Android 14 adds support for using your smartphone as a webcam
esper.io
esper.io
Here's a little script for streaming through your camera on obs:
get-adb-devices-list() { adb devices | grep -v "List of devices attached" | grep -v "daemon" | grep -v "^$" | grep -c . }
echo "device count: $(get-adb-devices-list)" while [ "$(get-adb-devices-list)" -eq 0 ]; do echo "Waiting for the device..." sleep 0.5 done
IP_ADDRESS=$(sudo adb shell ip addr show wlan0 | grep "192.168.." | awk -F ' ' '{print $2}' | cut -d '/' -f1)
connect-adb-tcp () { sleep 1 echo "Connect to the device...$IP_ADDRESS" && \ adb tcpip 5555 && \ sudo adb connect "$IP_ADDRESS" }
connect-adb-tcp && \ v4l2-ctl --list-devices && \ scrcpy -e --v4l2-sink=/dev/video0 --lock-video-orientation=1 -n -N &> ./log & obs
For folks willing to build from source, I have an additional commit on top of the PR (linked in the comments) that enables support for Android's constrained high speed capture mode, allowing 120fps/240fps camera streaming. Not the most useful for meetings, but enables things like capturing high frame rate mixed reality VR footage. As far as I'm aware, there's no other Android webcam app, proprietary or open source, that can do anything above 60fps.
I'm not too familiar with image analysis, but if it's acceptable to work on lossy frames and to take a small hit to latency, you could record to a MediaCodec hardware encoder and then immediately send the output to another MediaCodec instance to decode it.
Specifically I would love a way to use my Android device as a remote controller for PDF presentation. For now I can do this with KDE Connect but the remote controller is blind, I have no way to see the current slide on the Android device, much less to use it to annotate the slides in live.
Does that exist?
I know how to do that with Sway and swayvnc on wayland, as well as with xorg.
https://superuser.com/questions/1434779/using-a-tablet-as-a-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/k1zl41/thank_you_de...
This is particularly helpful to people using asahi linux and wanting to connect an external monitor. That can be done with something as simple as a raspberry pi.
EDIT: apparently this project help achieving the same thing on different OS but using webRTC and a browser:
You'd install the client on your computer:
Windows: https://anydesk.com/en/downloads/windows
Mac: https://anydesk.com/en/downloads/mac-os
and then on your phone:
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anydesk.an...
But I share your want of an quick and easy way to use my phone as a keyboard and mouse for a "remote" computer in the same room as me
This one was usable but not very polished IMO https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panda_nood...
Like, no matter what, the UX will probably be meh just trying to mirror screens. Instead the presentation app could give you a QR code with a TLS cert in it, and you could scan it and get a secure connection to it's mobile optimized web remote UI.
We are really nowhere near using the full potential of all the devices and connectivity we have.
Imagine telling my wife:
Here's a little script for streaming through your camera on obs:
get-adb-devices-list() { adb devices | grep -v "List of devices attached" | grep -v "daemon" | grep -v "^$" | grep -c . }....
:)))))
1. setting a static ADB/TCP port or automatically sending it to the PC (Android now changes it every time)
2. enabling ADB/TCP on mobile hotspot (Android complains "Please connect to WiFi")
Other than those two things, between scrcpy, KDE Connect and Waydroid, the Linux-Android integration is basically perfect and makes even the Applers jealous.
It started out as being a means to send a video feed into OBS[1], which is how I rigged the webcam input, but as the project grew, it expanded to being a way for me to spin up desktop video and audio sharing in a browser, sorta like Zoom, etc. This let me run virtual movie nights with people remotely.
Whilst it's possible to use it via the 'create a room' interface, you can also do it all via URL parameters which I found much more flexible and robust. See here[2].
You create source and recipient URLs and then it just automagically makes it all work via WebRTC. I was able to for example make a source that captured my VLC window and sent out the video and audio, and then two destination URLs which received the source video and audio, but also sent their own audio to one another. This meant we could hear and watch the movie but also talk to each other via our microphones. All within browsers.
I've got no relation to this project besides thinking it's really awesome.
[1]: Used for streaming your computer online, e.g. on Twitch. https://obsproject.com/
What surprised me was how long Apple was on 720p.
The other issue I didn’t bring up is the form factor. Phones and tablets simply have more room for a webcam than the MacBook Pro screen and I don’t actually know anybody shipping a laptop with a built-in 4K webcam. Mind you that Apple could ship a better camera with its studio display but opts not to.
Screen size, target audience (1080p Zoom), cost, sensor size, and pixel size all come into play.
You can pump numbers for the sake of it on paper, but the reality is that it’s very hard to cram a good image sensor into a laptop screen in an economic way. There’s unfortunately just not enough real estate as thin as they are.
Meanwhile, phones are quite a bit thicker & cameras are a huge selling point. Plus, almost everyone has one. It makes sense that if you want higher quality video on your computer, you’d use the other device which has video higher up on the design priority list.
Darn, one piece of marketing BS getting in the way of other marketing BS. Yea, 1080p is plenty high res enough for your work meetings and family calls - but users don't really care about the thin aspect, we care about weight. Getting better key depth on laptops in exchange for a modicum of extra width is a deal I'd take any day of the week... and that'd allow far better cooling engineering and for a few more bulky components.
Beyond pure aesthetics thickness absolutely does matter when you are sticking your laptop into a backpack.
But you’re not going to fit a really good lens on the laptop screen without an annoying bulge anyway, and for 99% of people it would be a waste to spend resources on it anyway.
Using the phone is a much better solution. People are likely to have a good camera there with an OK lens anyway.
