New things in Android 11
blog.google
blog.google
> 8. If you haven’t used an app that you installed on your device in a while, you may not want it to keep accessing your data. Android will now “auto-reset” permissions for your unused apps and notify you accordingly. You can always decide to re-grant the app permissions the next time you use the app.
> 9. With additional Google Play system update modules, even more security and privacy fixes can be sent to your phone from Google Play, in the same way your apps update. So you’ll get these fixes as soon as they’re available, without having to wait for a full OS update.
8 seems like a rather wise and user friendly privacy concern (which might be annoying to power-users who set things up proactively and don't want their configurations messed with, yet overall a great improvement).
9 has me worried about variants of android like Lineage or ParanoidAndroid where the play store isn't included automatically. This forced reliance upon the play store for security sensitive updates is devastating for de-googled device feasibility. It will make more sense for developers to not support devices without Google Play, effectively shoehorning alternatives out of the usable, secure devices realm.
Almost like that was the plan and Google employs some smart people isn't it.
Why does Google owe priority updates to unrelated third parties who aren't interested in patching their own code?
Because there are more and more threats, and they come faster than ever before.
Google's been forced to go in this direction by vendors who put out Android devices and never update them, even for the most serious issues. The only way to get security updates deployed is via Google Play.
Flagship devices with 18mths-24mths of support when Apple routinely does 5 years was damaging as well.
I typically buy mid/low-range android devices and AndroidOne has been great, I'm still getting monthly security updates on a must be 2 year old-ish Nokia 6.1 that is still a perfectly fine phone for my needs and it cost me 150 quid sim-unlocked.
micro-g attempts to emulate whatever is necessary.
If Google ports changes both to that and AOSP it's not a problem
It's a shame because it is an amazing project.. It only started fully supporting Android 10 last month.
And yet their messaging strategy is to push a carrier standard with what I consider an egregious oversight: end to end encryption. You know, that thing Apple and Signal have had since the beginning of time.
Even worse, Google decided to auto-enroll millions of devices into their RCS hub meaning it's receiving device text messages in cleartext. How do you like dem apples? And you thought the metadata collecting was bad.
SMS or RCS notifications aren't treated as any special case that gets priority over any other messaging app. If you want to use signal as your primary messaging app, android is happy to support that.
but there's nothing about SMS that makes it a default other than it's what most people use. You have to open an app to send a message, there's no default way of sending a message where you aren't choosing an app first, and if you want something private and secure, you can choose something other than SMS.
I was guessing this would be an SMS-based app.
If you are on Android and you use Signal, but text some random other android user's phone number that uses a pure sms messaging app, is any part of that conversation encrypted?
Opting for security and privacy vs a default lack thereof.
WhatsApp has the exact same problem with unencrypted backups.
End-to-end encryption at large scale is not really something American mega-corporations can provide, unfortunately.
Thanks!
https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/21/12994362/allo-privacy-mes...
I feel like a broken record but: Apple for the love of god stop pulling a RIM/Blackberry and make Messenger available on Windows and Android and charge a fee if you have to.
Because I already have a perfectly serviceable message app that comes with the phone by default. Do the three in your list interoperate with each other, is that why you're suggesting them?
Edit: What I mean with this comment is that HN has lots of readers outside of the US. Here using only iMessage would be a bit weird, and for that reason everybody uses either Signal or WhatsApp.
I don't know anyone who still uses SMS. What's your point?
This of course makes it usually more expensive for the Android user to respond. But due to the level of iMessage use they don't have an alternatives. And most plans are now quite generous with SMS bundles anyway.
This is so the carriers can measure and limit tethering separately.
The security issue here is that if you have a VPN client running on your phone, tethered traffic still goes in plaintext to the public internet via the hidden APN.
Not cool.
I wish I had something to add; particularly like "here's a reasonable alternative", but there really isn't.
Yes, there are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinephone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5.
If I want to buy 20 million of something the wholesale will give me a better price than if I want 2000.
The marginal cost goes down with the number produced as well.
