> With more than two billion active devices, Android is the largest mobile platform in the world.
So they'll get it onto 5% of active devices, or one in every twenty. Not great, perhaps not even good.
I've not been a fan of android fragmentation for awhile now, and have been surprised that Google hasn't been able to do more to attack the issue. Even when Treble launched, I asked myself... is that all? Rock and hard place I guess.
I actively avoid android devices because of the issue. My last android device was a tablet in 2011.
Therefore it's fine that they get only 5% to start. I assume it's going to turn into 10%, then 20% quickly. For some perspective the iPhone only has about 15% market share globally.
This article is explicitly spun to promote ARCore as "Android scale" and leads with a sentence pointing out that Android is on two billion devices.
You're right, their ambitions are much lower, but it's fair to point out their actual goals aren't anywhere near the image they are trying to project and they really shouldn't be bragging about it being "Android scale" when it's nothing of the sort.
Most likely someone will just build and offer an abstraction layer on top of ARKit / ARCore and solve the problem that way.
https://github.com/google-ar/three.ar.js
That's assuming you're okay with JS, but if you're going cross-platform then it makes sense if you need to have interactive scenes.
The biggest performance bottle-neck is the JS itself, specifically stock three.js is quite inefficient. However, that's just a matter of optimising three.js, or using WebGL directly if you need more fine-grained control. You can get a lot done in a browser these days.
Maybe it is a consequence of using JS, I have never researched it.
Curious, what exactly were you expecting? There hasn't even been enough time for Treble to play out to see if it brings results.
The other problem is that fragmentation increases the odds of a vendor walking away from a device since the per-model sales are divided more ways. Trying to pick a device which will get updates basically involves sales forecasting which wouldn't be necessary if the platform was open.
Like, obviously, iOS will have a cleaner and less fragmented ecosystem, because they support far fewer devices (all of which they own).
But a student trying to develop for Android can’t afford devices that start (!) at 908.35 USD. (Price of the Pixel 5" with 32GB storage, in Germany, right now).
And Google just dropped support for my phone, the Nexus 5X (which I bought for 324 USD, on sale, just before they stopped selling it)
Buying into iPhone development might be more expensive upfront, but you get a longer update period (which is obviously important for developers).
I paid around $725 USD for a 2012 Macbook Pro which can develop for iOS and it has 16GB of ram, an SSD and a hard drive for time machine.
[2]https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_device...
I’m comparing between developing on Google devices, and non-Google devices.
Also, a used Mac Mini isn't $3000.
> Also, a used Mac Mini isn't $3000.
A Mac Mini that’s still under warranty, and an iPhone, and some years of Apple Developer fees, are.
So, you have $150 annual fee just for the developer account. Plus an additional massive cost every I time I need to replace the device.
The starting costs are significantly higher; maybe not 3k, maybe just 2k, but that’s the same anyway: Completely unaffordable.
And running costs are massively worse, too.
Only if you ignore the free credit cards that are independent of a current account from Advanzia, Santander Consumer, Barclaycard, Hanseatic, Payback, Targobank, ICS, and some I forgot.
Then there are also a lot of unconditionally free current accounts that offer a card (credit or debit) that can be used to pay that subscription, such as those from DKB, Comdirect, ING-Diba, Consorsbank, Wüstenrot, Norisbank, Fidor, N26, and so on.
Those offers are not hard to find, some of them are available for over a decade or more now. Even pretty much every consumer bank you can name in Germany has such a card on offer for less than 40€ yearly. That includes small cooperative banks. If yours does not you should consider switching (or opening a second account), competition is fierce.
Santander, Barclay, Hanseatic, Targo, DKB, Comdirect, ING-Diba, Consors, Wüstenrot, Noris, and N26 require that you have at least 600€ each month of movement via the bank account, or at least 1200€/year via the card.
I’ve tried getting a card from all of them. All of them refused, as I’d not use them enough.
> If yours does not
I’m a customer at 2 major national german banks (postbank and commerzbank), and a local one, none of them (or their subsidiaries, such as comdirect) offer this.
I just want a credit card, I’ll use it at most once a year, for at most 100 bucks. That is not available from any bank.
The only offer that exists even similar in cost is the old MyWirecard offer, and they closed my account due to not using it enough.
Postbank has a Visa or MasterCard for 29€ yearly. Comdirect has a free Visa Debit card. I have it and have not used that account for over two years now apart from downloading the statements. Nothing happened so far and I haven't paid anything.
In your case the easiest solution would probably to order the British prepaid card from Revolut which is available for a one-time 8€ fee and I don't think they refuse anybody. Just note that they are not regulated as a bank but as electronic money so I wouldn't leave large sums of money for a long time on the card (but that's not something you want to do anyway).