It can be done without a bulge. But designers gonna design and make something ugly. Smartphone CMOS sensors are not bigger than the usual stuff in Laptop bezels.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epoccam-webcamera-for-computer...
I just feel this feature comes a bit too late where there was a scramble during the pandemic to get webcams as everything suddenly went remote.
Would have been good to have shipped this feature back then instead of buying 3rd party apps that provided this feature.
I ended up getting a Sony mirrorless for a webcam. (Might seem like overkill but I spend a good deal of my time teaching in front of a camera.)
Phone as webcam just doesn't seem like a long term solution, eventually built in webcams will be cheap and good enough. And tbh I find the built in one on the macbook to be bordering on good enough once you consider how compressed and tiny the output will be on the other persons screen.
Apple actually did come up with a good solution for mounting the phone. A small disk that connects to the iphone with magsafe and has a flip out tab that can hook on to the top of the macbook. It's surprisingly stable and nice.
We've been waiting what, 15 years for this to happen?
Using a good camera for your video call is simply showing respect to the person/people you're talking with.
Even flagship smartphones don't have studio microphones with 48v phantom power, 32-bit float, pre-amp gain control, etc - that's something you'd have to invest in separately no matter what. But if you can get better video for free, why wouldn't you?
I completely disagree that good video is a sign of respect. I consider people wanting video on in the first place to be a sign of disrespect. It is rarely important for getting work done and I see it as a waste of resources.
I agree that video is often unnecessary for effective communication, and I too avoid it whenever it's not requested. But there are contexts in which it's great, like occasionally seeing the face of a loved one, who lives far away; or helping debug an issue with a physical object (PCB, server rack, appliance...) that you need to see to understand what's going on. Especially in the latter case, having better video quality is just objectively better, especially if you can get it essentially for free.
But the builtin camera on phones is a huge area of attention for them. They tend to be amazingly high quality to the point of being overkill as a webcam.
I didn't get a cell phone until 2013. (Yes I used land lines until then.) It was a Nexus 4 (still love the grippy sides and sleek glass back). Every 2-3 years I traded up, all the way until Pixel 6.
Tomorrow my first iPhone will be delivered. Why? A lot of reasons, but some are:
- I can't just plug my Google phone into an external display to mirror it. Uh, hello?? DisplayPort out is explicitly disabled in the source code with no reason given: https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1189998588023234560 -- yet this works great in other phones.
- I can't access my text messages from my Android phone (without a separate app like SMS Backup & Restore) -- go ahead, try it. Yeah, do an adb backup. Maybe rooting your phone would give you access, but it's impossible otherwise AFAIK. And I think rooting your phone deletes everything in the process.
- I can't access my phone backup. It's ONLY stored on Google's servers. The only way to even get close is to restore it to a phone. This is a physical device I bought and literally am holding in my hand but can't access all the stuff on it! Did you know you can just plug in an iPhone into Windows or Macs and dump a backup to your computers? It's all right there, text messages, system settings, contacts, photos, databases, EVERYTHING (except maybe hardware-protected keys). It's amazing.
- Do I even need to mention all the Google shenanigans? We all know what I'm talking about, right? The mess of messengers... the killing of various services, the lack of support, the stronger integration with ads and tracking.
Apple's not perfect either, but I feel like it's worth a shot inside the walled garden for a bit. I like that some of these common sense things are not a problem with iOS:
- Display out.
- Accessing your own device.
- Messaging that actually makes sense.
- At least it feels like Apple cares about privacy; counterintuitively, I feel way more in control using Apple products than I do Google ones.
And for the record, "because it's their device, not Google's" should be as good a reason as any.
It's not 2005 anymore, a phone has all the computing power that most people need. In fact, most laptops are just phone boards these days. It's completely reasonable to ask that your hardware not be artificially limited by the software it's running so they can sell you a separate device that does the rest of what you need.
In a perfect world, my phone is a supercomputer capable of doing everything I'll ever want in a fraction of a second. And the thing standing between my current phone and a perfect phone shouldn't be my insistence on having a separate giant desktop taking up more space than is necessary.
I'm not sure if this is a weird use case or not, but given the number of iPhone apps that I have both used and written that have special handling for TV mirroring to improve user experience... it can't be /that/ rare.
What options do iPhones have for saving/restoring backups?
iCloud and local.
Along with the reasons you state, the ecosystem is really messy. I've bought Nexus/Pixel phones for the last 10 years and continue to be bummed by their performance.
Pixel 1 XL was fantastic, but after about 2 years the camera kept failing. 3+ seconds to load, and it would commonly crash. Ultimately the battery life degraded, and the replacement battery degraded within a couple months, so I moved on.
The 3a fell out of my pocket and broke 2 months prior to the end of security updates. That was a decent phone overall, but not supported by Google as long as I would have liked.
Pixel 6 Pro has been fine so far, but my wife has been having issues with her Pixel 5. Slow performance, unreliable cellular connectivity, etc.
"Don't buy Pixel phones" could be the lesson here, but alternatives are arguably more of a security nightmare. My experience with Galaxy phones has been that they're preloaded with an incredible amount of junk that needs to be un-installed. With Pixel it's exclusively Google apps, most of which can be removed. That gives a smaller privacy and security concern than having 30 different companies with their apps pre-loaded (and possibly not removable).
> Apple's no angel either IMO, but I feel like it's worth a shot inside the walled garden for a bit.
I've hated on Apple a lot over the years and am disappointed that switching platforms seems like the best move after all these years.
If sideloading becomes easier, that’ll be a big win in my book.