3D-gaming? Yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_HXQJkWjUQ.
Using an external screen? Yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH3RbrwhNd8.
I own one of these (the pinephone) and it's really very much like a laptop running alpine. All of my desktop apps just work (although I have to use fluxbox because CWM isn't nice on a touchscreen.)
I have a Pinebook Pro and love it, but the Pinephone's camera is woefully underspec'd. Put a better camera on it and let me pre-order ffs and I'll buy one in a heart beat.
That's great! Now if only I could get some kind of email notification about that. Oh. I can't.
I don't get why I can't pre-order now; if I'm willing to spend money on a promise, like with Kickstarter, then I should be able to do so here.
I discovered the issue by connecting my phone to my home VPN and then trying to access services that are only accessible from my home.
One major thing to note: Don't expect support from LineageOS devs for MicroG stuff. They explicitly do not support it and are slightly rustled at people using unofficial builds with MicroG and then complaining in their support channels.
If you have some sources on this, it I'd upvote it as a submission.
Interesting though, thanks.
That being said, the most straightforward non-root way around it is to install LineageOS on a supported device. There's an option in hotspot settings to share VPN connection. There may be other (non-Google) manufacturers that carry a similar feature.
If you want to talk real nasty shit: Lets say you do the above and unlock device bootloader to install LineageOS. However, you decide not to root because you'd like to maintain security on the device. Additionally, you're on the latest monthly patch level while your vendor's latest build is 8+ months back...
Guess what? Now you can't use Netflix or your banking app!
Why? Because Google play services uses your device's 'hardware-backed attestation' to know bootloader is unlocked and app developers can block install of their apps based on this certification status. See: https://www.lineageos.org/Google-Play-Certification/
2. SMS is miserably useless on some carriers (notably when I had T-Mobile and for my friends still on T-Mobile).
3. MMS is miserably useless, period.
4. International SMS/MMS can be expensive, is more unreliable than domestic, and often unavailable.
Given 2-4, I avoid SMS/MMS as much as possible. Given that E2E is available (WhatsApp, Signal, others), and those services are reliable, available, and useful, I may as well use an E2E system.
The privacy aspects are a great additional feature that they offer.
iCloud Backups are still stored in the clear, solely to enable snooping.
Meaning that Apple can decrypt it when they are requested by authorities.
It is not clear text. It is encrypted and Apple has the key.
The reason the distinction is important is that if it were clear text NSA/FBI etc could gain physical access to the servers and read the backups without Apple's knowledge or approval.
> The reason the distinction is important is that if it were clear text NSA/FBI etc could gain physical access to the servers and read the backups without Apple's knowledge or approval.
Where does Apple store the keys? On the very same machines?
It's like having a bulletproof lock, and storing the key under the potted plant.
Most people will want that and not care about the underlying subtleties, so it's not just for the government.
It seems they decided the main hurdle is just to get all the carriers on board, and a basic version of RCS up and running on all the Android phones, and encryption didn't make it into the MVP.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/23/21268577/google-messages-...
Yes some apps are a bit sluggish but most useful apps are good as running on any latest hardware. This is definitely one advantage of owning an Android device over other companies that deliberately slow down hardware to force people to upgrade hardware.
I think there is a good faith way to interpret Apple's aging battery policy, of course, it would be a lot easier to interpret it that way if they handled repairs in a way that wasn't hostile to users.
BTW if you like your tablet a lot, that's cool; if you're just holding on to it because you don't want to get a new one, and you live in a big city, there's a good chance somebody is literally throwing away higher spec tablets within a couple km of you.
It’s entirely possible the lack of clarity of what was happening violated consumer protection laws (I’m guessing, I don’t know what specifically the lawsuit was based on) without malice intended. The Apple way is to try and have design be silent and in the background. In this case it was a way to solve degrading batteries that would cause a phone to reboot, so slowing down to compensate is a slick way of preventing random reboots without involving the user. Since it doesn’t seem to be the case that this happened without battery degradation, I don’t think you can point to evidence that this was done to cause new phone sales. Am I mistaken?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphones-settlement/...
