Desktop Windowing on Android Tablets
android-developers.googleblog.com
android-developers.googleblog.com
Going to work with only my computer in my pocket was awesome. No sync between devices anymore.
Forced me to use monitors at work and home which is good for the neck. Had a 15 inch monitor when I was on the move, then a lapdock.
Sadly, I was quite alone and Samsung Dex being not open source nor well funded, some bugs where quite irritating in the long term.
I dream of a linux smartphone powerhouse. Linux smartphones have mediocre processors.
Give me a linux smartphone with an apple silicon processor !
devtools is just a set of html and javascript after all, and talks to the page its debugging via a websocket with special powers.
But it's a heavy task in the long run.
I toyed with it briefly, the performance is about what I expected given the hardware I was using. Which is to say, not a terrible amount of overhead
https://github.com/laem/chromium
It takes such a long time to compile chromium that this wasn't a good solution in the long term, but worked perfectly.
Don't remember how I did then, long term. But yes, this was one of the major hurdles.
I was testing embedded hardware, so my main tasks involved a UART port into a dev board. One Bluetooth serial interface later, I was in business; there were some Arduino IDE ports or something similar that had a respectable serial terminal, and that's all I needed to see log messages.
Monitor plugged in over Samsung's weird MHL-HDMI thing; knockoff cable was only a few bucks. It had a power passthrough, so I used the otherwise-useless Cisco VoIP phone on my desk (I was a contractor and the phone wasn't active) as a USB power source to charge the S4.
Bluetooth keyboard, Alt-Tab works for switching apps, and having real keys makes composing email a breeze. Bluetooth mouse, pops up a cursor on the screen and works just like touch with better ergonomics. Bluetooth headphones, for taking conference calls and listening to music.
I wanted for nothing, and the whole mess fit into my coat pockets, I didn't bother carrying a backpack that week.
It's a decade later and this is still a fringe activity?
Manufacturers don't have much incentives for convergence. They sell less devices and less applications.
It encourages local-first, instead of cloud-first. It requires more thought on UI.
Samsung has great hardware, they could do it if they wanted. But their software seems to have no direction.
15 years from now when passports and driving licenses have gone digital, imagine dropping your phone and it smashes.
Your identification, debit/credit card, drivers license, car key, transit card.. all temporarily inaccessible.
Now imagine that you also just lost access to your only device you can do work on.
Hell no.
The screen is working because it reacts to power and volume up/down buttons.
I realized recently that the mounting a usb-c to female usb-a adapter I could use the wireless dongle of my Microsoft wireless all in one keyboard/trackpad and control the smartphone that way. Sadly its usb-c port doesn't support external monitors so I haven't found any practical use for it. I guess I should look for a miracast dongle if such thing exists but that would limit the usage to home wlan I guess and not be as portable as I think it could.
Nowadays any 14 laptop that is as useful as those Asus used to be, including technical specifications, are no longer 300 euros, rather more like 1000 euros, as the 300 euros crowd is rather happy with tablet + keyboard cover combo.
Desktop mode is pretty good, and it works with most hardware. It's plenty powerful enough to be a portable laptop, plus after the work is done you can pretty easily grab a few hours on a game :-D
Android fully understands the idea of running multiple apps, at different resolutions, simultaneously and yet, no product in this space due to I assume restrictive APIs.
The nReal glasses will act as a monitor for your phone.
It's not as easy as you think though. Streaming video at acceptable VR resolution and framerate isn't trivial.
I guess you could get a headset to act like a car and get Carplay running, but full RDP of an iPhone...does anything do that?
Like iPhone mirroring?
I have left the Apple eco system for the most part, but I remember 10 years ago demoing on my Mac what was happening on my iPhone.
It has its own apps and it's own browser. I tried opening a couple epub readers but trying to open a file didn't bring up any file open dialog from the browser.
I felt pretty bad for the headset makers. Quite clear they were entirely beholden to an Android where most apps have extremely limited capability sets, where they have to really reinvent the universe afresh for their headset.
Small Linux tablets, such as Surface Go or Starlabs do touch and desktop pretty well on GNOME. Sadly, I don't think there is a good mobile equivalent to the S8 you used to use.
The monitor requires hardware support that's semi-rare, but the rest should work? It's been a long time since I saw a phone that didn't support USB host mode so you can in fact just plug in a keyboard and mouse if you have an adaptor/dock. Beyond that, you're just limited by software availability, but on Android you can use F-Droid to get Termux. Not sure about iOS; maybe iSH?
