Google postpones Android 11 beta | Hacker News Reader

Google postpones Android 11 beta

reuters.com

116 pointskitotik131 comments

To note, it's not the unveiling of Android 11. It's the unveiling of the first Android 11 beta release.

And also, it's the unrest in general, not anything specific concerning Android 11, that is the source of the pause.

... and not that. Thanks to both of you.

Ok, we've changed the title to say that...

How widespread are the protests? It seems very bizarre to think they could be affecting tech news and announcements. Is there more going on here?

Protests all across the country, riots only in a few large cities. It's alot bigger then Minneapolis

> Protests have erupted in at least 20 US cities over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [1]

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests

1 - https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protests-05-30...

It's also worth noting that this happened in the space of a day or so, a very quick countrywide expansion. There are supposedly reports that the White House is on lockdown due to the people protesting outside.

let's just say that they have spread beyond the state where this happened. and given that the police is getting ever more brutal, there is no reason for them to stop spreading either.

They are consuming all media space which is not directed to covid. There is just no room to talk about Google right now.

George Floyd's murder is only the straw that broke the camel's back. This is now about decades of injustice and police officers that stand by silently and enable their peers to abuse and kill and get away with it. Protests have broken out in most major cities.

Well people said the same thing about Trayvon Martin but nothing changed after the protests.

I don’t remember Trayvon Martin triggering any public action this aggressive or widespread

https://www.google.com/search?q=trayvon+martin+protests&rlz=...

It was pretty intense at the time.

Sure;

but that wasn't a campaign year, nor was there a pandemic raging in parallel where at least 100000 people will have died, the majority of them from minorities.

And as a sidenote:

Trump is literally activating terrorist cells in your country -- his tweet was explicitly quoted by this self-ascribed paramilitary goon when coming out with his machinegun to terrorize folks: https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266509747169005569

Was this happening in 2013? Pretty sure it wasn't.

Trayvon Martin and the wannabe cop actually fought each other. Daniel Shaver had a pellet rifle and reached for his belt. Some other poor fellow had an object in his hand. You can come up with some excuse that makes it a "both sides" case.

George Floyd was arrested and handcuffed by four real cops, calmly complied with every request recorded on video, and still died pleading for his life because one cop strangled him for no reason and the other three did nothing. It's a perfect storm: you can say "no matter how compliant you are, the police will still kill you if you're not white enough" and pro-blue opinion leaders can't counter you with anything except "but look at the looters".

Every major city in the US is having huge protests, and several metropolitan areas are dealing with riots. Trayvon Martin was nothing like this.

You have forty million people unemployed, many of which overlap directly with the demographics most impacted by wealth inequality and police brutality. It's pretty clear that this is going to be more intense than in 2012.

Two things make this different:

1) There's record unemployment in the US and there's an active pandemic. People are unhappy and the country is a powder keg ready to go off.

2) The footage this time is especially graphic. You can see the officer strangling George Floyd with his knee. You can see the unnervingly satisfied look on his face. You can hear George call out multiple times that he can't breathe. Then, after he stops moving you can watch the officer continue to strangle him for four minutes. You can also see three police officers that stood by and let it happen in the background. There's not much wiggle room here.

2) It's worse: One of the videos I saw had three of them kneeling on him while he was begging.

And crying for his mother. That's the mental note that's frozen in my mind right now.

And how he is dead. People are rallying, people are protesting. He is still dead. For a bad check.

It wasn't until Killer Mike's speech in Atlanta that the gravitas of what George Floyd was saying while he was on the ground really hit me.

>When a man yells for his mother, in duress and pain, and she is dead, he is essentially yelling "please God, don't let it happen to me." [0]

I don't know if I'm just so tired and desensitized at this point that the situation didn't register the first time I saw the picture and transcript (I won't watch the video). And I think that's awful.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxHWVJYXkeU

> And crying for his mother.

I think this is a very common story among soldiers who've seen a comrade get killed. People cry out for comfort in their last minutes.

I think the part you missed is this was not for a bad check. People are upset because he was profiled and falsely accused of writing a bad check. Then ultimately killed using justification of false accusations.

Even being falsely accused is almost irrelevant here. Someone was killed in a police encounter over a bad check, falsely accused or not. It's not like a false accusations of murder or some aggregated assault. It's a case of a bad check.

As an outsider the George Floyd seems like every other police murder that the US has, I swear it happens every other year with similar outrage... BAU

Yeah, I expect this to last a week or three and then it will happen again in another year or two.

normally perhaps, It is perfect storm of other factors.

  - 40+ Million people are unemployed 

  - the mental strain of being up indoors

  - covid affecting the poorest potion of the population disproportionately

  - finally Trump being  president and handling the situation in the worst possible way everyday.

Not sure why you are getting down voted here. These are all very valid points, this situation has a lot of variables that make it remarkably different than any other and can encourage the resistance (protests, &c) to continue far longer than standard.

He is being downvoted for using a code block and making it difficult for those of us on mobile to read.

Sorry about that, did not mean to use a code block. just wanted to make a list. HN formatting is little confusing.

Personally I prefer explicit markup attributes. i.e. if I want to mark something as code an markup like ``` or {code} or whatever is clearer than inferring tabs for code formatting, this kind of accidental code blocks could be easily avoided.

On a side note I read on mobile all the time, I understand the frustration, but it not poster's fault HN has some poor formatting choices which are not mobile friendly and no preview options, you should direct their feedback towards HN rather than the poster, most of them do not do this intentionally.

HN has already said they will do nothing about it, it’s been this way for years. Therefore the only person people can direct their rage to is the poster.

If you want to make a list, there’s nothing wrong with using new lines, they will work just fine.

A code block however stimulates rage.