That's literally the text used by everyone that settles. Apple employs enough lawyers to populate a small country. Nobody with that kind of legal firepower gives up a lawsuit by settling for a million of $300 million and up to $500 million for no good reason.
They settled for the same reasons everyone settles:
1. Because they can afford to pay.
2. Because they know they're going to lose (and they would probably have to pay more and may even be punished in some other ways, on top of that).
It's obvious I can't prove this myself, but they didn't disclose it and only did so when their hand was forced by third parties investigating and after this settlement.
I mean, what would they have to do to be assumed malicious, in this case? If basically losing a class action lawsuit is not enough, what is? Tim Cook coming up on stage and admitting it?
It's not even their first example of thinly veiled for-profit malicious moves, such as the removal of the headphone jack (presented at the time as due to space reasons, reason immediately debunked by many people disassembling phones).
You could imagine this happening because some engineering team was tasked with fixing crashes from reduced battery capacity, and some product people who would have been responsible with informing the user weren’t in the loop or dropped the ball. Alternatively, you could suspect those product people saw a good opportunity for planned obsolescence with plausible deniability and took it.
Either way, the eventual outcome (an outcry from customers and bad PR, followed by a more transparent software solution from Apple plus a subsidized repair program) seems fair.
>In the months and years following the launch, many Nexus 6P owners noticed their phones would bootloop or simply shut down without warning. The law firm Chimicles & Tikellis filed a class action lawsuit in 2017, and it looks like a resolution is on the horizon. Nexus 6P owners may be eligible for as much as $400 in restitution from Google and Huawei.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/06/07/google-and-huawei-a...
The main reason for this is hardware though - there's always plenty of conspiracy theories around that, but the biggest issues we've seen across Android ecosystem are due to flash.
Cheap eMMC flash with lowend controllers degrades pretty quickly (within 3-4 years) and you suddenly start seeing like 20-3000ms read times of a single settings file. Since a lot of apps just read those files on UI thread, this results in a lot of stuttering because developers expect < 16ms response times for those reads. Writes get even worse - it's not rare to see 500ms+ times for writes to configuration files of < 1KB in size, especially if there are multiple parallel writes queued (common in browsers when they cache webpages for example).
Apple and higher end Android devices tend to use better SSD quality flash which tends to last years longer than eMMC one and thus the devices don't slow down that much.
I don't really have links to actual research on phones though - although eMMC degradation is a pretty researched topic itself.
According to what I read here on HN, iOS devices have a longer usable lifespan than Android devices, and are officially supported much longer. Is that no longer the case?
It's better to just avoid them IMO. It's well documented the anti-consumer policies done by Apple. It's easy to see them poor money into massive advertising campaigns.
Consider the highly likely situation where someone bought a multi hundred dollar device, is disappointed, and need to justify it to themselves.
Also, it's more problematic to me that when faced with customers reporting the same "this phone randomly dies while showing that it has a good charge" issue on the Nexus 6p, Google never fixed the issue.
>If you're among those affected, your phone will randomly shut down and completely die, even though your battery indicator might have said you had plenty of juice left. It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.
https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...
Eventually they just marked the issue as won't fix.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut...
Or take for example: they broke call recording. Third party applications do not work above Android 9 (?). There is a Google feature that allows you to record calls, but only incoming calls. How is that for a feature? Why does it have to be tied to Google? Why cannot we just simply record the call, whether it is an outgoing call or an incoming call, without it being tied to any Google-related bullshit? It should be relatively simple to implement, but nope, they do not seem to be wanting to do that.
It does exist as an option for very tech savvy people but the downsides are very real and not palatable to the majority of people.
That's a strange statement considering the main features of both Android 10 and 11 are extensive new privacy features and related changes.
a) You are recording someone else, often without their permission, which in many countries is a serious crime.
b) You open up the attack vector for apps to surreptitiously record your conversations and make them available to governments or criminals to do all sorts of nefarious things e.g. blackmail you.
