Same for these super old MS-Word formats. Doesn't need to be as drastic as Apple does it, though.

The super old MS Word formats are just a memory dump of internal data structures. The Modern DOCX just converts XML into that same representation along with whatever new features have been added. There is little reason to remove the old format when it is still very much an integral part of Word internals.

My impression was that they have changed the way potential releases are tested internally https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/23/microsoft_windows_1... The last update was blocked since files were being deleted in users' Document directories and now this external drive issue. Both cases involve some fairly common configurations.

To add to this, I have a 6 year old iPad. There are no issues with it except the operating system itself. Hulu won't install since it needs iOS 11 for some reason. iOS won't update to 11 because it's too old. Netflix works and updates just fine.

The iPad is in perfect condition with no hardware issues. It's the software that will make it an ewaste soon.

My Android phone updates all the apps (even many OS services) without any problem.

Have you ever downloaded Hulu with your account? If so, it should let you download the “last compatible version”. It worked a few months ago for me on my old first gen iPad.

If you haven’t downloaded it before, you can download it with an older version of iTunes or a newer device if you have one and then it will let you download on your old device.

>As an iOS developer I can't use new OS features until all my users have upgraded. As long as what I need is in the support library I can adopt the latest and greatest for Android right away.

I don't know about the rate and speed of support library from the Top 5 Android manufacturers, which is Samsung, Huawei, BBKs, Xiaomi. I know they do get some regular update, but on all devices? And do those user actually update it?

iOS Users Update are on a much faster cycle. iOS 12 is on 70% of compatible iOS devices within 3 months of release. iOS 11+ on 95% of all compatible iOS devices. That is pretty damn crazy if you ask me Having OS that is only 2 years old on nearly all devices.

The support library is something that is statically compiled inside of Android apps. That's the reason why it exists - to circumvent the usual Android OS update process to bring new APIs to developers faster.

ARH, sorry I have close to zero experience on Android Development. Thank You for pointing out.

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