Andy Rubin Leaving Google
online.wsj.com
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The Android team under Rubin executed extraordinarily well with a tiny fraction of Google’s engineering resources.
There are enough failed and feeble mobile OS vendors out there (Symbian, RIM, Palm, Microsoft) to prove that doing what Android has done is hard.
Even if android did nothing but 'copy apple' they created a second player in the space on Apple's level.
If you think this is a trivial task -- look at RIM.
The creation of viable choice and a establishment of business model that hasn't (yet) forced the implosion of the platform, is a huge amount of work even of one were to abstact away any "groundbreaking originality" (whatever that means anyway) in the platform.
The first iPhone was nice, but how many features were original, aside from multi-touch?
Imagine iOS still having those shitty popups and notifications. Glad they "copied" it from Android.
What about the "desktop" on Android? Where did they copy that from?
iOS didn't have multitasking until a lot later, and the concept of background services is more aggressively policed (that is, processes killed often) on iOS, as far as I know?
Sure, the superficial layer on top (look! icons! rows of icons!) that children in a sweet shop would notice may look familiar, but underneath it is not anything alike is it?
Or are you saying it is?
> iOS didn't have multitasking until a lot later, and the
> concept of background services is more aggressively
> policed (that is, processes killed often) on iOS, as far
> as I know?
They expanded it quite a bit in iOS 7? to all apps with background fetch, background url upload and download tasks, silent push notifications, and background tasks.
All of these approaches do not work if a user forcibly shuts down the app (I am not quite sure of every case). All these mechanisms are controlled by the OS: we'll call you, don't call us sort of thing and if you don't return in a certain period of time or if we need to, we will shut you down.
In iOS 8 you have extension support which launches mini apps. Extensions are somewhat equivalent to services but they are about integration with multitasking an implementation detail for security purposes.
What's impressive about that? Tons of companies did something similar. Heck, OS X/iOS is Mach+BSD based hybrid kernel with a UNIX (FreeBSD/GNU) userland and a new windowing layer that "stops normal UNIX apps running".
>iOS didn't have multitasking until a lot later
Actually it did. It just wasn't enabled for third party apps because Apple is not the company to give users some non-essential feature by sacrificing something more precious at the time (battery life). Android just went for the "whatever" option, and let users deal with that.
>What about access to the filesystem in a "normal" way?
What about it? If anything its worse that it being something copied from iOS: it is the standard way of doing things carried over from 40+ years of computing.
>Sure, the superficial layer on top (look! icons! rows of icons!) that children in a sweet shop would notice may look familiar, but underneath it is not anything alike is it?
No, underneeth it's worse. More battery draining, worse responsiveness, a Java runtime they had to axe, audio latency issues, 2-3 releases to get a anywhere near decent UI, bad malware issues, etc.
But I was mainly pointing out the comment that stated that Android was a rip-off entirely of iOS at the time; it wasn't - the ability to have (battery-draining) multitasking for 'common' apps was missing on iOS. Android also introduced features not found on iOS (intents, notifications at the top, stuttering scrolling haha etc.) so it wasn't a "coat-tail-riding" exercise entirely.
I do recall the bad UI from early on; even 2.3 was pretty ugly, and every release said "now with smooth scrolling!" which sadly was lacking. The Java runtime axing is the funny one. One day Java will be as fast as C, right?
I am aware that many of the features could probably be found on Windows Mobile 6.3 or 5.0 or whatever was available at the time, but Android appears to have displaced the Windows phone market to a large extent.
"Actually it did. It just wasn't enabled for third party apps...."
This is, to my mind, the worst continuing failing of iOS, so bad that we see a front page HN post related to it at least once per month. Apple builds its apps on private APIs, while third parties must build their apps on inferior public APIs. Apple gets to create and use new UX, while third parties must wait until Apple uses it first. On Android, Google's apps use the same APIs my own apps use.
"Android just went for the "whatever" option, and let users deal with that."
That's funny. Apple copied wholesale the Android save and restore data bundles model that was in Android from the beginning, and said, "Look at our battery-saving multitasking."
"What about [normal filesystem access]?"
It simplifies porting. What does Apple's system gain that you can't get by alternate APIs on top of the filesystem? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
"Worse responsiveness"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPhkPXVxISY The Android apps are running on Dalvik on year-old budget hardware pushing more pixels. In a same-generation test, I would expect the outcome to be even more lopsided.
"A Java runtime that they had to axe"
How does this matter? It's as transparent to the developer as switching from Sun's client JVM to server JVM. It doesn't require so much as a recompile, unlike on iOS.
"Audio latency issues"
This is true, but it doesn't affect 99.9% of apps, unlike the first issue I pointed out. If you're developing an app for DJs, you already know about it.
"2-3 releases to get a [sic] anywhere decent UI"
It was many more releases than that.