If you're on mobile, you need Materialistic.

Protests like this one happened before covid for similar reasons. While those might be factors, I don't think they're very important ones. I think the fact that there have been several such murders in the past few months is the main reason this is happening.

There are loads in between the protests. Eventually the murders pile up and the evidence against the police’s actions is so strong that people collectively snap. If it were merely every other murder, there’d never be a day of peace.

The Tunisian Revolution (the first and only successful one in the Arab Spring) started when a fruit seller self-immolated.

That blows my mind. I have no idea how the USA would react to something like that.

> I have no idea how the USA would react to something like that.

We know how USA has reacted in the past; it carries on as if nothing happened.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/politics/immolation-wh...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/david-bu...

I assume there are more examples, that's just first page picks from a cursory google search.

Malachi Ritscher's suicide by self immolation in protest of the Iraq war made a strong impression on me at the time. That was near the end of 2006. It seemed to go unnoticed by most everyone else, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachi_Ritscher

The Tunisian revolution worked because the system was overloaded with protests in almost every single region of the country. Contrary to previous localized protests in 2008, that were more contained and effectively suppressed by the regime.

But it is also worth to remember that unarmed protestors rarely "just" overrun the barricades and enter the palace (figuratively). Someone with power (police or military) has to decide that they're OK with letting the protests go through, that is the signal of the end.

Obviously my opinion, but I was in Tunis, Tunisia during those times.

The Tunisian Army was impartial (still largely impartial to these days) and would not intervene. They did protect some government buildings so nobody really overrun the palace. What happened is that support for the old dictator become too low and most of his supporters decided to bail on him (many people hates him too).

The Tunisian army was mostly impartial, but there were instances where they actively protected protestors from the police (which gained them a lot of good faith).

And there was this rumor that Ben Ali and his close family were "tricked" by the palace guard and the military to leave the country "temporarily" because protestors were going to be closing in (which never happened).

But that is exactly my point, supporters in key power positions decided that it was too much trouble to keep Ben Ali around.

One of the oddest bits of recent American news was seeing armed protestors occupy a capitol building .. and then leave again, with no shots fired by either side.

aka "blue wall of silence" or "blue code".

I am afraid that this will actually swing the election towards Trump. One of the big reasons for the blue wave in 2018 was the suburbs going Democrat. However, a lot of the people will get scared by the riots and get pushed into voting for “Law and Order”.

Trump was on the ropes politically, but I think this might change the voting calculus.

Perhaps. I don't think it's possible to be too certain about it - 'law and order' may not imply support for Trump, especially if you see him as inflaming tensions. Or it may result in larger voting turnouts in certain areas which may not help Trump at all. Who knows? It seems unpredictable to me, unless there's good precedent for similar events & election results?

Do they have any actionable points to fix the US-system? The HK-protests where simply awesome in that regard.

Yes, there are many data driven policy solutions that have been proposed. See for instance Campaign Zero [1].

[1] https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

Excellent, I hope it gets media coverage.

Same, I fortunately just saw a senator pledge that he will end the federal 1033 program which provides military weapons to local police departments. That was one of their points.

Twitter has been indispensable for on-the-street/real-time video reporting (just search for city name). Even reached normally quiet Portland.

it’s curious to me that you consider portland to be normally quiet - in the era of W and occupy it was 2nd only to Oakland on the west coast as being somewhat notorious for protest intensity, which was also worn as a badge of pride, and recently there have been several intense clashes between pro- and counter-fascist demonstrations.

Cops were shooting (less-lethal rounds and gas, not live rounds) at unarmed protesters down the road from me in San Jose tonight, not too far from Google's main campus. Plenty of their employees live here and some work here right now due to the pandemic. It feels pretty logical to see violent unrest outside your window and think 'we should probably postpone whatever press events we have planned'

Yes, PR and political signalling both internal and external.

How are these things related? I don't see an obvious connection. Is Google afraid they don't dictate the headlines in the next week?

Google would probably like to get some press attention with their new android release, not gonna be any to go around for a while

They are consuming all media space which is not directed to covid. There is just no media room to talk about Google right now.

It's the same as when games move their launch dates because other hyped games have a similar launch date, so there is less space for them to actually get any attention. Most recent example would be Factorio moving their launch date as it got to close to Cyberpunk 2077 (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-349), a game people have been waiting forever for.

Google wants to make sure when they do their announcements, people have "time and space" in their mind and in the media to actually talk about it, as big releases like this is usually mainly a PR effort.

Honestly I think that's just an excuse. And I don't think Google really cares for media attention about this, it's a pretty boring, minor update, unless they have something else up their sleeve.

The thing is it may be minor in the grand scheme of things, but for some exec at Google it matters a lot. And so if it makes sense to move it, they will.

The protests have started to become surprisingly widespread.

“We are excited to tell you more about Android 11, but now is not the time to celebrate,”

I consider this as an emphatetic move by Google.

This is more PR than they would get with an actual release. Does anyone care about new adroid updates anymore? I haven't followed anything since lollipop

Millions of people do.

Millions out of billions.

As an Android developer I do, because every update breaks something important (11 will break storage in many apps).

As a user, IDGAF

They broke storage starting at Android 4, I think... Google doesn't like SD cards.

from what I heard, this time they're really breaking it bad.

The great big-little, straightforward-confusing, optimal-painful, userfriendly-userhostile Storage Access Framework. Those were the days.

Even more people care about knitting.

Thats irrelevant to the OP's statement

Not only that, it gives the developers some breathing-room I'd guess.

Yes it is PR strategy but in every new android version, Google give us something new compare to older version.

Guys be on the look out. It's the best time to pass a new crazy law without getting pushbacks.

Haven't we been doing that ever since Covid19 got serious?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com