Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP

Re:Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without... by AnthonyMouse on Friday September 18, 2026 @11:33PM (#49763052)

> Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).

The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.

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Re:Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without... by floxy on Saturday September 19, 2026 @01:13AM (#49763525)

Apple can create a clone for their wall-garden when they want to catch up to the times.

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Re:Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without... by NetMageSCW on Saturday September 19, 2026 @03:58AM (#49764383)

Those times will never happen.

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Re:Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without... by nottorp on Saturday September 19, 2026 @06:08AM (#49765079)

Pretty sure wasm works on Safari since I've ran my own code like that...

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Re:Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without... by AnthonyMouse on Sunday September 20, 2026 @11:36PM (#49782773)

The premise is that you want to make something that competes with Safari, e.g. you want to provide a graphics API to third party developers.

Doing that in Safari doesn't work twice. First, if Safari doesn't already expose whatever GPU primitives you need to do things efficiently, you can't get them. And second, your API implementation (which is likely to be large) would then have to be distributed by anyone using it instead of being part of the browser they use for all sites, creating a >100MB dependency for a <50kB web page.

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