"Bad malware issues"
Not by default -- only if you install apps from websites (requires users to click through a dialog that tellls them it's dangerous) or use a phone with a Chinese app store. You're buying Tim Cook's lazy marketing. None of the manual testing that Apple does before allowing an app on the App Store stops malware any better than the automated testing that gates publishing on the Play Store.
Looking at allowing installation of apps from unknown sources from the other side, this lets me develop apps for my own phone for free, without paying a $99 / year tax. Even more than the private APIs issue, this is what made me jump on the Android bandwagon early on and makes it hard for me to understand why a person who enjoys software development would choose the iOS ecosystem.
Yeah, it's called building a stable API. Not all APIs are ready for external consumption. Apple, since it controls the APIs and their internal apps can safely build on early APIs, since they can release in sync with any changes. Third party developers not so much. This is not some conspiracy or Apple "advantage", this is software development 101.
In fact, instead of third parties "having to build their apps on inferior public APIs", iOS's public APIs are way better, and offering more than Android APIs.
>That's funny. Apple copied wholesale the Android save and restore data bundles model that was in Android from the beginning, and said, "Look at our battery-saving multitasking."
After Android emerged a full year later than the iPhone, and with the same UI and interaction model (while just days prior to the iPhone's introduction Google only had keyboard sporting, classical-looking smartphone models as their Android mockups), there's nothing that can be said that iOS "copied" from Android with a straight face. iOS/iPhone was there first, and it set the way for all the major features. Heck, Android lead members even admitted so.
That Android, years after coming into life as an iOS clone, pioneered a few things here and there (most of which Apple worked on in secret anyway for years, like battery saving techniques) is not that impressive.
>Even more than the private APIs issue, this is what made me jump on the Android bandwagon early on and makes it hard for me to understand why a person who enjoys software development would choose the iOS ecosystem.
Because there are more things to enjoying software development than "hating closed systems" or not wanting to part with $100.
"Yeah, it's called building a stable API. Not all APIs are ready for external consumption."
Yet Android's APIs that allow multitasking, JITs, and sharing with arbitrary apps (instead of just the apps that Apple has blessed) have been stable too and available much longer. The stable API argument doesn't hold water.
"iOS's public APIs are way better"
As a developer, I have to disagree. Even for simple things like sharing, multitasking, default handling, and multitasking Apple's APIs remain inferior.
"[A long irrelevant rant about copying]"
Technically, the LG Prada pioneered the UI and interaction model you're talking about, but that's not the point. My point was that Android didn't use a "whatever" model for multitasking but instead designed at the outset the same save/restore transparent multitasking system that Apple adopted years later that you hold in such high esteem.
"Because there are more things to enjoying software development than 'hating closed systems' or not wanting to part with $100."
$100 per year. I have never met anybody who would prefer to pay for their hobbies when there is a free option that is just as good or better for scratching their itch.
Every software, pretty much ever has to have core components rewritten, sucks and is horrible. Fortunately, it's just code.
And yes, DalvikVM wasn't very good.
1) Linux, from Torvalds onward. Android used Linux as the hardware abstraction layer and still does. How many developers there?
1B) The ARM Linux developers, especially. Russell King is an unsung hero in this space.
2) The sea of subcontractors that helped with device drivers, subcomponents, integration, and manufacturing. Remember that whole "Open Handset Alliance"[1] thing? Those were all companies doing work for the Google/Android either under contract or gratis in the hopes of getting future work thrown their way or increasing their handset sales with the Google monolith behind them. I was one of them.
3) Webkit. How many developers worked on that (including Apple engineers)? OpenBinder (started at Be)? OpenGL?
Sundar appears to be walking proof that victors get to write history, but I'm not sure how long he'll be able to keep that act up.
Andy could be a pain but his accomplishments speak for him -- Android has long been seen as a massive success, warts and all, at the highest levels of goog.
Android has already gotten miles better in the year since Rubin is no longer involved, seeing long-needed improvements such as Chrome for the browser and WebViews, radically better runtime, more unified UI design, etc. Overall, Android is much better off without him and I look forward to whatever comes next (for Android, not Rubin).
While I'm also quite glad to see the recent Chrome/Android integration, I think Rubin should get a lot of credit for getting Android to the point where it's even worth integrating with. A bunch of competitors tried and failed; I'm glad that there's more than just Apple available in the mobile OS market.
I realize I'm being pedantic. I think it illustrates my point: until the mid-90's, Computer Science would occasionally wish for a new OS to fix all the bad things about current OS's. Even the lack of a killer app was not considered insurmountable, because apps weren't that complex. Witness the proliferation of open source OS's.
As Android continues to dominate iOS in sheer numbers, it underscores just _why_ building a strong mobile phone OS is hard––enough that even Apple with all the early advantages still gets marginalized.
