WTF is up with everything using Android? | Hacker News Reader

WTF is up with everything using Android?

14 pointsgeorge3d628 comments

I was recently looking at VR & AR devices

(As an aside: Because the res has improved enough where I can code, and the peak coding position is with a pants keyboard on an inversion table -- very suboptimal for a monitor)

I noticed all of them sans apple run Android.

I understand why Android has become the unfortunate standard for mobile, but it seem absurd to me that it is now taking over VR (as well as "IoT" devices, car computers and so on)

It seems like a very inelegant OS that essentially committed itself to the wrong paradigms in everything:

- Committing to JVM usage instead of supporting static compilation -- locking itself in a dead ecosystem that can't see the light of either Rust or simple scripting language - Having heavyweight security abstraction that don't really achieve much beyond a linux kernel - Dependant on a bunch of proprietary modules for <anything> - And (now) having a bunch of new features rooted in backwards compatibility hell

I can't even comprehend the monumental effort to get the sort of GPU-intensive and RT capabilities a proper VR experience requires running onto something like this (vs a minimal RT focused linux distro)

Am I just being unfair to android and missing a core benefit? Is it mass psychosis ? Am I missing an underlying reason why it's getting so popular ?

(To be clear: I assume vision OS is bad, given that it's apple, it just confuses me why e.g. meta would not develop their own OS)

As others said, Android does not run on Java. Its linux under the hood, with a jvm that is running everything application.

You can do things like install Termux, and compile stuff to native code right on the phone.

There are only two choices in mobile OS: Android vs iOS.

Android is more open and at the core it is Linux. Yeah, I dislike JVM too.

What I don't get is that even a simple app, e.g. FB Messenger (not the whole of FB) requires an 84MB download. What on earth lurks in that massive download when the actual app could probably fit into a couple kB?

Right, I'm saying for a VR devices, no a mobile phone. It makes perfect sense why android would be the choice for a mobile phone. I'm rather confused what you are replying to.

VR devices are basically mobile phones with better screens and more precise accelerometer/gyroscopes in them.

Expand? The design constraints seem very dissimilar: - weight is important, form factor isn't - any app is either doing 3d rendering or integrated into a windowing system ala a trad desktop - they are not constantly-on, they are used for long periods with breaks - they are limited by processing power not by UX - the peripherals are very complex - to the extent of complex requiring access to hand and/or controller movement at a very fine level

If anything they are similar to laptops, but overall they are their own device class.

If "similar to mobile phones" means "similar chips and batteries"... sure, but so are laptops build after 2020, besides that I don't quite understand the comparison.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...

> Yeah, I dislike JVM too.

A lot of the apps these days are built either with React native or NDK. The former is for web like apps, the latter is for performant apps.

> What on earth lurks in that massive download when the actual app could probably fit into a couple kB?

Other than the fact that an android app to has to bundle every dependency, Facebook apps also have lots of "useless" features.

For example, Messenger can show you how many Facebook notifications you have (only necessary because Meta doesn't know how to send an actual notification half the time). It also has "Stories", some "AI Studio chats" and a "Create an AI" button???

Also, I think they also have the ability to update themselves, because Meta doesn't trust google play?

And let's not talk about the main FB app bundling an entire web browser, which recently is your only option when clicking a link in Facebook.

> What I don't get is that even a simple app, e.g. FB Messenger (not the whole of FB) requires an 84MB download. What on earth lurks in that massive download when the actual app could probably fit into a couple kB?

Apks are zip files. If you pull the apk, load it a tool and see what's there. One exciting thing is the typical way to do string localization in Android results in the string resource files being in the zip file uncompressed. If your apk supports a lot of languages, that's a lot of space. FB Messenger shouldn't have a lot of uncompressed strings, they had a way to manage that when I was there (left 2019), and I think??? there is some support from Google to do better things now too. But between that and images for multiple dpis (which does also have some Google support for doing better), there's a lot of room for bloat. If you're getting a non abi specific apk, there's bloat from different binary libraries too.