Call recording is a very useful function to many people. Entirely breaking it is unnecessary.
a) You can look at photos of someone else, including naked children, often without their permission, which in many countries is a serious crime.
b) You open up the attack vector for apps to surreptitiously record your browsing activity and make them available to governments or criminals to do all sorts of nefarious things e.g. blackmail you.
Seriously. Because it was easy to abuse by apps and users too. I miss that feature too though.
iPod was mature in that it had reached a small video capability but was maxing out what was possible in how you could interact with the product.
Back then Apple's products felt boring. Zune was about to debut and compete with them by offering a brown color!
6-7 years ago we didn't have Apple Watch yet. There was still a sense of "what's next?"
Today, touch based interfaces in iPhone and iPad are so broadly understood that product interactions are routine:
- TikTok uses no new interaction concepts, rising instead on content and content format.
- Fortnite uses the same user interactions that have been adopted by shooters rising instead on gameplay.
Despite progress on ARKit, using AR experience on iPhone / iPad feels as wrong as watching videos on iPod Video did in 2005.
The good news is that iPod Video in 2006 was not even remotely representative of the experience what Apple was developing with iPhone / iPod Touch.
I'm hopeful that Apple will debut something as groundbreaking as the interaction iPhone offers between people and the world around them.
But until we see a level up like that, its going to feel a little boring on iOS at least.
I like this quote by Steve Jobs, which I think is applicable here:
“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.”
Outside mobile devices though, I think this is a very exciting time in open source and software technology. So if you're feeling board, it might be a good time to expand your horizons.
Now they're all there
Call, text, look stuff up, watch a video, listen to music, navigate, track, take a picture or video...
What else is there that these smartphones need to do?
Prob the next thing, since the processing power of the latest A14 and snapdragon is insanely good... just have one device be ubiquitous for everything besides poweruser stuff. Come in from a run and do work on your phone, etc. Seamlessly connects to monitor and keyboard. Do any heavy compiling on the cloud, etc.
That's pretty much it. They accomplished their goal.
However none of that is relevant for end users, in that regard there is hardly any reason to get Android 11.
I was more than happy with my Symbian Belle C7.
I have of other gripes as a photographer but they're mostly about Google Photos and not Android itself.
I'm assuming that you're been sent to a photo picker screen and can only choose one at a time. Have you tried holding a tap to enter multi-select mode?
I really hope this is optional or highly configurable, I don't want work conversations to start mixing with personal ones :/
EDIT: Ah, it's clearer on the main release page this is for notifications only
[0] https://www.android.com/android-11/#a11-conversation-article
If they had gone the other direction we may have had a completely different mobile paradigm than just a bunch of apps. I suspect the major services would have been even more opposed to that, if that's even possible.
That sounds like the notifications will be grouped, not the conversations (so like, messaging at the top instead of mixed with everything or something like that).
https://9to5google.com/2020/02/19/android-11-notification-co...
It invites the idea of competition and alternative, which of course is bad when you're fighting to have complete monopoly of the "search" concept.
So google.google should google 'Google' on google for you.
I can see something like `iphone.apple` and `ipad.apple` etc..
I can give you some benefits of brand TLDs, though. For starters, the entire .google TLD is HSTS preloaded, so every new site launched on that TLD is instantly HTTPS-only from its very first moments, rather than waiting for potentially many months for users to upgrade their browsers to incorporate new additions of individual domains to the list (which would be your only recourse if you launched a new domain on e.g. .com). And secondly, the .google TLD is closed, meaning no external registrations, so if you see an unfamiliar product.google domain then you immediately know that it's actually Google running it, whereas if you saw an unfamiliar googleproduct.com domain then you'd want to do some due diligence to ensure that you aren't being phished.
