What percentage of Android devices will get to use Google's AR solution? How many devices that have hardware capable of using Google's solution will ever see the OS update?

Android's fault is over reliance on tango hardware because they are going for perfection rather than good enough.

I am quite happy that one year later Android N only managed to acquire 9% and KitKat is still rocking with 18%.

Maybe now that Google sees no one gets their new shinny OS every single year, they change their attitude.

Trello is not the solution as it is only available in Android O, it still leaves to the OEMs the choice to actually make it work and with Android N at 9% one year later, who knows how many years it will take until Android O becomes relevant at all.

I'm excited for Treble, personally. I'd like to slightly modify your statement to say that it's available for any device that supports it. Google Pixel and Pixel XL shipped with Nougat but they are using it to test the transition from a non-Treble system layer to a Treble-ized (?) one with Android O's release. So other OEMs could choose to support Treble on older devices, given that they meet the requirements and also have support from the BSP vendors like Qualcomm.

That said, I agree with you that it probably will still take some time before we see a huge impact, and it's a shame it's taken this long; better late than never, I suppose?

Thanks for the remark, yeah my device auto-correct does funny things and I do not always notice what it did.

> So other OEMs could choose to support Treble on older devices, given that they meet the requirements and also have support from the BSP vendors like Qualcomm.

The thing is Treble is nothing new, it is just the attempt N + 1 to sort out the update situation in a technical way, where the all issue is political.

Android already has an HAL that OEMs should adhere to [1], so if they haven't adopted correct behaviours willingly, it is not now that they will start doing it.

[1] https://source.android.com/devices/

I am yet to see Android 7 devices at prices I am willing to pay, one year after its release, with 9% market worldwide.

Rooting devices is not an option for regular users.

Well, that only proves that people don't want to pay for security ;)

> one year after its release, with 9% market worldwide.

Android N was not released a year ago, it wasn't even announced a full year ago.

And when it was released it was so buggy OEMs had to wait until February for a fixed version.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/arkit

This is actually not as cut and dry as it sounds. Generally speaking the difference between VO and SLAM is how it handles accumulated errors to do LC/relocalization. Almost by default a robust VO system using some kind of sensor fusion does a form of relocalization but rarely loop closure.

I say this because I feel like it undercuts Apple's effort by stating it's a purely VO approach and I don't want people to get the impression that you can't do round trip SLAM without active depth (IR etc...).

"Almost by default a robust VO system using some kind of sensor fusion does a form of relocalization but rarely loop closure." This is not true, Visual(Inertial) Odometry systems typically estimate "odometry" i.e frame to frame motion tracking hence the name, such as in [3] and [4], whereas SLAM systems, such as [5], store a map of features, and their descriptors to relocalize which isn't necessarily a typical feature of pure VO systems.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/arkit

[2] https://developers.google.com/tango/developer-overview

[3] https://github.com/uzh-rpg/rpg_svo

[4] https://github.com/ethz-asl/rovio

[5] https://github.com/raulmur/ORB_SLAM2

So the reason I say that it's "almost by default" is because on really quality VO systems, if you turn in a 360 degree circle, the image descriptors and pose estimates returned are almost exactly the same. It's not of course the same, but the effect for an end user is the same and can be extended relatively easily.