Using it as a webcam would be a win though. It has a nice camera that sort of works in open-source land.
(and has most of them pre-setup)
It’s via the Orion Browser by Kagi, which somehow supports Chrome and Firefox extensions on top of the Safari rendering engine.
I wonder if Apple will notice that they accidentally let us have nice things, and take it away.
I really wish Android wasn’t a user-hostile privacy and stability shitshow of a closed ecosystem, but it is.
Lesser of two evils, and all.
To clarify that is not how it works, the Web Extensions API support in Orion was ported from scratch on top of WebKit.
Android will always, always have my heart for hacking, I still buy them occasionally for projects and weird esoteric shit I wanna do/try, and for game emulation and that kinda thing. But for my daily driver life manager, it's iPhone all the way. The integrations with HomeKit devices + Apple TV's make my home incredibly smart, absolutely everything is mirrored onto my Macbook and iPads (a current gen mini, and a 2017 Pro that's somehow still hanging in there despite being beat to shit every day for 6 years) without me lifting a damn finger, and when I do get around to upgrading, I plug them both in and all my shit is transferred over, and I blank the old one and send it to Apple for recycling.
Like it's cliche as hell, but it does all Just Work. Androids have caught up quite a bit in terms of power and the "slickness" that iOS got famous for, but at this point, I'm so deep into Apple's ecosystem I'd have to replace damn near every piece of electronic kit in my house to really transfer back over. And the grass just don't look that much greener over there.
Admittedly I haven't used Android full time (I have some Pixels for testing) since the Nexus days, but they pushed me back to iPhone when they released an update that completely destroyed the performance on my Nexus 7. Since then the growing Apple ecosystem makes it unlikely I'll change back. And that's fine. Phones are a solved problem at this point, it's really everything else where interesting work is happening.
Good luck leaving that walled garden by going to apple.
Why choose one evil over another? Sure Apple device is more convenient but "Privacy", that's Joke.
I get that people want convenience and feature but I would choose Google over Apple anyday, why? because it's not trying to lock me in.
I've used LineageOS + MicroG on a pixel phone and it's been great being free of Google spyware.
It's about as easy as it would be for an ISP to inject code into an HTTPS page.
The only reason anything works is because Google attestation servers still return a green light for evaluationType=BASIC. Once old devices become rare enough they'll only return a positive attestation for evaluationType=HARDWARE_BACKED.
Go find try and find a single instance of anyone achieving HARDWARE_BACKED with less than a fully stock device.
They are none. No amount of Magisk magic will make it work because it's all taken out of software's hands. Bypasses at that point look like electron microscopes and micro-electronics cleanrooms.
It tricks apps into thinking your phone doesn't support hardware key attestation, forcing it to fall back to basic software attestation which can easily be spoofed.
Been using it on my OnePlus 7 Pro and aside from when I had to switch to the fork, I haven't had any times where SafetyNet has stopped passing.
Honestly Android does a lot of things better - there's so many stupid "because Apple" things on iOS. For example it's impossible to tell the charging speed/estimated charge time, I have a lot of charging bricks between places and I can't tell if I picked an iPhone compatible fast charger/cable or not ? Or when I have Chrome/Firefox installed, highlight text and tap search the web - it takes me to Safari ? A lot of small annoyances like these where you can't do anything about it because the OS is so closed down.
Android is way more customisable, easier to side load stuff (like running GBA emulator on iPhone). Also a lot more exciting phones in the Android ecosystem (eg. Samsung flip phones)
I like the ecosystem integration with my Mac but I wouldn't say one is clearly better than the other.
In fact, I recently got a refurbished iPhone 13 just to check the ecosystem out (as a mobile dev) and get a feel for things but honestly I prefer my Pixel more. There are so many things that Android does well like notifications and typing (these two stood out to me on Apple - horrible implementations really, especially the latter) that it will always remain my primary driver.
But yeah, if someone thinks that Android is not for them and Apple's walled garden is worth entering then or vice versa then whatever floats your boat, I guess.
I always joke that when Android can handle a screen rotation without blanking the screen, I'll switch back: It's not about the actual blanking of course, it'll just mean they finally ripped out a design tradeoff they made for a device with 256MB of RAM and just... never fixed.
Android is full of decisions like that, like the horrible storage framework churn that randomly made a generation of devices dog slow as various terrible FUSE implementations.
Decisions that are technical, but just end up affecting user experience every day you use the device.
None of the Android phones I've used blank the screen, there's a smooth animation.
It can be hidden by frankly disgusting animations where they do things like squish a screenshot of your current screen to hide it, but the literal UI is being tore down on every rotation.
As you can imagine that's a pain in the ass to deal with on the app side, and until relatively recently the framework did a poor job providing support for handling it all. It's a very common cause of app crashes too.
(To really get technical, apps can opt out of this... but doing so means you'd need to reimplement the entire view stack and rotation yourself, which doesn't happen for anything but video games)
Android indeed does tear down the activity and creates a new one with different rotation and size; but activity is not the framebuffer currently displaying. Recreating the activity does not imply blanking screen.
You're saying "activity is not the framebuffer currently displaying", which is a completely nonsensical statement. The framebuffer does not change: the Surface Flinger is bound the the framebuffer and that's not changing during a rotation.
Tearing down the activity and creating a new one is literally blanking the screen as far as the activity is concerned: removing all views on the activity surface and adding brand new ones.
If you were to look at the activity in a view debugger frame by frame you'd get... a blank screen.
You could poll the WindowManager and there's... no views.