(I should probably at this point disclose that I run .google, but had no involvement in the larger process at ICANN that resulted in the creation of brand TLDs in the first place. But, given that brand TLDs exist, of course companies would defensively secure the TLDs for their largest brands, and once you have said TLDs, why not use them?)
because it pollutes the root domain, which means:
1. More phishing opportunities. Aunt Barbara can barely tell the difference between chase.com and chase-secure-login.com. Allowing baddies to register chase-login.security is only going to make things worse.
2. I can't tell what's a domain anymore. In the past I can reasonably use the heuristic that any string matching the pattern[1] was a domain name. Now I have no idea. Is foobar.technology an actual website or just a brand name? Who knows! Come to think of it, I couldn't remember whether it was foobar.tech or foobar.technology. Or maybe they hit it big and now they're just blog.foobar?
>I can give you some benefits of brand TLDs, though. [...]
Every benefit you've listed can be had by having all your websites run off your main domain (eg. blog.google.com vs blog.google).
[1] https://regexper.com/#%5Ba-z0-9-%5D%7B3%2C%7D%5C.%28%5Ba-z%5...
There's already an effectively infinite number of phishing opportunities just on .com alone; having more available TLDs doesn't make it appreciably worse. Indeed, Chase having .chase and .jpmorgan (which they do) makes things better, because if you see a .chase domain name then you know for sure that it's actually Chase. Any random .com could just be any random .com.
> I can't tell what's a domain anymore.
Try resolving it? You never could tell conclusively what was a domain name without resolving it anyway. Is asdfhjasdflkghasdgf.com a real domain name? Hell if I know. I sure can't tell just from looking at it. Is asdfhjasdflkghasdgf.technology a real domain name? Again, try resolving it.
> Every benefit you've listed can be had by having all your websites run off your main domain (eg. blog.google.com vs blog.google).
There's lots of downsides to running everything off one domain name. For example, big potential security vulnerabilities from cookie leaks between your more secure sites and your less secure sites. Google's blogs for example used to be hosted on googleblog.com, blogspot.com, and blogger.com. They already never shared the same domain as google.com for security reasons that long pre-date the existence of .google.
And as for your heuristic regex:
[a-z0-9-]{3,}\.([a-z]{2}|com|org|net)
[a-z0-9-]{3,}\.[a-z]{2,}
There's an infinite amount, yes, but in the past the amount that plausibly looked liked your domain was small. You also don't have the ambiguity of chase.com or chase.bank, although this is a bigger issue with smaller companies than it is with bigger ones.
>Indeed, Chase having .chase and .jpmorgan (which they do) makes things better, because if you see a .chase domain name then you know for sure that it's actually Chase. Any random .com could just be any random .com.
Is this significantly better than trusting that jpmorgan.com or chase.com is the "legit" address (basically, treating .com as the "root" domain)? There are some instances where this heuristic is wrong (nissan.com), but at worst you land on the wrong website. Phishers probably won't bother spending tens of thousands of dollars on a .com domain just to phish some credentials. It's probably cheaper for the company as well: buying a .com from a squatter is probably cheaper than paying ICANN the $200k application fee + $25k annual fee of a gTLD.
>Try resolving it? You never could tell conclusively what was a domain name without resolving it anyway.
This isn't in the context of "checking whether a domain is valid", it's in the context of "is this string referencing a website or not?". If I see a billboard with "foobar.com" at the bottom, there's very little doubt that it's a website. If it's foobar.technology, I'm not so sure.
> There's lots of downsides to running everything off one domain name. For example, big potential security vulnerabilities from cookie leaks between your more secure sites and your less secure sites.
While that's true, getting a whole new TLD seems like overkill, not to mention that you can get the same amount of isolation by enrolling in the public suffix list.
Type, on a Google-made Pixel Chromebook running Chrome OS into the Chrome browser web browser (pretty sure it doesn't qualify as a 'user agent' any longer,) the word 'google' into the omnibox in order to get to Google to make a search, and your machine communicates over Wi-Fi to your Google Wifi AP, through your Google Fiber connection, to the Google-run 8.8.8.8 DNS resolver, where Google then goes and looks itself up in the DNS.
