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> iOS is the biggest gaming platform, on $$$ per user, including some exclusive hits, with several frameworks and tooling tailored to writing games.

Other than "Apple Revenue", in no other world is this a metric of "biggest" in the context of even the most "squint hard enough" contexts of this thread.

Then by that measure, the Web is the biggest gaming platform, where the Linux kernel doesn't have any role at all regarding Web browsers.

Are you sure? I think people play way more often on android than they do on the browser.

No, and actually Windows, Mac and consoles still rule, with mobile being a mere 38%.

https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/

So iOS is the biggest market, while android apps have more play time (also are messier, more of a pain..)?

Plausibly more time is spent gaming in browsers, or not. My guess would be android apps, possibly browser games. AFAICT the link only covers payed games, mostly counting by revenue, but I didn't look hard.

Worldwide 2019:

PC 25%

Consoles 26%

Phones 34%

Tablets 11%

Browser 4%

Since Android has 76% mobile os market I'd say that Android is the main gaming platform of the world. And the web is least used for gaming.

I wonder what magic turns 34% into 76%.

This even before starting the whole discussion that market share doesn't transform into gaming market share, nor in most profitable market share, or even native vs web views vs mobile browser usage.

.76*(.34+.11) = .342

That's greater than .26 (consoles), .25 (pcs).

> the only Linux that Android has is the kernel

The only Linux in any Linux-based operating system is the kernel.

Except that the little fact that Android is not Android/Linux, rather just Android, in what concerns userspace.

Any kernel will do the job required by userspace, that is running ART, ISO C, ISO C++ and the set of Android native APIs.

No, not "except that". Linux is just a kernel.

Yes, Google could replace Linux but they would also have to port drivers for every device Android runs on to that kernel.

> Yes, Google could replace Linux but they would also have to port drivers for every device Android runs on to that kernel.

Or just virtualize the whole kernel and Android runtime via a new kernel-based hypervisor for compatibility/migration purposes and switch everyone to Fuchsia/Zircon.

Google doesn't care about writing the drivers for other/older phones for manufacturers as they already have a hardware division to do it themselves for their phones, laptops and tablets. If Android was to be replaced by something else (Fuchsia), The vendors will be writing the drivers instead if they want to support Fuchsia.

Also, they don't need to "port drivers for every device Android runs on" since they would just start with their own devices first and the other manufacturers will eventually write drivers for their devices to support Fuchsia.

The problem is that they won't be required to open them up unlike Linux. But I guess the benefit to Google is that they have full control rather than waiting for one person to approve their changes.

I suspect if they could "just" (!!) virtualise, they would have already. Modern phones are amazing but they have limits.

Google undoubtedly has the singular oompf to launch a brand new OS, I just haven't seen a reason yet. The few things they say they want to improve upon aren't limitations in Android (or Linux). Third party vendors and their chip makers are going to —perhaps rightly— view this as an Emperors New Clothes upgrade and resist. They're going to have to make a business case somewhere along the line.

Let's wait for a production release before we start the Android/Linux death knell.

But they already are with Fuchsia.

> Or just virtualize the whole kernel and Android runtime via a new kernel-based hypervisor

Nokia gave that a go, back in ~2009 if my memory serves me correctly. They actually had L4 (with certain security extensions) running on some of their prototype ARM boards. Linux, as an OS kernel, was then running on top of that.

It didn't get much traction, and I heard very little of it from 2010 onwards.

Except that from a locking latency perspective, virtualization isn't a great choice. As Linus explains, guest operating systems runs on virtualized CPUs which can be de-scheduled while holding a spin lock. This is very much like what happened with the original benchmark in Malte's blog post, except that the application and operating system are now replaced with guest operating systems and hypervisors, respectively. AFAIK, the Linux kernel makes heavy use of spinlocks, making this a problem for people who care a lot about scheduling performance. This isn't to mean that people should avoid virtualization, though. There are likely to be many other bottlenecks to consider before most people have to consider these kind of stuff.

Like Fuchsia.

I assume you mean Zircon —formerly Magenta— Fuchsia's kernel.

Android is Android/Linux, just not GNU/Linux.

And sure, Google can change the kernel, but that would be a lot of work. The same could be said of many Linux distros. For example Debian GNU/Hurd is an experimental version of Debian swapping Linux for Hurd.

We're measuring by revenue by user?

It's got to be something more expensive than that. Hololens starts at $3500, so it's probably a good candidate for instance.

Which kinda gets the point across that revenue per user matters very little.

If we're looking ourselves to software revenue and ignoring device cost, look towards vr headsets. Practically every user is buying expensive games.

If you only want to include things with built in processors as platforms, look at Oculus quest in particular.

I believe by total revenue iOS is bigger — not per user (although that’s implied), but I could be wrong.

> Android is such a pain to develop games for, that Google has started a Android Games initiative only in 2019, to appease the growing complaints from game studios.

This is actually irrelevant, Android could be the worst environment to develop however since it has the biggest user base it still has people wanting to develop to it.

> Finally, the only Linux that Android has is the kernel, which Google could replace tomorrow and user space wouldn't even notice.

This is not really true, specially considering for games. For one, since most games use Android NDK, you can't simple swap the kernel and everything will magically work. You will at least need a recompilation, and this new kernel API must be bug to bug compatible with Linux or things will strangely broke.

For another, there is things like the discussion of spinlocks/mutex/schedulers like this one of this topic that, as shown, can make a big difference. It could be better in a kernel optimized for latency, or it could be much worse, making games that today are playable in low end devices a complete shitty show.