Android has:
• Open source OS (Google's/OEM's proprietary bits notwithstanding)
• Free SDK as the gold standard
• Multiple strong hardware vendors competing for the best designs and attempting to find underserved markets
• One central "authority" that champions consistentcy, interoperability, and polish (that google.com is the economic incentive to stay in charge of android becomes a strength for android––because unless another company thinks it can unseat google in their core business, they are not incentivized to try to take android from google either. Xiaomi and Samsung's Tizen may be vanity forks but other than vertical integration they have no edge in the larger android picture)
• Complete administrative backend (cloud, app store, PR, etc.)
It's not like they don't have excellent runtime designers in house. They could have taken the opportunity to go with Python or something else entirely when they rewrote so much anyway.
Now, you could argue that maybe Google should just make a more efficient Python interpreter. They did that for Android Java anyway, with Dalvik. But the design of the Python language makes it hard to optimize; witness the failure of Unladen Swallow, and all the incredibly talented engineer-hours that have gone into PyPy. A lot more happens, semantically, in each expression or function call than happens in Java or C.
Performance was obviously not the main goal with Dalvik. If it was they would have gone with something like C++ or Go. The first versions of Dalvik was quite slow. Compact bytecode looks like the design goal which probably made sense since mobile bandwidth wasn't great at the time.
If you're talking about syntax then do you mean Dart? Now Dart compiles to JS, perhaps it's time for it to compile to ART.
It may be very close to Java the syntax but it's very far from Java the language or Java the runtime. And the syntax is not really the appealing part of Java.
It is an indication that giving away a viable mobile OS is really, really hard. Google was able to pull it off because it is tied to their cash cow.
What was so successful about Android is the speed they pivoted as the market changed. This was, obviously, largely a response to the iPhone, which didn't stop at technology pivots, but the entire business model. This did indeed lead to a rate of development and collecting far too much crap along the way, which has been problematic since.
However, Symbian are a great example of the opposite, in the sense their development had slowed to a crawl. Things like OpenGL and anti-aliased text rendering appeared first in feature phone user interfaces, and then moved up - it was nuts. Quite how Nokia, in particular, remained oblivious to the potential UI improvements the new stuff enabled is beyond me, but then a good number of us were floored by just how bad the performance of the G1 was.
The "improvements" you mention are, with the exception of the bought in runtime, inconsequential. We've been through the phase where people wanted to use WebViews for most of the apps (I was a champion of that idea at one time) and it sucked. Do things like Google Now use the WebView for rendering their UI? Now that the lower levels are approaching good the real problems that remain are much more pervasive, causing an unbelievable amount of app developer time to be wasted (at Google too), and the sad thing is it doesn't look like they will ever be fixed because the answer will be "we're replacing them with web stuff" which is an answer no one making this stuff actually wants.
You can complain about dalvik or webviews or the shitty ide or whatever, fact is there isn't a SINGLE company in the valley or Seoul or anywhere in the tech world who doesn't want to be in control of Android. How are those FB and MSFT and AMZN efforts going?
That tells you all you need to know about why Android has been and will be a "success" to google.
This might be a little bit of a far stretch, but based on the belief that anyone is reachable, would anyone have any leads to Mr. Rubin or would know how to make contact with him?
tw @carlosvivaldi
Who knows if he still checks it though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8506911
Google employees were implying that Andy Rubin got bored of Android and left to work on robotics and people suggesting the opposite were getting downvoted. It still could be true but looks less likely down.
The truth seems to be both (a) unpleasant for Andy and (b) unremarkable to the rest of us. In other words, it wasn't his choice, but there wasn't a scandalous smoking gun either. He just wanted what Larry wouldn't give him. Nothing that would be front page news.
God knows when I hear things like that I thank my lucky stars I don't have to work in a large corporation or answer to anyone but customers. (Well more than that obviously but at least I'm not at the whims of corporate culture.)
I suspect my hopes will be dashed.
Andy definitely got bored and went to work on robots before. He even says that in the article.
As for what happened this time, no idea.
I have some guesses though, and none of them are "forced out".
Edit: I found this quote from [1]. "Jessica Lessin at The Information tweeted that Rubin wanted more freedom for his robotics group. She said he wanted a structure like Calico, which is the anti-aging company Google has started.
Our guess is that Page views robotics as something he understands better, and considers it core to Google, and therefore would not want to give it the same independence. "
If so it seems rather short sighted for Page to let somebody like Andy Rubin leave. Rubin is self motivated,passionate,driven about what he does and he could have done great work with robotics.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/andy-rubin-out-of-google-2014...
2nd Edit: At least now I'm hopeful that Google will not own robotics.
But this is a wild guess. Andy, from what I've heard/known, never particularly liked the "CEO" aspect of his job. So having a more traditional structure would probably be more than just "not enjoyable" to him.
Here's a more upthread link with a bit more context for the discussion: