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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Too little, too late, I'm afraid.

The improvement is great, but I think the audio professionals jumped ship long ago to Apple, and they're not going back. I know of several music professionals plugging into their Macbooks or iPads as part of the pre-amp, but I don't know if any using Android. Google sat on this for way too long while Apple courted the creative professionals, and for any that have already made the upfront buy-in for Apple hardware, I don't see them taking the risk of switching ecosystems to save a few dollars for performance that still won't match what they're used to.

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There will always be a niche that wants to do music production or engineering and can't afford Apple productions. Newbies or living outside the western world for example.

Just because the pros have merged towards a single brand doesn't mean that the only other smartphone monopoly won't benefit greatly from offering other high quality solutions.

> There will always be a niche that wants to do music production or engineering and can't afford Apple productions.

If Google cared about niches, they wouldn't have such a large graveyard of dead products - some of which were profitable and some of which were widely loved.

Caring is not a binary. A product has a much larger ongoing cost than low latency audio, so there is more of a reason to kill it.

Features require maintenance the same as products. If this feature is enough to go after entire new categories of customers, aka musicians, this feature effectively defines a new product opportunity for Google. Also Android is already buggy as fuck, so every new feature they add actually is a big deal.

Ever since Google killed Reader I have no faith in them to ever maintain anything that isn't directly selling ads.

If they achieve a low audio latency, how much headcount do you think is needed to keep it low? A small fraction of an engineer, I suspect.

This is the reason I don't trust Google. What was the headcount to maintain Google Reader? I'm pretty sure an intern could do it part-time.

Also if it's part of Android, I bet it will unravel a bunch of hidden bugs that haven't been exposed before. Like I said, Android is already buggy as fuck. My Pixel 4a freezes/crashes regularly and Google told me (paraphrasing) "it just does that."

Well first you need a couple of UI people to move the buttons around every once in a while to keep people on their toes. Then you need a few people keeping the backend up with deprecations, a qa person, a few people making sure porn doesn't get into Trends, and a few SRE people to make sure the servers aren't going up in flames.

I was referring to App Store not Google itself...

Once the tech is capable the software will come.

Perhaps. Though I wonder if every musician afford Macbooks or iPads. These things are not cheap, especially if you consider earnings of non-US based musicians, etc.

Disclaimer: Googler, but opinions are my own.

This is where Apple's far superior product lifecycle comes in: Buying a four year old Apple product is affordable, still runs the current OS, unlike Androids that old, and has the audio performance down.

This is a valid point, but it’s hard to place the blame on Google/Android. I think the challenge is less of Android itself but a refusal of the OEMs to support newer OS versions. This makes business sense, but sucks for consumers.

I think Google is doing a better job with their Pixel devices. I honestly hope they try to lead the Android industry more with them.

A four year old Android is years out of support to Googlew. You get two, maybe three, years from them at best and then security patches until they get bored.

Blame, here, can't be squarely placed on any one entity. But it is shared between both Google and the OEMs. Google created the Android product, and permitted people to sell devices utilizing Android and to brand/advertise their devices with Google's Android branding.

It absolutely does, in part at least, fall on Google to establish how the Android label can be used. Their decision has (apparently) been that it can be used by anyone even if their devices become (practically) obsolete in just a year or two from various perspectives (not in an absolutely obsolete sense, but a lack of many/most/any updates is a crucial element of currency for mobile devices and hastens obsolescence). That's on Google, not the OEMs who take advantage of it.

I'd like to say the OEMs should do better, but the market has clearly convinced them that they can be profitable and sell soon-to-be-obsolete devices.

Every Pixel phone so far stopped getting updates after 2 years.

Not true actually. Google now updates these devices for 3 years now and not just security updates

Tell that to my Pixel 1, still stuck on an ancient version without security updates.

That's an old device. Notice I said now(as of 2017). Google announced 3 year OS updates a year after the Pixel was released(which they specifically stated at launch would get 2 years of updates) The Pixel 2 got updates for 3 years. I know because I have one sitting next me right now.

Honestly, I don’t care. I was forced to buy a Pixel 1 because the Nexus 5X didn’t get updates anymore, and by the time the Pixel 1 stopped getting updates, I just gave up.

I won't support Android 11 and later in any of my apps. If someone has an issue with that, they're free to send me a device getting the Android Preview releases for the version they want me to support. I treat Android just like iOS now: Want support? buy me a devkit.

In the past it was possible for me to just build AOSP master from source and test with that, but 3.0 was the first release breaking that assumption and after 5.0 the assumption was broken entirely. Now I just won't support it anymore.

Musical instruments aren’t too cheap either. Drummers and guitar players can get good stuff secondhand, but most synthesizers will run you way more than a mid-range MacBook and a copy of Logic. God help you if you need a piano...

Pirated copies of FL Studio on cheap windows PCs/Laptops have been the lifeline for a lot of third-world musicians for more than a decade.

I like FL studio, but.... if you're going piracy, why not add Live, Reason, Bitwig, Pro Tools, CuBase, and a stack of premium VSTs... ;-)

Reaper (free during COVID, $60 discounted license otherwise) + free plugins is pretty great though without going the unlicensed route.

Reaper also runs on Linux, natively and in WINE.

The big problem is there are few great Android tablets (mostly from Samsung, previously Huawei), and small community to buy them. It's also make less apps released for Android tablets. I prefer Android but I choose iPad because of this situation.

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