_
There's all sorts of ugly hacks to hide that fact, but at the end of the day supporting seamless transitions across rotations is something that dates back to iOS 3.
It's an artifact of the literal first Android phone that ended up causing pain for developers and instability for end users in perpetuity. Google simply is not product driven in a way that will ever allow them to match Apple. No UX obsessed company would have allowed that mess to go on as long as it has.
Of course most people don't notice because they unlock the phone with Face ID and usually don't stay on the home screen for too long, but still - if you push the home button when in horizontal mode you're presented to a rotated screen.
As for RAM: I was surprised to note that my phone has in fact 4GB of it (always thought it was 2GB), because apps get suspended all the time. It appears that at least on Android that was a sound design decision.
God damn this one is so annoying.
It’s one of the few things you can "easily" sideload on an iPhone without jailbreaking using AltStore (the emulator is named Delta, btw and it is excellent).
I will not say that AltStore is really practical to use but GBA and GameCube emulators are basically the only things you can sideload without a lot of pain (along with UTM, a virtual machine runner.
I haven't tried this for a while, but just for comparison I actually got a GBA emulator on my Samsung via play store. It's very much an Apple thing again.
This apparently changes with the Pixel 8
> - I can't access my text messages from my Android phone (without a separate app like SMS Backup & Restore) -- go ahead, try it. Yeah, do an adb backup. Maybe rooting your phone would give you access, but it's impossible otherwise AFAIK. And I think rooting your phone deletes everything in the process.
> - I can't access my phone backup. It's ONLY stored on Google's servers. The only way to even get close is to restore it to a phone. This is a physical device I bought and literally am holding in my hand but can't access all the stuff on it! Did you know you can just plug in an iPhone into Windows or Macs and dump a backup to your computers? It's all right there, text messages, system settings, contacts, photos, databases, EVERYTHING (except maybe hardware-protected keys). It's amazing.
This is not applicable for all Android phones
> - Do I even need to mention all the Google shenanigans? We all know what I'm talking about, right? The mess of messengers... the killing of various services, the lack of support, the stronger integration with ads and tracking.
No I don't, none of the dead services have impacted me, what mess of messengers? Lack of support for what?
> what mess of messengers?
Meet, Hangouts, GChat, Talk, Allo, Duo, Meet, Voice, Messenger. Fi and RCS barely.
With various levels of integration, merging, and unmerging of the services over the years.
I don't even know what they call that chat-inside-gmail these days. Talk? Chat? I remember it getting merged with Hangouts eventually and then un-merged. Or was that Voice?
I was on Voice too as GrandCentral back before Google bought them. The mp3 ringback functionality which was the first feature lost in the purchase.
Ended up reminiscing a bit there but its been a crazy ride in the Google sphere.
You've been on Android for decade, keep using what you've been using and you like. When did people become too dumb to choose a thing they like and started demanding socialism?
Tf is this supposed to mean in this context?
In particular "something I have no need for but lots of other people do but I don't care about them"
Not to mention fairly nice features like SMS and Hangouts integration that were ripped out into separate apps again.
It has been a confusing mess.
Yes, if you want to talk to people in other parts of the world, you'll need a different app for that, because different parts of the world tend to use different apps (e.g., Chinese all use WeChat, Europeans seem to use WhatsApp, etc.). If you just want to talk to people in Japan, LINE is all you need. (Taiwan too, I think)
I talk to them on Facebook Messenger and Instagram personally. Which means "people in Japan" have them installed also. So you get my drift :)
One messenger is never "all you need" unless you pick your friends based on what app they use.
No, I don't.
Those people only have them to talk to you, because you're not in Japan and don't use LINE.
People in Japan who don't have foreign friends don't have this issue.
(Also, Instagram is not a messaging app. Messenger is.)
FTFY
> Those people only have them to talk to you
Nah, any single one of them has many more friends outside of Japan than I have friends in Japan. People living on an island with the most powerful passport in the world love to travel, breaking news.
> because you're not in Japan and don't use LINE.
It's true for all of the world except Japan :)
> (Also, Instagram is not a messaging app. Messenger is.)
That's just false. After it's stopped being about photos, it's just a messaging app for me and countless other people who don't care about its tiktok-mimicking reels and other drivel. It's actually very decent at being just a messenger.
You have to pick your poison, but a phone that actively forces you to update AND also blocks 3rd party apps from running AND forces proprietary cables that no other consumer device uses... seems like a nonstarter for me.
A few of the things you mention sound pretty annoying, but none of them are annoying enough to make up for not being able to write code on any computer I like, and run it on mine or my friend's phone, without paying a regular subscription and submitting to a reviewer who can just say no for any reason.
The 5g SE (2022) is $429 (or at least $100 less if you shop carrier deals), and the CPU is current android flagship-grade.
You can get the 2020 model refurbished and unlocked at walmart.com for $70-$140. It probably has at least 2-3 more years of security updates, so the longevity is better than many new androids.
The Moto G6, and that stopped receiving updates long ago, and was released in 2018 for about $100. I don't need much power, so I could easily get by with such an old, underpowered phone. I did for a while, but I did switch away because I was more phone-reliant at the time, and so an upgrade was needed. And I find the freedom of being able to install anything just from APKs, set another browser as my default, etc. as a huge value-add for Android.
And yeah, the iPhone has more security updates, but that doesn't really matter to me. I only install reputable, and mostly open source, apps on my phone so I'm not really concerned about security.
