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Official Android 6.0 SDK and Final M Preview

156 points by cryptoz 11y ago

knd775 11y ago
OEMs (and probably carriers) really need to get their stuff together. It really sucks that here we are talking about M when very few devices have seen an L release.
- sp332 11y ago
  The new UI style and notifications means all the skins have to be revamped. That takes a lot of investment, and the only other benefit users are likely to notice is slightly better battery life. Lollipop has better security, but unfortunately that's still not a big selling point. Hopefully cell phone makers have had enough time to update their skins to look good with (or pave over) Material design, and we'll see more updates for M than we did for L.
  - zanny 11y ago
    Or they could, you know, just ship stock Android and make everyone happier by not shoving awful carrier skins down everyones throat nobody even likes. Cough, Touchwiz.
    - fidotron 11y ago
      Lollipop is bad enough that Touchwiz, on devices like the Note 4, is a massive improvement over stock Android.
      - nilkn 11y ago
        That's the first time I've ever seen that claimed. In what way does Touchwiz improve on Lollipop? On my Note device, I've done everything I can to hide Touchwiz and go back to stock Lollipop because of how much better it is.
        ypcx 11y ago
        I tried both and I was all about going back to iPhone, until I tried Cyanogenmod, which puts (a lot of) the sense back into Android. It uses the Google launcher (without the Google Now page integrated on swipe left), but it removes the insanely annoying design decisions by Samsung, e.g. displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold even with your Phone locked in your pocket and you bombing it on your bike downhill. Or the "cannot use camera" and "sorry, dimming your screen" on 5% battery threshold. I don't know what they are smoking at Samsung, but it's not good.
        wvenable 11y ago
        > displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold Don't blame Samsung for that, my Nexus 7 did that as well. And in Netflix the dialog appeared behind the active window so you couldn't see it or hit the button.
        inversionOf 11y ago
        Critics of Android embraced a meme that Lollipop was Android's Vista, substantiated by users anecdotal claims about poor battery life from a given upgrade, or the changes to notification levels, etc. So you still see the echos of that. I've never seen someone go so over the top to claim that it justified vendor skins, though, so this is a new pinnacle. To everyone else it was an incremental update.
        tdkl 11y ago
        Yeah, the ritual of rebooting the device every two days because of the memory leaks and camera crashes were quite an incremental update over stable Kitkat.
        inversionOf 11y ago
        Even ignoring the placebo effect, and a contingent of people carrying forth a message between advocating the amazing world of task killers, what in the world would a skin have to do with that? TouchWiz and others are literally layered over stock Android, so if there was a fundamental issue it would have the same issue. The notion that the skins are somehow superior is nonsensical, despite the comical, ignorance-induced downvotes I've predictably received.
      - georgemcbay 11y ago
        Speaking as an Android user/developer: Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever. I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.
    - pachydermic 11y ago
      Then they would have basically no way to compete with one another other than marketing and specs. Touchwiz and all those other gimmicks really do sell phones. That's just speaking from anecdotal evidence, but I assume big corps have done their homework on this one. Remember that the types of people reading this comment are not your average consumer. We might hate it, we might know it's not as good as stock android... but we're a very small segment of the market (especially for Android). You probably don't see a ton of nutritionists/personal trainers eating at McDonalds, either. The downside of having an open platform is that OEMs will add crap to differentiate themselves - just look at the weird media bs that comes pre-installed on tons of windows laptops.
      - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
        I suspect this is temporary. A lot of the big OEMs from just a couple years ago are massively losing money on Android. HTC, Sony, LG, etc all reported signficant losses. I imagine the market will tigheten up with one or two premium OEMs (Moto, Samsung) and some bottom feeders selling super budget phones. When things finally tighten up there will less incentive to make these difficult to maintain Android custom distros and more incentive to get closer to the stock as a way to make updating easier. Google may also put in a full theming engine to help this along. Marshmallow has a basic theme engine form what I've read, so that's a start. I think Google knows that the status quo with Android is unsustainable and will need to migrate to a more tightly controlled business model. Samsung's flirting with Tizen hasn't paid off and they're more or less stuck with Google dictating policy now. The monthly security updates thing sounds promising as well. Its time Android got serious about security and updates.
    - eddieroger 11y ago
      If people didn't mind Touchwiz, Samsung wouldn't sell nearly as many phones as they do. Not that they like it, but they clearly don't mind it.