The Google search results page has 'Google' as the first result (AdWords, naturally [resulting in Google paying itself for first placement?]) Clicking on this ad, you finally arrive on the Google Search home page.
...
Finally, after all that, you can type in 'Bing' to search for Bing's website, click on their top AdWord result instead of the organic result, just so you can enjoy the "diversity of search engines" there exist today. Or whatever Pichai said to Congress.
I don't think the notion of URLs are in the public consciousness anymore.
For more information, look me up on AOL Keyword: learnurls
I've been following this issue across several filed issues now (the first one in the Chrome repo), waiting for them to fix this frustration, but still nothing.
Google's track record on home integration is laughably terrible and I'll bet this functionality comes to market duct-taped together and they'll break it as soon as it's convenient for them.
Last fall Google essentially bricked third party smart home integrations within their own NEST ecosystem by forcing a migration to rely on their terrible Google Assistant umbrella, removing IFTTT support, etc.(1)
As a result third party controller support broke, useful integrations like "flash my lights if there's a fire" broke, etc.
I appreciate Android's desire to own the UX and relegate all third parties to beyond their "bubbles" etc but it is scary to hand this level of control to Google if they disagree with your personal product choices.
(begrudgingly written from Chrome)
What I'd like to see is permission requests for apps to use audio on the device, and the ability to allow or deny on a per-use basis. I don't want my phone making any noises unless I explicitly allow it.
Pretty slick and much nicer than messing around with adb and zip files.
As for 11 in general nothing really exciting. Looks the same. Amusingly the first thing to happen after completing setup was an error message that 'Google keeps stopping'[0] :) Not the best thing to see on a fully wiped and fresh install of the OS!
Apart from Pixel all other brands receiving the update immediately are Chinese brands. This really shows how much the Chinese manufacturers software has improved and how much the heavy customizations brands like Samsung do to Android blocks them from providing easy OS updates.
Seriously though, it looks like a step towards how People and Message hub worked in Windows Phone. From the video I can't understand if what they propose is a way to consolidate communication channels (I wish it were), or just more levels of distractions / notifications. And I hope bubbles are nothing like Facebook Messenger.
Ads. On the homescreen of a phone you paid money for.
This is madness. A lot of folks I know are livid that Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese OEMs do this...and won't you know it, the world's largest ad-network wants a slice of the pie, too.
Edit: Looks like these are suggestions for already installed apps unlike on Xiaomi / Oppo phones.
> With additional Google Play system update modules, even more security and privacy fixes can be sent to your phone from Google Play
This is huge [0]. Even though Project Treble [1] makes it easier to run latest AOSP and other forks on Androids, this is a much needed update for billions who couldn't be bothered.
[0] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/07/accelerati...
I do not believe you'd ever be able to target a user by their routine to offer ads in this manner. Ads were not even something I thought of when I read this.
Thankfully, it looks like that is not the case.
Android already does this at the top of the applications list, just not directly on the home screen.
This is the feature iam looking forward to the most. But I don't think it works for my subaru crostrek 2019 even though its a compatible vehicle.
I am not affiliated or even saying it actually works. I just saw it posted on xda developers the other day. https://www.xda-developers.com/aawireless-dongle-enable-wire...
[0] Aliens, the sequel to the first one: Alien. I'm old enough to have gone to the cinema to see all movies mentioned.
Random example: filesystem journaling so that you don't have to wait minutes to hours for fsck every time your computer hard resets. It showed up in Windows first -- but only in Windows Server. It was very intentionally excluded from consumer Windows. Then it showed up in Mac OS X. For a decade, hard restarts were painful on Windows and smooth on Mac. Finally, in Windows 8, just in time for SSDs to make it moot, it showed up in consumer Windows.
This story repeats over and over. Cameras and video chat out-of-the-box, backlit keyboards, desktop search, retained and GPU composited GUIs, Webkit, and so on. Apple wasn't first, but they were the first to do it well and get it in front of lots of people. People complain about apple users being sheep inside a bubble, but it goes both ways.