So in terms of value: there's the 2020 iPhone SE, with, say, 3 years left, for $120–$40 per year counting just the remaining years and using the current price at Walmart, or $300–$50 per year, assuming MSRP, a carrier discount of $100, and 6 years total. And the Moto G6, with just over of 5 years of life so far, and more value to me due to both the relative freedom of Android, and the fact that I'm used to and prefer Android, for $100–$20 per year. The choice seems obvious to me, for my purposes, but I can absolutely see why an iPhone is better for some people.
By the way, fun fact: the Moto G6 has FM radio built-in!
P.S. also, there's no way I'd risk becoming one of those arseholes that tries to make their whole family get iPhones so they can FaceTime, just because they can't figure out how to download another damn video calling app, despite being able to download all other apps just fine. Yes I'm looking at you, mother's half of my extended family.
As much as I’d love this to be a valid stance if you use the internet then you need to be keeping up with security updates. Recently there was a bug in the open source decoder for webp images, it impacted basically every device, and was being exploited in the wild via nothing but displaying an image.
> The 5g SE (2022) is $429
iPhone absolutely are more expensive than any other phone if you care about things other than the CPU/GPU performance.
The 5g SE has a tiny screen with archaic bezel design and still uses LCDs in an era where not giving you an OLED would be seen as a ripoff on the android market. It starts at 64gb of storage for this $429 (in France, it's actually 529 euros), my S20FE from a couple years ago which I bought at 400 euros on deals had 128gb. It has a very big, 120hz OLED screen and the finger print sensor works from underneath the screen.
For me, and many others, the phone is primarily a content consumption device. If the CPU is good enough that I don't see stutters all the time then it's good enough. I don't need my smartphone to be a laptop in the pocket. I do need a screen that I enjoy looking at and big enough that I can use it to read ebooks.
This in turns is heavily reflected in how many Apple users will splurge the big bucks to get the iPhone models that are comfortable to use despite their insane prices. Right now, the cheapest phone Apple produces with a large screen is the iPhone 14 Plus at 969 euros.
There's a reason why the iPhone SE is the least popular of all Apple phones despite having far-more-than-good-enough hardware performance and longevity while being accessibly priced: it lacks what people actually wants out of their phone, Apple knows that and they keep the SE the way it is because they wouldn't want to cannibalize the sales of the expensive phones. If you look at any statistics, the SE is like a rounding error compared to the sales of the other iPhones.
And next year, when the S20FE won't even have security updates, the 13 will get another major upgrade. And probably another after that.
_
In fact, if you had bought a refurb $500 iPhone when the S20FE was announced (iPhone 11!), you'd still be getting into the new update the S20FE just missed out on.
That is how absurdly abysmal Android support it: you could have gotten a 2 year older phone and actually gained an upgrade cycle.
Also fun fact: the 2 year older iPhone 11 would also be faster than the S20 FE
You see, if Apple dropped support for your iPhone, you would never be able to ever get a browser upgrade again, since Safari's engine updates are tied to iOS itself.
Android doesn't do that. Very old phones past their prime and past the security updates support will still receive the latest Chrome with latest web standards support and security fixes for itself (though it won't stop other apps from being able to, say, exploit a privilege escalation vulnerability and other things of that vein). You will continue to receive upgraded Messages etc.
Many of the APIs are updated independently too from the OS, through the Play Store, and because the developer community is aware of the OS update fragmentation, they also tend to target older SDKs for compatibility. So android phones are not becoming obsolete as fast as some Apple-exclusive users seem to believe from only being informed about "android doesn't get updates".
By the time my phone is truly done I will probably buy a new one because the battery will have worn out beyond my tolerance, as it always happens with these devices just as it happens on iPhones (I used to be on the iPhone camp when prices had not turned obscene, started with a 3g and ended with the 5s. No, I'm not paying $1k on a goddamn smartphone just because I prefer a bigger screen.).
To remark on not being able to get 14: it's sad, but I don't really miss it. I've never used webcams in my entire life, and the other OS level features aren't particularly important. IMHO, both iOS and Android have become mature as OSes and most of what people care about is in the app ecosystem, not what comes out of the factory.
You spent way too many words trying to downplay some pretty simple facts: Android OS updates are what contain most headline features lay people recognize.
GPS/Mainline cover things that are implementation details as far as they know, and don't cover the binary blobs which are the biggest reason why losing security updates in a year is going to mean the S20FE is forever an insecure device, regardless of what Mainline can deliver or what going with a custom rom does.
_
Also Android is extremely far from mature, things like Project Mainline show we haven't even settled on how far Google gets to sink the closed sourced claws of their GPS into the core of it.
I mean you've got Android 14 finally adding the APIs to properly support scrolling on high FPS displays. Android had 120hz displays years before Apple and somehow manages to screw up these basic cases because they have no unified product vision to speak of.
Maybe Android will be "mature" once Google is done with their iOS-ization of AOSP driven by crappy vendors, but for now the updates are extremely meaningful.
2) System updates do not mean the same on Android and iOS. On Android, all the apps are going to be updated still. Browser, mail, chat, maps are not hostages to system update. Conversely, security-only updates on Android are perfectly fine. Most users would not see difference between major releases anyway.
2) I don't get why people keep lecturing a guy who built AOSP products with wildly wrong understandings of Android's update structure
Browser, Mail, and Messages are all baked into AOSP just like iOS... they're just so awful they mostly stopped getting updated: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/
You're instead referring to Google Play Services alternatives, which get updated but also don't represent the headline features that get announced with new Android releases.
> Most users would not see difference between major releases anyway
Absurd take when Google spends literal millions marketing the new features native to Android releases (not app releases, Android releases)
And in less than a year the binary blobs running half the phone in your pocket will no longer get updated, so it elevates from being a feature issue to being a security issue.