There is no Kernel API for userspace as official supported NDK API. If you call any Linux API you are the one to blame if anything changes, even across devices.

No it hasn't the biggest gamming userbase, as proven on a market analysis report I just posted.

A market analysis measures the market, i.e. $$$, not the user base. Which part of the report is on the userbase?

I posted the link, everyone can read it.

> There is no Kernel API for userspace as official supported NDK API. If you call any Linux API you are the one to blame if anything changes, even across devices.

Yeah, I never said that you should directly access the kernel API using the NDK (however you can actually). I said that just the fact that the NDK is compiled to native code means that the code depends on the Linux kernel, and changing the kernel would mean, at minimum, a recompilation. Android NDK only guarantees an API, not a ABI, and those two things are very different.

So no, it is not like changing the kernel would have zero impact in Android game market. It would actually have a huge impact, since almost every game would stop working until being recompiled (games that does not use the NDK would probably be fine, however few games are not native). And of course, for backwards compatibility purposes you would need to have multiple binaries (however this is already true nowadays since Android support multiple architectures outside ARM).

> No it hasn't the biggest gamming userbase, as proven on a market analysis report I just posted.

I never said it was the biggest gamming userbase, I said it was the biggest userbase. Even if Android doesn't have the biggest gamming userbase, just for the fact that that you have a big userbase as big as Android have means people will develop games for you.

Google Play already does binary translations from ARM into x86.

Also the whole point of ISO C, ISO C++, OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenSL is to be OS independent.

Game studios are not a charity, they develop games for profitable markets, not for large userbases that don't pay for games.

> Google Play already does binary translations from ARM into x86.

It is not libhoudini [1]? AFAIK, libhoudini is not something that Google Play embeds on binary for distribution, it is a library that ships on Android x86 devices (and another AFAIK, it is proprietary from Intel so they only ships on Intel devices).

So while Google could have a similar approach if they want to ship another kernel for Android, the work is not as trivial as you seem to think.

> Also the whole point of ISO C, ISO C++, OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenSL is to be OS independent.

Yeah, it doesn't mean you don't need to recompile your software. You can't take an game written for Windows in OpenGL and run in Linux without recompile. This is my point.

> Game studios are not a charity, they develop games for profitable markets, not for large userbases that don't pay for games.

Well, Android seems to be pretty profitable? It is not the most profitable platform sure, however it sure makes enough money because almost everyone ends up creating games for both iOS and Android.

You seem to imply that making games to Android is not profitable, however it sure seems to be. Or Epic Games, EA, ActionVision, and many other big names in game studio are a charity.

[1]: https://commonsware.com/blog/2013/11/21/libhoudini-what-it-m...

Having to recompile doesn't make the applications kernel dependent, now to consider porting such applications from macOS to Linux to Windows, kernel dependent?!?

And the point wasn't that it isn't profitable as such, rather it isn't the money maker that some here are making waves for, rather a wannabe versus the revenue made across desktop, consoles and iOS.

Hence why Google has introduced the Android Game SDK last December (which is quite basic as of now) and Google IO 2019 was the first time Android ever had a games track, versus WWDC iOS/macOS that have had them since ever.

> Having to recompile doesn't make the applications kernel dependent, now to consider porting such applications from macOS to Linux to Windows, kernel dependent?!?

So you concur with me that if Google changed the Android kernel it would be a big change? Just imagine, you would have to recompile all applications using NDK to work with this new Android. It is not something trivial, sure they can make it work, however it would probably need quite some time with Google making obligatory to having developers to ship both Linux and new Kernel binaries.

And even them, you can't make sure that everything will work. A small change in behavior of a specific syscall may break a random application somewhere that depends on it, because even if this syscall is not directly used, Android NDK uses this syscall to implements its API. Now multiply this for the number of NDK applications that Android have and you will have a huge amount of breakage.

So yeah, Google can make it work, however it is not as trivial as you think.

> And the point wasn't that it isn't profitable as such, rather it isn't the money maker that some here are making waves for, rather a wannabe versus the revenue made across desktop, consoles and iOS.

Sure, we can concur at this point. However the market for Android gaming is still more expressive than you seem to think (not wannabe by any means, but lower than iOS sure).

> So you concur with me that if Google changed the Android kernel it would be a big change?

No I don't, anyone writing portable applications already does compilations all the time.

It is no different than the requirements to provide newer builds updated to specific Android target versions, or being 64 bit only that Google keeps forcing devs to move forward.

It is Google and OEM's job to ensure that NDK APIs work across whatever kernels are available.

Any application that depends on syscalls isn't portable across Android devices anyway. Google doesn't support syscalls as part of the NDK stable APIs contract, and some OEMs are well known to change their behavior.

> It is no different than the requirements to provide newer builds updated to specific Android target versions, or being 64 bit only that Google keeps forcing devs to move forward.

That is basically saying that this is a big work for everyone involved (developers, Google, OEMs). This is exactly my point.

> Any application that depends on syscalls isn't portable across Android devices anyway.

The application does not necessary call a syscall directly, the problem is that the NDK calls a syscall as an implementation detail (for example, for lock primitives eventually the NDK must call the Linux lock primitives too, there is no way out).

So if Google needs to change Android kernel, they need to implement the same quirks of the current syscalls, or the slightly change in behavior will break random applications.

My point was never calling syscall directly, however for sure some applications call syscall directly too.