- BlackJack 11y ago
  A good rule of thumb is that 25% of Android devices will have the OS within 1 year of release and 50% within 2 years of release. Based on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html though, L is behind the pace :(
  - patrickaljord 11y ago
    Android L was released on October 15th so it could still make it to 25%. Also note that 5.0 was pretty buggy so that didn't help...
  - izacus 11y ago
    Those stats you're linking are extremely misleading and don't really reflect demographic of actual app users. Pretty much all our apps across the board have higher Lollipop and KitKat usage. Which makes sense - what you linked is aggregate number of all users on the Play store across the world. Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Ignore newer API versions at your own peril.
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      > [..] demographic of actual app users [..] Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Your post seem predicated on assumptions which aren't supported: - That people with "better engagement" are more profitable to app developers (which might be the reverse of true if you aren't on a freemium modal). - That non-Westerners don't buy apps at all or that we simply shouldn't care. .
      - izacus 11y ago
        No, no, I did not want to imply any of that. Just that: - For pretty much any of our apps the actual breakdown of Android versions is nothing like what the Play store shows. - The amount of new Androids is significantly higher (we actually have an app with 57% 5.x and 80% on 4.4 or newer - Samsung updates have been significant for it) and varies greatly - The users with newer devices and newer Android versions are usually more engaged, use apps more and also advertise them more which makes for a good network effect. - We have noticed a major shift to apps with Material design, arrogant Apple marketing aside, there's alot of users on Android that DO care about design, UX and those tend to have rather newish phones. Depending on your app you should of course also care for people on worse phones. If you're providing a public service app (e.g. showing public transport schedules), you should probably target as low as 2.3 (even though, perhaps actually building 2 APKs for that usecase makes sense). If you're building a modern 3D game, you should probably target API 19+ since users with older devices probably won't be able to run it anyway. But in any case, DO YOUR RESEARCH, because the numbers vary greatly across demographics, app categories and regions.
- e40 11y ago
  I think the release lag for OEMs is far longer than Google thought it would be. Also, this lag is the reason they won't get rid of the Nexus program. Without it, they would not have a test bed for Android.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    Yeah, I imagine they figured that as long as they kept pushing out updated OS versions, essentially for free, the OEMs would have an easy way to keep offering updates without having to build any of the underlying "stuff" from scratch. But I think it ends up more like enterprise IT where OS updates get put off and only done when absolutely necessary. To OEMs who only really care about selling hardware, it's just more testing, deployment, and support cost (not to mention porting their customizations). I realize I'm not in the majority (outside of tech circles) but I really do like Android and the main criteria for choosing a device are specs, build quality, and likelihood of timely updates. My current phone is a Moto X and it's the first non-Nexus I've had in a while. And I only got that because I broke my Nexus 5 and we were still a way off from a refresh. The Moto seemed like a less extravagant (in terms of price and screen size) version of the Nexus 6. But if Lenovo undoes the good things Google did for Moto, I'll be back to the Nexus line regardless for my next phone. I got rid of the carrier as a middleman by avoiding carrier-branded and subsidized handsets but the OEM still plays a huge part as long as proprietary code is needed to port newer versions of the OS to a given device.
julianpye 11y ago
Right now according to my user demographics, I just decided to move to 4.2 (API 17). Which means that what I learned at I/O 2013 can finally be put to good use! The sad part is that I decided to skip looking enthusiastically under the hood of M, because I won't be able to use it anyway for quite some time.
- izacus 11y ago
  And 57% of our demographics are on 5.0 or newer, with 19+ covering over 80% of users actually using the app. Perhaps updating your app to the 5.x standard will actually make those users use it instead of running away to other Material apps ;)
  - julianpye 11y ago
    There are many useful libraries to get a close-enough Material experience working on the older devices. And I am not talking about the official support library, which should be at least on a par of many MIT licensed Android extensions out in the marketplace.
    - xienze 11y ago
      There's more to the Android APIs than UI stuff, which is the majority of what's covered by workarounds like the Compatibility Library. This is a very real problem with Android development -- "hey look at all this cool stuff we've added and you'll be able to actually make use of in two years!"
  - RyanZAG 11y ago
    Not quite catching your point - if you set your min sdk to android 5.0, you will remove 43% of your users. That's kind of the problem. Luckily, Android has a great compatibility library so you can still use many of the new features.