The Galaxy S20 FE doesn't run AOSP though. It has Chrome, GMail and Messages from Google and all of them get updated via the Play Store.
... sound about right chief?
iPhones typically get OS upgrades for 5 years. Pixel gets 3 years.
My iPhone cost £849 including tax, which is £170 p.a. The Pixel was £449, working out to £150 p.a. So the Pixel is £20 cheaper per year.
iPhone SE has a much smaller screen, too small to read comfortably. I don't trust refurbished phones. So these options don't matter to me. Far cheaper Android options don't matter to me either because they typically have huge quality and security issues.
For people who just keep using their phone for 5 years no matter what, Pixel would be £80 cheaper, but I think performance would no longer be on par in the later years given that the iPhone starts out with higher specs.
I'm not saying this comparison is any more correct than yours. My point is that whether or not iPhone or Android phones are cheaper depends on how people use their phones. There is no one true answer to which one is cheaper.
That said I have a Fold 4. iPhone aren't doing folding phones atm and they lock down the ecosystem so much I have zero interest.
Today, some phones and tablets support DisplayPort alt-mode over USB-C.
The main things drawing me to the iPhone are:
Live voicemail - don't have to deal with my carriers awful voicemail anymore, and it's way more practical than Android's Call Screen, because the Call Screen prompt is way too tedious to sit through, unprofessional if you're being called for an interview, and they know you're there. Live voicemail I can see it, optionally answer in the middle, it gets saved after, and the other party has no idea if I'm available or not.
Apple Photo Memories - My girlfriend shows me them on her iPhone, they're cohesive and actually really enjoyable to watch, they look like they were professionally done, like what you'd pay someone to make or see an social media influencer post. Google Photo Memories look like random assortments of photos in a powerpoint presentation you made back when you were only 8.
The apple watch is also better than the google watch.
I still have to see what features I care about that I'll be losing before making the switch though. I still remember having to fight my iPod where the internal music db would always get corrupted and need to reset because I used MediaMonkey instead of iTunes since it was faster and had better transcoding and library management features.
Now fast-forward almost a decode. I'm using Galaxy S10 since its introduction in 2019. TouchWiz is nowhere to be found. Samsung uses OneUI nowadays, which is actually pretty cool, and I prefer it to vanilla Android. Basically, I have as good experience with it, as you described.
Of course you can accesss your stuff on it, just back it up with android debbugger (adb).
If you're annoyed with the search box you can disable it or flash GrapheneOS or LineageOS.
My partner is always having a hard time transferring her iPhone photos to her desktop. Finally gave up and bought iCloud storage. Apple has better integration with their peripherals though. No stupid app to use the heaphones, create other accounts etc. Their Apple Air Pods setup is just integrated in the OS. I have Sonys and absolutely hate their 4.7 star rated app, nags you to create an account and give it access to the camera in order to optimize your sound.
It's not packaged up and made shiny by the manufacturer, but that's why I like it. It's a decoupled experience where I've got control over it.
As much as I enjoy tinkering and having control over my device, sometimes I want things to just work. The Steam Deck and SteamOS are the what I consider the gold standard for this: SteamOS is very beginner friendly, but allows power users to access the Desktop mode and unlock its full potential.
I've talked about this before on HN [1]. I cannot backup my Minecraft worlds on Android 13 without paying Mojang $4 for their server to act as an intermediary to transfer files, whereas people in the "walled garden" of iOS can access it via a file manager app or plug their phone into a computer and backup the worlds.
If you want an all encompassing authoritarian provider, you have an option. But demanding that of everyone narrows the periphery and extinguishes the creative sparks of discovery
Vendors should embrace diversity and not line up in compliance with whoever the perceived market leader is.
This is called Error reinforcement: when a tech company makes a poor decision and their competitors copy them out of fear because they don't know it's a mistake.
The original firm sees the copycat work as evidence they were right.
See Google/Apple maps, iPhone/Android, Google/Bing etc
This leads to service degradation, feature reduction, persumptive interfaces, poor defaults, hostile interfaces, and disliked products with no alternatives because everybody is racing to clone each other feature for feature assuming that everybody else knows what they're doing
Any presumed market diversity from competition is then traded in for compliance, uniformity and conformity.
So go buy your Apple device. Expecting everyone to be like Apple (or anyone else) is offensive to the craft of innovation
Are you sure you've responded to the correct comment? Or did you misunderstand my comment?
No where did I say I want an "all encompassing authoritarian provider" or to "narrow the periphery and extinguish the creative sparks of discovery". All I asked for is my device to "just work" when I want it to. You can have have your cake and eat it as well - it is possible to be friendly towards both novice and pro users, as I demonstrated with the Steam Deck example (whether they will continue this, is a separate discussion). Things can "just work" without a company deciding what's best for me.
I used to be able to plug my phone into my laptop and copy my Minecraft files. I can't do that any more.
I own the device. I decide what I want to do with it.
I myself have faced the brunt of "error reinforcement": my phone doesn't have expandable storage, lacks a headphone jack and didn't come with a charger in the box, - all to inconvenience me and raise Google's bottom line.
If you're up for constructive criticism, please don't come off so aggressive.
Apple took the first step on almost all those feature killing things you listed and then to "keep up with the industry", the android vendors followed suit.
Products that "just work" often in practice get that attribute by only working in a proscribed way and then flat out failing in others.
Your fail case is inevitably because the just work philosophy was followed for some other imagined use case so being a tool was replaced with being an appliance.
When you try to meet the user too far you inherently compromise functionality and adaptability in exchange for narrowed convenience.