The S8 was also a bit too memory constrained for DeX. Even my S23 is now. I love DeX but Samsung shouldn't be so frugal with memory.
"We're excited to announce that Android Tablets now have a terminal, with full support of terminal applications like 'ed' and 'grep'!"
Erm... what?
> The only real way to win here is by using a VM which is what ChromeOS did.
What advantage would the VM provide, other than the host OS having even less insight into what the application is doing?
(Which is, by the way, exactly the only reason Android is introducing VMs: hiding stuff from the host Android)
The host android won't have access to the guest VMs but the hypervisor still does.
They sure as hell don’t go out of their way to help keep it running.
> Squeeze extra performance out of a device to achieve low latency or run computationally intensive applications, such as games or physics simulations.
> Reuse your own or other developers' C or C++ libraries.
Followed by https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
It is not on that list, it isn't supported.
I doubt anyone at Google is trying to break Termux, but they don't care about power users and they think Android should function like their iPhone and treat users accordingly.
If it isn't on that list, it works by luck and can be broken on any device or Android update.
If that's not what you mean, I'm not sure how your link works as a reply to a comment on Google's motivation.
So naturally Google breaks "private" APIs whenever they feel like.
(And can we just pretend that I replied the same thing to the other places in the thread you posted the exact same response? No point in duplicating threads)
I'd say past 40 years proves this model is not what people want, but they are so persistent about not doing a normal file-focused UI that it feels intentional. Like some directive from Steve before he passed.
I ended up putting Rockbox on my iPod Classic, which makes it be what it actually is: an MP3 player! (Alas the UI is not as pleasant, and battery life is worse...)
Similarly I've been so confused about files on my iPhone, whereas on Android I never had any confusion (except on some newer versions where there's both a Documents folder and a Documents "smart view" which are indistinguishable except when you realize nothing makes any sense and you ended up in the screen that's trying to give you an Apple-like files experience for some reason, and then you navigate back to the actual file system and are actually able to find your files...)
But WTH is an iPad for with the larger screen and all that power? Watching videos or maybe some games I guess?
I think the limitations are entirely for business strategy reasons, not because they believe there is no demand.
In older versions of iPadOS (it might even have just been iOS back then) you had to enable the mouse under Accessibility to make it work, but in current OS versions it "just works"..
You can even cmd-tab between apps and a lot of the keyboard shortcuts you know and love work in most apps.
Maybe in their marketing materials. Trying to do something useful on an Android tablet is painfull. The on screen keyboard uses half of your screen.
Don't know if it's unique to Lenovo or part of Android in general, but these tablets do support the windowing feature. It's Android 13.
So-called Productivity Mode is a Lenovo thing and I agree it's actually decent. I know that Android has some windowing support built-in but it's basically unusable (hence why this announcement is good news).
Though admittedly split screen is the most useful of those
Well, that all depends on what you were expecting. It works about as well as I figured it would (including the pre-installed bloatware), so in my eyes, it’s performant.
But DeX is only available on the highest performing devices in the Galaxy lineup :)
I don't have any performance complaints on my S23 with Snapdragon chip. But they are too frugal with memory. Tabs and apps often have to reload in DeX.
We carry these things with us everywhere and they are more than capable (hardware wise) for what 99% of time spent on desktops/laptops can do, especially in the corporate world. The limitation is the form factor. I'm really just floored that there hasn't been a bigger push to turn our smartphones into our computers.
I'm a jazz bassist, so I'm mostly reading chord symbols when not just playing from memory. Having the sheets on stage lets me consult rehearsal markings and jog my memory as needed. Sometimes it stays in my bag, or at the edge of the stage, until I need it.
The one band I play in that has more complicated charts is entirely paper based, and will be for the foreseeable future. My kids both play classical, and they have 13" iPads -- there's pretty much no avoiding it nowadays. But after shelling out for them, I decided that I didn't need that much technology.
I don’t understand the downvotes. I am always baffled when statements are downvoted.
The whole experience would have been great, except for one thing which made it unusable for my purposes. Android has that clipboard editor popup that can't be disabled. When using Emacs within Termux, every time I hit ctrl-k, I got that damn popup which blocked a significant amount of the screen for ~10 seconds.
Part of my reason for being cheap is that I've seen more than one tablet get destroyed, while playing music. One got blown over by the wind at an outdoor gig, the other somehow got knocked around in my instrument case and the screen cracked in half.
Yes, you do. There's a pretty extensive set of keyboard shortcuts, actually.