My credit report is perfect, and I’ve had no issues with that – but the problem is that I, as student, currently have zero income, and zero spending.
> Comdirect has a free Visa Debit card
Only in combination with the Girokonto, which is only provided if you have any monthly income. Same with Hanseatic. Check their AGB, or call them.
> Postbank has a Visa or MasterCard for 29€ yearly
Same story with this, I’m a customer at Postbank, have a Sparbuch in the 5 digits, but I can’t get a free Visa or MasterCard until I’ve > 670€/month income, and I won’t pay a single cent for a credit card.
> In your case the easiest solution would probably to order the British prepaid card from Revolut which is available for a one-time 8€ fee and I don't think they refuse anybody. Just note that they are not regulated as a bank but as electronic money so I wouldn't leave large sums of money for a long time on the card (but that's not something you want to do anyway).
I’ve had one with them, too, they closed the account because it wasn’t used often enough.
Not to mention that all that gives you the ability to, you know, sell apps on the App Store and recoup your expenses. $2000 is a very reasonable entry price for something you could be making your living with. It's expensive for a hobby, granted, but it's not like the stuff you buy is single-purpose. And it keeps resale value amazingly well.
You can really stop it with the made-up numbers now. This is ridiculous.
For what I am doing, it literally is.
> $2000 is a very reasonable entry price for something you could be making your living with.
For a student that has 50€ left each month after rent, food, etc, $2000 is quite a fucking bunch of money.
> Oh quit the nonsense! I'm paying nowhere near 40€ for my credit card in Germany
Which bank? A credit card without being required to be linked to an account with a certain monthly or annual transfer?
> Not to mention that all that gives you the ability to, you know, sell apps on the App Store and recoup your expenses.
Which is so useful when the whole goal is to port existing GPL'd open source apps for my projects to iOS, and provide them for free.
Replaced the motherboard myself, a year later, same issue.
Bummed about it because otherwise it's a good phone at a great price. Only thing I complain about other than that is how terrible the camera is, but for a cheap phone that's a few years old, it's unfair to compare to today's devices.
The "high-end" at market on iOS is bad enough, would you want to try and fight that battle on android?
Yeah and fragmentation in Android versions is pretty bad. Also the quality of the underlying hardware might be not as consistent as in iOS devices. It relies on a lot of sensors to get it right, not just raw CPU power and a nice camera.
The Android CDD maintains requirements for sensor accuracy and performance: https://source.android.com/compatibility/android-cdd#7_3_sen...
e.g. lots of Android phones basically can't hit low latency audio targets that iOS has been able to hit essentially since launch.
iPod users wouldn't have taken the iPhone as seriously if Apple hadn't put in the work to make audio a first-class citizen. Android doesn't have that pedigree/baggage so it's never been as important.
Treble could have been the solution, yet they are still allowing for OEM customizations and the OEM are the ones expected to keep pushing the updates, as discussed on the ADB Podcast.
Guess how many OEMs will choose to push Treble updates instead of selling new devices.
Google could have taken the same approach as Microsoft always did since the MS-DOS days and require specific hardware expectations.
Android solved a very different problem than iOS. It has compromises and benefits (that iOS has enjoyed by proxy) in doing so. The OS that we know today is the combined knowledge of many OEM customizations. The hardware of a vicious battle between many vendors. The screens and designs the result of an endless tug of war. And again, Apple has enjoyed the fruits of these.
But saying "If only they..." is seldom from a place of reason.
Apparently no one at Google ever read PC hardware specifications from Microsoft like "PC 97 Hardware Design Guide" or "Hardware Design Guide for Microsoft Windows 95", among a few other hardware guides from them.
https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Design-Guide-Microsoft-Profe...
https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Design-Guide-Microsoft-Windo...
Of course the Windows Phone attempted at it failed, because by the time Microsoft tried to apply the same rules as they did on the PC hardware, OEMs already had the Android wild west to play with.
Microsoft hit update handling for Windows Mobile spot on. A 2014 Windows Phone today[1] is a safer bet if you value security than any Android on the market right now. May not run the apps you want, but it is going to have the latest security updates.
[1]My Lumia 929 currently is running Windows 14393.1593, released August 8th, 2017. I can safely expect to receive the next update on September 12th.
When Windows Phone 7 was released (this is ignoring that Windows CE was around for about a decade before, giving Microsoft a massive headstart), Android had about 18% of the market. Microsoft leveraged their enormous base of desktop developers, pulling them through various failed initiatives, to get them developing for Windows Phone. Android started effectively from nothing.