You need to take things away and remove decision points from the user in order to get to a just work state.
Then there's an actual group of users that reinforces this and classifies such things are progress.
I care a lot about a productive meaningful future and I want to push things in the right directions
Thing is, power users are a vocal minority in his industry. People like our families are the majority, and I don't want them to have to deal with quirks or troubles, but I also don't want an oligopoly controlling the space and compromising innovation, privacy, etc. in the name of "convenience" (profit).
The problem here is whether someone wants a good knife or a bunch of specialized knife like devices like cheese slicers for specialized knife functions.
The problem in technology is we presume it's Either the mandolin Or the knife and not both.
The fleeting elegance in the craft of engineering tech products is in empowering all these modalities and not the endemic narrowcasting we see plaguing the industry.
It's possible, it's just sadly not common
I'm pretty happy with my Fairphone 4 on LineageOS, personally. Murena also sells some degoogled out-of-the-box with /e/. I also like having root adb access on these systems (which btw, gives you access to the sqlite sms database). Screen mirroring via DP alt mode over USB-C works out-of-the-box and you can enable Android's "desktop mode", though it's rather barebones and clearly experimental. Plus, Fairphone supports their phone for a long time, they are easy to repair, they can run mainline kernels (postmarketOS...), etc. Of course, any Android phone still depends on Google for the OS.
I'm with you on a lot of complaints regarding Google, though switching to Apple would feel like trading one evil for another: I would absolutely not describe an Apple cellphone as "mine", nor "accessing your own device" sounds like something Apple provides.
If you set up your Apple account to use iCloud to sync your messages, you will end up with your iMessage and text messages in the Messages app on your macOS computer. At that point the message content is easily retrieved from files on disk, should you choose to do so.
As you said, this is only a Pixel problem. Speaking of, have you tried Samsung Dex?
> Accessing your own device
Seriously? Apple basically invented the idea of not giving you full access to your "own" device. At least there's a file explorer now...
> Messaging that actually makes sense
Messaging under Apple is literally just messaging on Android plus iMessage. You still have SMS, like 50 common third-party messengers, all the Google ones, but then also this Apple-only thing. How is this better? If you want a better chat experience, look at Blackberry (yes, really!).
You do have a point regarding privacy though, as most Android devices ship with at least Google's spyware, if not also their own...
Yes, workarounds exist like IP Webcam.
Only good phone I ever had. I wish things were as easy on Android devices, but somehow they almost never are.
That's a hard task, worth of respect too. But it feels like this hardline conservative outlook for software has utterly dominated what's gotten built for a long time now, with less and less computing that is interested willing or able to give power users solid ground & footing. Tech keeps increasing the distance, keeps becoming more esoteric, ironically because it keeps losing on-roads to becoming an expert or explorer if you're interested in going further.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/17/23726967/google-pixel-das...
> We don’t know how Google plans on mitigating heat issues or how it deals with the issue of potentially damaging a camera that uses optical image stabilization
I think sun sitting the phone, while its doing nothing else but charging is enough to cause concern... guess we'll see.
I have found it quite useful when joining a zoom call with a group of people in a breakout room. Prop up your phone somewhere and it works like a conference room camera.
It’s a nice feature. The cameras on any iPhone are WAY better than those built into a Mac.
I’m sure that holds for Android/PC.
* shortcut from off to recording video, immediately (no clicking around the camera app)
* stop charging battery at 80% setting (no heuristics, AI, predictive BS).
> stop charging battery at 80%
...if you don't mind?
Charging from 80% to 100% puts more strain on the battery than charging from 60% to 80%, even though it's an addition of 20% each time.
So let's say you use about 40% of your battery daily, and charge from 60% to 100% every day, and that drops your total capacity by 10% each year. You'll have 6 years before your battery won't last a whole day.
If instead that +40% charge was going between 40% and 80%, the reduced strain might mean you only lose 5% of the total capacity each year. That would get you 8 years before your battery won't last a whole day.
Getting your battery to last longer like this also means that a year or two in, if there's a day you expect to need the full capacity, you can just turn off the limit for that day and your battery will last longer than it would have if you never limited it.
Most Android phones will let you open the camera app with a double tap of the power button when locked, then you have to start recording manually, so it's a two step process. Sony has a dedicated camera button that opens the camera and can be configured to either take a photo or start recording immediately: https://sony-xperia-l.xphonehelp.com/en-us/camera/using-the-... (under Quick launch)
> * stop charging battery at 80% setting (no heuristics, AI, predictive BS).
Sony has that under their Battery care, you can set a custom stop percentage.
On the lock screen, the camera app is by default there, you can just swipe up, and if the last mode was video, then it's video again
And under More Battery Settings, there's an option for "Protect battery", which limits maximum charge to 85%
The first EVER Android phone release was the Dream, which came out in September 2008. It had very little to do with today's Android. I was there. I know.
It's just so frustrating because this is such a solved problem for Linux / FreeDesktop.
Really hope this changes in future….
Edit: Just tried it on my dock and it can also mirror vs acting as a separate display via Dex.
It's quite useful sometimes when I'm in a satellite office and I didn't bring a laptop, I can just plug my phone into one of the guest workplace docks and it's quite productive. Eagerly waiting for Android 14 to bring this to the Pixel.
USB-C is a complex standard, but basically, just because your connector is USB-C, doesn't guarantee what can actually go over those wires. First you have to have the connector; then your device needs to have a chipset that is capable of specific processing and protocols; and then it needs to actually implement those protocols with other things on the device. So your USB-C connector might only support USB 2.0, or 3.0, or 3.1, or 3.2, or 3.2 Gen1x2, or 3.2 Gen2x1, or 3.2 Gen2x2, and possibly PowerDelivery, and possibly video, and possibly audio, and possibly mass storage, and possibly ethernet, and possibly basically whatever feature you want.