2-finger trackpad swipe = browser back/forward
3-finger swipe = app previous/nextWhat I can do in seconds on a fast, responsive, non-bogged down modern laptop can take orders of magnitude longer to accomplish on a tablet. Tablets surely have their uses, but high paced productivity is not one of them.
If only the world had evolved into one where operating systems could interact with applications in a way that would allow persistence of window layouts, scripting of user interface elements, and allowing a user to modify application layouts to their own preferences.
I only maximise windows frequently when I work on a single small monitor (and sometimes I'll use window transparency to be able to see multiple windows simultaneously.) With 2 or 3 large monitors, there's rarely any need to have windows maximised.
I also saw an article a while back that Android might get a task bar for phones as well, that actually seems quite handy.
https://9to5google.com/2024/08/06/android-phones-taskbar-tes...
Even the titlebar buttons look like Windows' with the obvious exception of a missing minimise.
On the other hand, maybe they're finally realising the fact that "mobile UI" has been dumbed-down for too long.
Microsoft also started presenting new features like selection of font colors.
I also got a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
The only thing that works properly is web apps. All the native apps have terrible keyboard and mouse support. It made me wonder if I'm the only person using it this way.
On that note the only GUI text editor (yes I'm learning Vim in Termux, no it's not a replacement for Sublime!) that's tolerable is VSCode running in the browser.
Surprisingly comfy in fullscreen, but the fact that's it's even necessary is just a testament to what a joke the whole ecosystem is.
pkg install helix helix-grammars
Edit: Fixed formatting (my fourth comment on HN...)
I haven't found a desktop operating system that ticks most of the boxes, especially security and privacy. The only OS that ticks all the boxes is GrapheneOS, but it's not really a desktop OS. That's why I'm so excited about these updates, and why I wish there was either a good keyboard/trackpad case for the Google Pixel Tablet running GrapheneOS, or someone would make a laptop that had the necessary requirements to support GrapheneOS.
I code on my work laptop, and if I really wanted to, I could probably SSH or VNC into a Linux box to code on GrapheneOS. There is also pKVM, which will probably make it easy to run Linux VMs on GrapheneOS at some point in the future.
Android and privacy are not two things that go together.
There's no replies becuase it's utter cargoculted ignorant bullshit.
Linux is a kernel. ChromeOS is a dumbeb down OS. Calling it a desktop is like calling MS Windows secure.
Edit: guess we’re not having a fruitful discussion about this then. Shame.
When you started with the low-grade trope "Change my view" you already indicated you weren't interested in a discussion, just arguing for the sake of arguing on the internet.
Thanks for explaining though, I was genuinely confused at the downvotes. Maybe that meme doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
Fortunately with a bit of time it will even out and probably go positive. It's the early voters on comments that are the most negative and quick to judgment.
It doesn't. The general implication of that meme is not that someone actually wants to seriously consider alternative views; the implication is "I want to assert my position, which I think is unassailable, using the veneer of an argument".
Isn't it more the case that all actors audit all software? Open source just has potentially more "auditors" than closed source?
(I don't understand what you mean by "usual exploits" and "keys to the castle")
Keys to the castle = the ability to also look in the source code for vulnerabilities, run static analysis, fuzzing but also architectural flaws. Basically use extra methods that you can’t do on the running system or binaries. You would expect some tools to be run already by the authors but some tools will find things that others don’t.
Bad actors have an incentive to audit the code (find vulnerabilities) since they were in the process of attacking the system anyway, so why not look at the source? You also have state level attackers who are getting paid to find these sort of things, and others looking to sell 0-days.
Who are good actors? Who is willing to spend their time finding and fixing bugs? There are definitely people doing it out of the kindness of their heart, and others might be researchers and so on, maybe some companies that use the software - but you are relying on these outnumbering the bad actors.
I think there will always be bad actors, and assuming that there is an army of good actors watching your back might not always be correct. But happy to hear other angles, which is why I opened (and accidentally closed) the conversation.
Isn't it a good thing that anyone can effectively use tools to check for potential vulnerabilities?
This is just speculation, but I think open source projects may mature faster in terms of security because the low-hanging fruit is maybe found faster than in closed source projects?
Another interesting case I think about a lot is the classic AOSP vs. iOS. Apple tried to sue Corellium for making it easier to research iOS. Then Apple started the Apple Security Research Device program to make it easier for researchers to do iOS research. These two things seem to me to be a kind of involuntary open-sourcing of iOS. Why did Apple see Corellium as a threat and why did they provide researchers with these special devices?