    - xd1936 11y ago
      However, as discussed below, the amount of users in the world with Google Play ≠ active app users. If you collect stats on your app's actual usage, I think you'd find that they are much more up-to-date than the Developer Dashboard stats would have you believe.
ronald_dregan 11y ago
yea too bad android is a complete piece of trash. buggy inconsistent piece of shit. they can't do anything about it though, it's just the "open" (to manufacturers, at least) nature of android itself that forces it to be utter garbage. eh whatever, only like 2% of android users will ever see all the new bugs and garbage google added anyway.
clumsysmurf 11y ago
I predict that only Nexus devices will get 6.0 initially, just like 4.0 and (to a lesser degree 5.0) before that. But OEMs will wait for 6.1 to let the bugs settle out. After 5.0 and its memory leak bugs etc, i'm wary.
- xd1936 11y ago
  I don't know. Marshmallow feels a lot more iterative than KitKat → Lollipop did. I'd say ICS → Jellybean = Lollipop → Marshmallow Refinements, tweaks, and moderate improvements, as opposed to a whole rethinking of design.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  Oh please. Android 5.0 introduced a new runtime that was the cause of a lot of the issues. These have been ironed out in 5.1.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    Pretty sure that was exactly his point; major issues until the point one release so why wouldn't they wait?
xasos 11y ago
Really big fan of the simplified permissions feature. It's something I've always wanted that Android never had. In addition to the supposed battery usage improvements, I'm looking forward to the new streamlined Android Pay features.
- jzzskijj 11y ago
  Just learned about this and it seems really great! This is something I always wished for when I was developing for Android and actively using apps. When the most of the apps seemed to require me to give permission to access my personal information, I quit installing and using apps. "The M Developer Preview introduces a new app permissions model which streamlines the process for users to install and upgrade apps. If an app running on the M Preview supports the new permissions model, the user does not have to grant any permissions when they install or upgrade the app. Instead, the app requests permissions as it needs them, and the system shows a dialog to the user asking for the permission. If an app supports the new permissions model, it can still be installed and run on devices running older versions of Android, using the old permissions model on those devices." https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime-permissions.html https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime-permi...
jl6 11y ago
Really hoping 6.0 and the new Nexus phones have pen support so I can get over my disappointment that the Galaxy Note 5 won't be released in Europe.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  Android M gets native Bluetooth stylus support so it should be supported.
  - winslow 11y ago
    Why does a stylus need bluetooth? I thought it interacted with the display much like a finger (just more precise). Unless they are using thermal touch sensors?
    - NeutronBoy 11y ago
      Most stylus' have at least one additional button (on a Surface Pro, there's 3).
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Why does a stylus need bluetooth? I thought it interacted with the display much like a finger (just more precise). Styluses often have interaction mechanisms other than the pointer (e.g., the button on Samsung's "S-Pen".)
bitwize 11y ago
Android as a platform is toast. With the flagrant security issues, anyone who cares about security will buy an iPhone or BlackBerry. Add to that the blatant Oracle IP infringement and you've got a recipe for a platform with no future. The smart mobile devs are noping the fuck out of the Android ecosystem.
- farmdve 11y ago
  I like the fact that it's open source, mostly excluding some third-party binary blobs, but on most phones I can install custom ROMs and kernels, and even fiddle with these binary blobs.
  - josteink 11y ago
    People who bought into Apple's closed garden (with a capitol c) need to rationalise their investment. Part of that rationalisation is at will dismissing the value of open technology, despite 99% of the internet and 90% of the Apple ecosystem lives atop of it. Considering how lots of full on FOSS Linux users were lured to the Apple platform for its (at the time) impressive desktop, this has probably caused one of the biggest damages to open source software we have seen in recent time.
    - sjwright 11y ago
      Android is marching ever further away from open source with every release. They're boiling the frog and you didn't notice.
      - josteink 11y ago
        Good point. Too bad it remains the most viable open-source mobile OS around.
- 51Cards 11y ago
  You're correct... at ~78% of the mobile market share the platform is definitely on its last legs. Better to focus development on the remaining 22%, esp with that 30% Apple market overhead.... ??? Android definitely has hurdles to overcome but it's far from "toast". I really can't conceive where that view would come from?