So you have to actually look up the specs of the device you have to find out what it will actually allow you to do over that USB-C cable. I bought a USB-C phone years ago only to find out it supported virtually nothing besides USB 3.0 file transfers, and a dumb charging standard proprietary to that one vendor.
Samsung Galaxy phones do a ton of stuff over USB-C, including video out, and even DeX, where you can use the phone as a laptop.
My galaxy s8 does either mirroring our a full desktop.
Still, good webcams use USB 3.0 and no chroma subsampling, to avoid recompression and enable certain tricks. I hope the YUV 4:4:4 mode will be supported in this, for those who have the speed and want chromakeys/non-blurry reds.
Webcams need to be very near real-time to be useful. That severely limits what kinds of compression you can use on the video stream.
Steam in-home streaming needs to be realtime too, but is very playable, and most people aren't realistically getting 480mbps out of their wifi.
4k I don't know... 1080p no problem.
Don't most phones have dedicated hardware video encoders on their SoC now anyway?
Using more fancy encoding, 4k should be no problem, even with a bit of headroom for on-device encoding and low latency.
Considering the cheapest of desktop/laptop CPUs and iGPUs are more powerful than the best mobile CPUs and GPUs, this is a problem with the encoders and video chat software involved.
That might seem unfair, but many people replace their phones far more frequently than their computers.
Smartphones cameras are not USB2, they are, I think, directly connected to a powerful SoC. The USB2 link is for sending data to the computer after the smartphone has processed it with all the might of its main processor.
It should be possible to have DisplayPort output but with USB2 data. In fact, we know it is possible because the iPhone 15 does it. It has USB2 data speeds but 4K Displayport.
https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/722x2eef...
The newer 3.0 device has 4:2:2 YUV.
Example reviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daS5RHVAl2U and many more. They all boil down to the same thing: excellent device, even with MJPEG. Obviously it's more dependent on what you use as camera, than the encoding method.
Take a look at this OBS forums thread I found, which is a pretty good illustration. [1] This is the best key from a cheap MJPEG webcam I've ever seen, usually it's terrible and streamers have to wear hats. The edge quality in the final picture is still bad (especially hair), and that's with unholy amount of polishing the turd he did, sacrificing latency and probably holding his breath (figuratively) to not go outside of his finely tuned setup. Especially the temporal noise reduction. Check this frame out as well [2], and pay attention to his shirt and hand - the edge is terribly pixelated, which he points out as well. And that is probably the best you can do with the crappy compressed source.
This is the reason cameras like Facecam Pro exist at all. Uncompressed YUV with full chroma resolution makes it all far easier.
> Obviously it's more dependent on what you use as camera, than the encoding method.
You can get away with a cheap camera, if you're using it indoors with controlled lighting; you can't get away with bad compression if you want to process it.
I am too. The HDMI capture card makes a webcam out of a DSLR/DSLM. MJPEG is not the main issue when it comes to quality.
This is still implementation dependent. MJPEG can range from 0-100 in terms of JPEG compression. Also the C920 might also use H264 which would be even worse, also same 4:2:0 issue.
And, dear lord... there's so much Intel <three-letter-acronym> stuff that simply shouldn't be there, and some of it is even impossible to disable :( All sorts of non-consensual tracking marketed as "anti-theft" or "IT remote service support". And that's on a ThinkPad, which, at least in my memory, used to be the friendliest brand for Linux among laptops...
Anyways, back to Android. Well, last thing I want it to be is a Web cam. There's even an idiom in English "butt-dialing" that stands for accidentally calling someone w/o the caller being aware of them calling them. But, with a Web cam, and the glorious Web security, and proprietary drivers... now you'll have a chance to... broadcast butt-dial? That doesn't sound as snappy though. Let's wait for the first victim, I guess, and see how they call it.
BTW I highly doubt that toggling settings in your BIOS is going to stop this supposed non-consensual tracking. But hey, if the placebo helps you feel better
> BTW I highly doubt that toggling settings in your BIOS is going to stop this supposed non-consensual tracking.
Some are known to be impossible to stop. Some can be stopped. There are, unfortunately many of those. "Anti-theft" thing can be completely disabled for example. The "IT remote support" thing cannot, but can be configured to be less malicious (somewhat, not really, but still). It's not magic what they do. It's just (intentionally) poorly documented (and poorly implemented) stuff. But there are some enthusiastic people who try to discover what this stuff is actually doing.
So, it's a fight that never ends. Eventually, enthusiasts will discover more of this stuff, take Intel to court and make them undo / allow to disable this. And then Intel will produce chips with more malicious stuff but rebranded and so on.
I happen to work for another big h/w manufacturer, so... it's business as usual.
It will probably even work with something like this UVC->HDMI converter: https://www.amazon.co.uk/OBSBOT-UVC-HDMI-Adapter-Webcams/dp/... so you can go straight into a video switching device.
Do you never plug your phone into a PC for a reason other than wanting to use it as a Web cam? Laptop users literally tape over the Web cam to prevent accidental / malicious uses of that device. Now they'd have to tape over the phone camera every time it's connected to a PC? Seriously?
I expect that on most phones you will have to select USB camera mode for it to work (and you'll have to tell it if you want the front or back camera), and it will probably tell you that it's working on the screen.
Was it activated or you just here to vent?