I'd answer your question more specifically, but I'm currently on the wrong side of the bubble in Android land. When I buy my next phone, I'll do my research, which will include swinging by an apple store to experience qualitative things like stylus/AR latency first-hand. You should too :)
I was using Windows on a daily basis across multiple computers and this wasn't a subtle thing. In fact, I still regularly use Windows 7 (oscilloscope, can't update) and occasionally get "reminded" about this, even though I also remember a number of gnarly examples from my everyday computer use.
Most people just skipped it, and I did too, until one time it got into a state where no programs would run...
Not only that, journaled HFS+ was introduced in OSX 10.2, not in 10.0. It was enabled by default in 10.3. Way later than NTFS.
However, there's a reason for all that, and why Windows 9X used FAT filesystem: it was much faster. Computers in '90s didn't have any spare perfomance, and journaling was not needed by most users. It was introduced into consumer releases only when they were fast enough for users not no notice.
I'm even being generous by using past tense here because I still have to live with Win 7 and this particular problem (no, I can't just upgrade, it's a $40k industrial tool). I'd be ecstatic to learn that the ungodly slow fscks are redundant or easily disabled and the whole thing is just a matter of extremely poor defaults.
Normally, it took few minutes. The only way to avoid slow chkdsks in the future is to fix the underlying issue.
Also note that I'm not telling you to upgrade. I know that it is impossible with systems that have lab equipment attached. If you want support from the vendor, that is. So the question is, why don't you ask the vendor for support? This is in their scope.
Also, it was very easy to have damaged HFS+ and not know about it. There was a thriving market of third party utilities (Disk Warrior & co) that would gladly tell you and fix it, but most users didn't use them.
The computer that used to take hours to chkdisk was a home computer with a couple 1TB (IIRC) 5200RPM drives containing a lot of files. Chkdisk didn't typically find errors and Windows small-file-access is notoriously slow. I don't think this is a "me" problem or a "my hard drive" problem, I think it's a "chkdisk is slow and obnoxious" problem. Windows users just put up with it and didn't resent it as much as I did because they didn't know there was a better way.
Apple cited journaling as the feature that let them drop the slow checks. Maybe that was puffery. Maybe it was uninformed risk tolerance (the NTFS ecosystem has an ecosystem of recovery tools too, so that's hardly an indication of anything). Or maybe it was informed risk tolerance, or better journaling, or better defaults.
In any case, the point holds: Windows was first across the "technological accomplishment" finish line while Apple was first across the "relevant to me" finish line, and that seems to happen a lot, even though I have feet firmly planted in both ecosystems.
That said, I do kind of agree with Gruber, it kind of feels like the passion for Android has burned out at Google and they are just dialing in a lot of this.
The Pixel specific updates seem particularly weird to me too.
This is just speculation... but maybe it's because they are getting ready to finally kill Android and switch to Fuchsia.
Android has been getting better over the last 4-5 years and the KitKat days are very far away, but it wouldn't surprise me if Google was ready to start fresh with everything they've learned.
Also I'm sure Google want stricter control on customisation which would be a good thing (easier updates). It'll be hard to take that back from Android vendors but I bet Fuchsia won't have it.
Any source on that?
That doesn't seem like a good strategy for a competing product.
If a person has a good point, they have a good point. This isn't a very strong Android update and neither was last year's.
With third-party apps there was a bit of a lag in support but the same goes for dark mode on iOS. Even now some apps don't support that.
But right now the main apps I use on Android all support it. Samsung Mail, OSMAnd for maps, Firefox (with dark reader extension that automatically matches the system dark mode!), most chat apps I use, password store, MS apps I use for work, etc. It's really amazing to have this. I'm sensitive to too-bright displays and most displays these days are tuned for maximum output, not minimum.
Password API works with third-party password managers. Not perfect, but LastPass works pretty well this way. Security Code autofill is also great for 2FA SMS things.
Device performance/reliability, mostly related to launching the camera, although this probably applies all-round. There's nothing worse than trying to take pictures for a group and your camera app just... won't work.