Perhaps bad actors don’t audit more than good actors, but this doesn’t address whether there are more good or bad actors doing the auditing. I think this is a more valuable comparison if we’re talking about risk mitigation and the safety of open-source software. Do you know that there are more good-faith auditors than bad?
Very much related — we should probably acknowledge the disparity between the two groups in terms of motivation, sustainability of said motivation, financial resources, and time.
The idea of burnout among open-source maintainers is long-known and endlessly discussed. They often/mostly volunteer their time — to some thanks, but also to a deluge of “doesn’t work” tickets with no repro, as someone pointed out on this recent post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41579591
Bad-faith actors tend to be highly motivated, with ideological or financial goals. They have more and perhaps better resources, more so if state-funded, and more time to commit.
This doesn’t mean there’s a constant and unmanageable risk to open-source software, and I certainly don’t agree that open-source OSes are a bad idea. But it’s not as simple as having actors auditing on each side or the difference in numbers between closed and open-source.
At least with open source, you have white hats (and gray hats to some extent) using the available source to get hints. These end up getting reported a lot more than for closed OSes. There may seem like more CVEs for Linux than Macos for example, but that isn't proportional to the number of vulns, researchers, or exploits out there.
That said though, even if open were less secure (which I don't think it is), it is still a better and more ethical model for software and would be worth the security risk. Luckily for the world, open is more secure (or at least equally secure).
Android makes a lousy desktop, and the issues go far deeper than windowing.
The single application which Does Not Precisely Suck on Android is Termux. It, the wealth of directly-packaged software, and the wider universe available through other packaging tools (e.g., pip, npn, rpm, ppm, etc.), scripting and programming tools, etc., are what turns Android from a toy to a Real Operating System.
But even Termux is horribly handicapped by Android:
- Filesystem permissions are generally not available, nor is most of the filesystem.
- Keyboard support within and between apps is horrible and inconsistent. Three specific examples: 1) Firefox/Android (a/k/a Fennic Fox) lacks the keyboard shortcuts of desktop Firefox, a longstanding bug Mozilla seem to have no interest in addressing. 2) In Readability, when editing tags, the backspace/delete key does not work, rather one must select and replace text to correct misspellings. 3) In Neoreader (the Onyx BOOX ebook reader) typing text into the search dialogue is wonky in ways I don't specifically recall though it simply shouldn't break that way.
- Android memory management (courtesy the JVM AFAIU) will reap apps without warning. Some manage this reasonably well, many do not.
- There's absolutely abysmal inter-app exchange through copy/paste.
Free-form windowing is good and fine so far as it goes, but Android needs one hell of a lot more done to it before it's a reasonable desktop / laptop replacement.
I still see tablets as most useful for reading text (and perhaps watching videos), and best suited at little else. I'd still recommend a full-featured laptop or notebook for Real Work.
I noticed this last year on Android 13, and I found it a bit unusable on an 8.4'' tablet and useless on a phone. But i think it has less features in Android 13/14, as the management (maximize/restore) looks a bit different on 15.
It still looks like it doesn't have a minimize icon (also not when maximized), which for me is essential in a desktop environment.
What bugs? I have mine for like 3 month and its probably the best expierence I had on any android device over the last dekade. Everything works so well and smooth.
The only thing i critize is that the dock is not USB-C powered (so I could relocate it in the kitchen to watch stuff while cooking).
I used to have the Lenovo Smart Screen 10, which was great. But it didn't support Netflix or Disney+ so I thought that the Pixel Tablet would be an upgrade. There so many things that don't work any more. For example after starting a timer, the Lenovo know the command "re-start" while The pixel for the same command starts a new timer. I have many more examples, but it just make me sad to think of it.
I do know similar window managers for Android existed in the past and Samsung still got their Dex but making it official emphasizing the responsiveness reminded me a lot of stage manager which Apple decided to make available only for the expensive iPads.
Probably a really good thing to not have two OSes when they really could be one. I just with Fuchsia were powering it.
Btw, Firefox Nightly on Android now has a tabbed interface like a desktop, making it better for tablets.
Depending on if I am just reading and watching youtube/music a good android tablet is enough.
They are so excited to just have reinvented last decade desktop envs that were working well before fullscreen apps were imposed to us.
you could split the window and use two apps. for everything! only annoyance is that some apps reload when you did that, which was annoying the first time only.
i still think HN crowd slept on those phones. a lot.
However, I don't see the top window handle they show in the animation. I have to long press the app icon in the running apps view, then I get a free form option. At that point, I get the floating windows with controls. You can tap and drag the sides and corners of apps to resize windows, seems intuitive enough.