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Please Google, how about some real battery improvements this time? I was disappointed to hear that the new "doze" feature is only for completely stationary phones. So sitting in your pocket or the bottom of your purse won't set it off because there's too much motion. I imagine this will be nice for tablets that sit on the kitchen counter all day, but might not affect phone battery life at all. Apparently, the battery gains from Volta in 5.0 didn't do much and from what I've read many of the popular apps never bothered supporting the new APIs for their own reasons. On the plus side, hearing about monthly security updates tackles my biggest concern with the platform. The problem is only a handful of the biggest players have signed on for that, and even then these updates need carrier approval for some asinine reason. The smaller OEM's will probably never deliver these updates.
- andor 11y ago
  "App standby" in Android M also works for non-stationary phones. It disables services and background data for apps that you don't use for some time. https://developer.android.com/preview/behavior-changes.html#behavior-power https://developer.android.com/preview/behavior-changes.html#... I'm pretty sure that Google cares a lot about battery life, but there's no magic way to save energy, so don't expect too much from optimizations. Apps, not the OS, use most of the energy for CPU, screen and radio time. The new features only limit the apps a bit by disabling or rescheduling background tasks.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Well, I don't think my demands are unrealistic. Compared to my iOS devices, Android does terribly, even with much higher capacity batteries. It would be great if google caught up.
    - bitmapbrother 11y ago
      Google did. It's called Doze.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
Rangi42 11y ago
> The Android emulator system images and developer preview system images have been updated for supported Nexus devices (Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 & Nexus Player) to help with your testing. The Nexus 7 is pointedly absent. Will they even get an OTA update for the final Android M release?
niedzielski 11y ago
I thought I was the jaded dev until I started reading these comments! There's a lot of stuff I hate about Android but, in my opinion, the tools, first and third party libraries, testing support, and design have made really great progress this year alone. Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along (and I'm on Linux!), the Support libraries are filling in a lot more holes than they ever did before (and I have to support Gingerbread!), Robolectric is at 3.0 RC3 and you can finally run it in Android Studio, and Material Design is getting more well defined and seeing more and more saturation into other tech (Polymer hit 1.0!).
- vorg 11y ago
  > Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along Too bad Gradle only allows us to use one language (i.e. Groovy) to configure the builds. Because Maven uses generic XML, any language can sit atop it. E.g. Polyglot Maven [1] not only allows us to use Groovy, but also Clojure, Scala, and Ruby to configure its builds. [1] https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven
  - niedzielski 11y ago
    Build systems have been particularly tumultuous for Android. It was unfun to build an app in Eclipse, then want CI and have to write a lot of boilerplate in Ant. The complete translation of all that Ant code and related CI materials to Gradle / Android Studio took weeks for my team on a large codebase. And, if you're a platform dev, you also have to support nonrecursive Make. I'm not a big Groovy fan either but I am a big fan of picking something that works. The transition was painful but I'm glad the road ahead looks clear and focused.
    - vorg 11y ago
      If Gradle's configuration API was opened up so other languages besides Groovy were allowed, such as Clojure, Scala, JRuby, and even Jython, Gradle would attract a lot more developers who are put off by Groovy. Even Gradle's website and promotional materials avoids using the word "Groovy", instead saying "Gradle DSL", but that's not enough to win over hardcore Python or Ruby shops. As for your case and many others already reluctantly using Groovy in Gradle, translating it all from Groovy-Gradle to, say, Ruby-Gradle wouldn't take weeks but hours because only the syntax would need to be translated almost one-to-one, leaving all the Gradle configuration names and sequences unchanged. In fact, because it could be done incrementally, only minutes spread out over several days.
needusername 11y ago
Slightly OT: Does anybody have an ETA of Java 8 in Android?
richardboegli 11y ago
I think that next version of Android will be called Oreo. Just putting it out there, so when I am right in a year or so time we can refer back to this comment ;-) I'll write up a separate post later as to why I think it'll be called that.

156 points by cryptoz 11y ago

OEMs (and probably carriers) really need to get their stuff together. It really sucks that here we are talking about M when very few devices have seen an L release.

sp332 11y ago
The new UI style and notifications means all the skins have to be revamped. That takes a lot of investment, and the only other benefit users are likely to notice is slightly better battery life. Lollipop has better security, but unfortunately that's still not a big selling point. Hopefully cell phone makers have had enough time to update their skins to look good with (or pave over) Material design, and we'll see more updates for M than we did for L.
- zanny 11y ago
  Or they could, you know, just ship stock Android and make everyone happier by not shoving awful carrier skins down everyones throat nobody even likes. Cough, Touchwiz.