Feature polish (although limited). There are a lot of features that I wish existed, and features that I wish I had more control over, but the overall polish on a feature's functionality and feel is great.
Airdrop. Supposedly Android has a good competitor coming?
Share Wi-Fi password with contacts.
Sign in with Apple + Auto-hide your email.
:( Shortcuts. This is great, except writing them sucks for anyone even slightly code-proficient. Next to impossible to set up on phones. But again, polished but limited vs Android.
Facetime. I really wish Duo was better integrated into Android and marketed.
I'm sure I'm missing some, and I'm purposely not listing the things I miss from Android. There are other Apple-specific reasons that I've decided to stick with iOS for the time being that are also good to consider.
Third party password manager autofill has been around for a few years now (Android 8), and their Airdrop clone was released last month: https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/
- Android password api integrates with 3rd parties. Android SMS app does security code copy thought not native autofill (apps implement it themselves)
- AirDrop equivalent is nearby sharing: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-nearby-share-file-shar...
By asking access to all of your text messages last time I checked.
- Nearby Sharing has already started rollout across even older Android devices as a feature equivalent to Airdrop.
- Camera is usually device-specific, but my Pixel/OnePlus devices have usually been very good at this
- Google released the "Nearby Share" feature a couple weeks ago
- Wi-Fi sharing can be done with standard QR codes, but I don't know if this OS-specific
- Tasker is different from Shortcuts, but a viable option. Very powerful, but more complex too
- I agree with the Duo point. It's a great service, but not well known. Google being Google I guess.
(To be clear, not disagreeing with you, just adding to the conversation)
...and insisted to bring it to the top of the share menu without a way to disable it.
I don't even think it was malicious intent, like growth hacking or something. It's just a sloppy implementation.
... like Googles camera and photos apps that stopped respecting the accessibility setting not to use haptic feedback and enabled it for some rare and random ui elements, like tilting an image or changing camera modes.
Or how Android 11 new (and random?) background animations during notification bar pull down does not honor disabled animations, another accessibility feature.
... or the new button right next to the screenshot button in the app switcher that just does not appear to do anything? It just makes the app switcher unresponsive until you press the "x"-button. They probably just forgot to add a feature there.
It's a pixel 3a. There it got a full, dedicated column above all regular share sheet items.
I have to scroll past it many times a day, which feels like some form of absurd punishment.
- Nearby Share looks great! Looks like its only Android -> Android or Android -> Chromebook right now. Hopefully we get Windows/MacOS/iOS support.
- What is the workflow for sharing a Wi-Fi password as a QR code? I looked in to this a while ago, and Android doesn't even let you access saved Wi-Fi passwords without root, and the stock camera app didn't have a QR reader built in.
- Tasker was pretty powerful, but the polish and user experience was lacking. Haven't kept up with Tasker's development, but I hope they take some inspiration from Shortcuts/Workflows and streamline their interface for general cases. There was a lot of additional features that were separated out into separate apps, which also made it more difficult to manage.
Thanks!
Even Nearby Sharing (Android's Airdrop clone) was released as a Google Play Services update and is not part of the OS: https://blog.google/products/android/nearby-share/
Which is Google's weakness. Not only are the core apps not developed by the Android team, but each app is done by a separate team and there is a lack of consistency across the board with different colors, placement of icons, and dark mode support. It took Gmail six months after the release of Android 10 to get dark mode. And dark mode has existed (in limited form) since Android 9. Dark mode for Maps followed Gmail.
Oh, and let us not forget Maps had white navigation buttons on a white background, with light grey shadows for a few months with the release of Android 10. When I first upgraded my Pixel, I thought they had removed the bottom navigation because of this regression. Supposedly these are the best and brightest programmers on the planet.
Yet every Google app gets all permissions (even non-essential ones) on by default? Because users never turn them off, and you give a misleading prompt urging them to turn it back on.
Is this supposed to be a feature? The last thing I want is app suggestions based on my usage pattern.