FB in particular likes to have multiple ways to do the same thing, which sometimes means having libraries to do X from JVM as well as doing X from native code.

It has an integrated web browser.

It is simply the superior product, who wants the other locked-in, locked down, horrible designed, overpriced, product that basically has to bought each year while features are taken away from it and it's price seems to increase yearly in a logarithmic manner...

I'm rather confused what you are replying to.

So, you want to develop an AR/VR device, and start shopping for hardware.

You’re not a mega company (yet), wanton get to market fast, so you want to focus on the AR/VR features, not on getting an OS, drivers and libraries for (3D) graphics up and running. You also want something (somewhat) portable, and assurance that you still can get hardware to deploy your stuff on X years from now.

You also don’t want to order a million units up front.

Given those constraints, I think you’ll find Android is your best option.

> You’re not a mega company Right, I'm asking why Steam, HTC and Meta did this, which are in the top <x> tech companies by market cap and spend billions on this stuff. Totally get why a small VR device dev would not do this.

> OS, drivers and libraries for (3D) graphics up and running Right, except that I am not saying one should build a kernel, and webgl, cuda, etc are kernel dependant not OS dependant

> assurance that you still can get hardware to deploy your stuff on X years from now I am unaware of android-specific hardware features to date (linux specific, maybe, but not android) -- you can literally add any bootloader and load a linux kernel and get drivers running on most phones even, w/o android, and where "android" is necessary it's simply an artifact of the company maintaining the phone having build the drivers into their distro and not released them separately.

> You also don’t want to order a million units up front. Again, seems unrelated, I'm talking about building the VR hardware i.e. not order off the shelf and white label (unless your claim here is that meta, htc, steam etc are doing white labeling, which doesn't seem to be the case)

> Committing to JVM usage instead of supporting static compilation

Android supports native development in C/C++ without the JVM. Its not particularly mainstream, but it has always been an option.

https://developer.android.com/ndk

Android is a Linux distribution. 100% you can absolutely build C/C++ binaries that you run directly like fairly regular Linux programs.

Executables, daemons, CLI, sockets, whatever you want. Rust no problem. I have even run Python and Node.js

I run jetbrains remote development on my chroot (the backend). Its important to not take termux seriously and go the chroot way.

I do exactly the same!

Its pretty main stream for most any game, and a lot of the performant apps. You can pretty easily build apps without ever touching Java.

I understand why Meta wouldn’t develop and OS… it’s a lot of work.

However, the odds of me buying something running Android are very low. I suppose most customers don’t care, but it’s usually a deal breaker for me. I’ve tried setting aside my biases a couple times to try and it wasn’t good.

Meta tried to create their own VR and AR specific os, but that project ended up being cancelled. John Carmack was against the idea for a while when he was there. Turns out modifying android was a much better starting point!

Android was made specifically for mobile devices with user interface and network connectivity, which VR glasses are. Not sure why the confusion here?

I'd imagine the only reason why is because android is cheap to license, meanwhile it's expensive to license some more specialized software, let alone develop a new one.

> I assume vision OS is bad, given that it's apple

You know what they say about assumptions

Google is far more privacy invasive than Apple, and Apple has an ecosystem that works fairly smoothly across devices. Yes, it infuriates me at times. But anything with the Google touch on it can be counted on to be spyware.

I do find everything on the desktop to be vastly more efficient, powerful, feature-full and stable than mobile (stable as in text box cache like this not vanishing with an app switch ) so I expect little from mobile except to be usable on the easy chair.

Do you really need more from mobile? Size matters!! The smaller the device, the more you pay for miniaturization.

I can show you a wireshark dump from a rooted android phone that has been degoogled, versus a wireshark dump from an iPhone. Guess which one sends less traffic back home.

I guess it depends on what the traffic consists of.

Please share (some).

And it's really an unfair comparison in that the android is white-hacked.

Linux Phone? Ready for prime time?

And a de-Googled Android phone can run how many apps that depend on Google Play Services?

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