In the context of actual history your post is simply surreal.
2 - Android 7 has currently about 13% acquisition after one year
3 - There is currently no obligation for OEMs to provide updates
4 - Given the failure of security updates, only being delivered to flagship devices, I believe Google will ship them directly when they actually do it.
2 - Right, this is something Treble will attempt to solve.
3 - Which is why Google is making it as easy as possible for them to do so, right down to actually pushing out the updates for them.
3 - I would really like to be proven wrong here. Still waiting for my Android 7 update on a newly bought device.
For example, something I was excited to see is in the updated documentation on source.android.com with regards to how they recommend developing kernel branches alongside devices: https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/modul...
Basically, one of the issues that's plagued OEMs in the past is the fact that each SoC vendor (e.g. Qualcomm, Samsung, ARM) would not only have a kernel for each SoC, but each OEM device using that SoC would be another branch on that SoC-specific repository. This would then be compounded by the OEMs having their own kernel repositories that pull from the device-specific branches of a SoC repository, and bug fixes from OEMs would have to trickle back upstream to the vendor repository before making them back to other device-specific kernels.
The new proposed model would see a single kernel soruce for a given SoC, and device-specific changes would come in the form of kernel modules, config overrides, and device tree overlays. They are also strongly recommending SoC changes to the kernel be upstreamed to mainline Linux, which would greatly ease porting to newer kernels in the future.
It isn't the first time that Google does recommendations to OEMs.
They also did recommendations for security updates. An advice that OEMs only follow for the customers that paid the big bucks for the flagship devices.
So unless they actually provide requirements instead of recommendations, nothing will change for consumers.
Stop selling low spec phones?
of course it isn't gonna run in a supported configuration on some dumb phone from 5 years ago. those people can't afford or don't care about VR.
Apple has significantly easier job here - especially since it doesn't need to get OEM buy-in for these kind of things :/
first, 100MM or even 400MM devices is no fucking joke...
but Q is: bandwidth to deliver drivel to the devices... not the apps - but how much bandwidth will ads consume over consumed content.
If I were a VC, I would be purchasing every-single-pipe-in-existence for the future.
We went from pipes-are-pope to content-is-king -- but the fact is that the control of information is in the plumbing ( at the high level ) -- not the holders of attention... they are just firewalls.
Facebook is a firewall.
Google is a firewall.
Reddit is a honeypot.
etc...
you get the analogy.
so...
Who owns the pipe.
ISPs were vilified... FFs the NSA sent the head of Qwest to prison for not spying... the scientologists refuted the NSA on carnivore (because they were already monitoring the networks for clams) -- the .gov went after the guy who detailed all fibers.. -- how many more examples would you like...
Can you explain your last paragraph a bit? It's a bit telegraphese and I'd like to know to what individual things you are referring. Thanks!
---
NSA had been trying to install network monitoring boxes in all the places.
this was discovered, after a whistleblower from AT&T mentioned this happening in the MUX/IX in the infamous room 641A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
---
There is way too much to educate ppl in one post on the evolution to the above, but I can go back decades if I have time - and ppl have interest...
Anyway - the NSA was running all over and installing spying boxes... they got caught.
The CEO of Qwest was convicted on "tax fraud" or some such after he had the balls to stand up to the NSA and not install their shit.
Aside: Qwest communications was founded as a splinter from a railroad company who realized they had right-of-way easments along ALL their rail lines -- which was easy to lay fiber alongside, and then build a comms co on that backbone.
Earthlink, which was funded early by key hollywood scientologists, refused to install the boxes as well -- but because they were already spying on all their user traffic to hunt for "clam" people (clam people are those that made fun of scientology due to scientology's belief that humans are evolved from clams - among a great many other weird beliefs... anyway they werent prosecuted, presumably due to holywood big-shot money... etc...)
---
There was a student who was able to look up all the public-works filings for all municipal and federal digging plans/permits/etc and wrote some detailed report on the critical network infra of the US, thus revealing its weaknesses -- the report was nabbed as "national security" as "terrorists" might attack it.. (though they didnt really report on the fiber cuts which caused major upheaval and outages in silicon valley) -- but they shut that kids thesis (i think it was a thesis) down...
The revolving door with the NSA and silicon valley is wide open, obvious and pretty big...
if you want more info. email me... revealing too much on HN is stupid.
That's...not great? For comparison, ARKit on iOS is going to support 400 million devices at launch (very rough numbers: ARKit runs on any new iPhone Apple's released over the past two years - iPhone 6S/SE/7 - and they sell over 200 million a year). Hardware fragmentation is a tough problem to solve.