  - fidotron 11y ago
    Lollipop is bad enough that Touchwiz, on devices like the Note 4, is a massive improvement over stock Android.
    - nilkn 11y ago
      That's the first time I've ever seen that claimed. In what way does Touchwiz improve on Lollipop? On my Note device, I've done everything I can to hide Touchwiz and go back to stock Lollipop because of how much better it is.
      - ypcx 11y ago
        I tried both and I was all about going back to iPhone, until I tried Cyanogenmod, which puts (a lot of) the sense back into Android. It uses the Google launcher (without the Google Now page integrated on swipe left), but it removes the insanely annoying design decisions by Samsung, e.g. displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold even with your Phone locked in your pocket and you bombing it on your bike downhill. Or the "cannot use camera" and "sorry, dimming your screen" on 5% battery threshold. I don't know what they are smoking at Samsung, but it's not good.
        wvenable 11y ago
        > displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold Don't blame Samsung for that, my Nexus 7 did that as well. And in Netflix the dialog appeared behind the active window so you couldn't see it or hit the button.
      - inversionOf 11y ago
        Critics of Android embraced a meme that Lollipop was Android's Vista, substantiated by users anecdotal claims about poor battery life from a given upgrade, or the changes to notification levels, etc. So you still see the echos of that. I've never seen someone go so over the top to claim that it justified vendor skins, though, so this is a new pinnacle. To everyone else it was an incremental update.
        tdkl 11y ago
        Yeah, the ritual of rebooting the device every two days because of the memory leaks and camera crashes were quite an incremental update over stable Kitkat.
        inversionOf 11y ago
        Even ignoring the placebo effect, and a contingent of people carrying forth a message between advocating the amazing world of task killers, what in the world would a skin have to do with that? TouchWiz and others are literally layered over stock Android, so if there was a fundamental issue it would have the same issue. The notion that the skins are somehow superior is nonsensical, despite the comical, ignorance-induced downvotes I've predictably received.
    - georgemcbay 11y ago
      Speaking as an Android user/developer: Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever. I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.
  - pachydermic 11y ago
    Then they would have basically no way to compete with one another other than marketing and specs. Touchwiz and all those other gimmicks really do sell phones. That's just speaking from anecdotal evidence, but I assume big corps have done their homework on this one. Remember that the types of people reading this comment are not your average consumer. We might hate it, we might know it's not as good as stock android... but we're a very small segment of the market (especially for Android). You probably don't see a ton of nutritionists/personal trainers eating at McDonalds, either. The downside of having an open platform is that OEMs will add crap to differentiate themselves - just look at the weird media bs that comes pre-installed on tons of windows laptops.
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      I suspect this is temporary. A lot of the big OEMs from just a couple years ago are massively losing money on Android. HTC, Sony, LG, etc all reported signficant losses. I imagine the market will tigheten up with one or two premium OEMs (Moto, Samsung) and some bottom feeders selling super budget phones. When things finally tighten up there will less incentive to make these difficult to maintain Android custom distros and more incentive to get closer to the stock as a way to make updating easier. Google may also put in a full theming engine to help this along. Marshmallow has a basic theme engine form what I've read, so that's a start. I think Google knows that the status quo with Android is unsustainable and will need to migrate to a more tightly controlled business model. Samsung's flirting with Tizen hasn't paid off and they're more or less stuck with Google dictating policy now. The monthly security updates thing sounds promising as well. Its time Android got serious about security and updates.
  - eddieroger 11y ago
    If people didn't mind Touchwiz, Samsung wouldn't sell nearly as many phones as they do. Not that they like it, but they clearly don't mind it.
BlackJack 11y ago
A good rule of thumb is that 25% of Android devices will have the OS within 1 year of release and 50% within 2 years of release. Based on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html though, L is behind the pace :(
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  Android L was released on October 15th so it could still make it to 25%. Also note that 5.0 was pretty buggy so that didn't help...
- izacus 11y ago
  Those stats you're linking are extremely misleading and don't really reflect demographic of actual app users. Pretty much all our apps across the board have higher Lollipop and KitKat usage. Which makes sense - what you linked is aggregate number of all users on the Play store across the world. Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Ignore newer API versions at your own peril.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    > [..] demographic of actual app users [..] Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Your post seem predicated on assumptions which aren't supported: - That people with "better engagement" are more profitable to app developers (which might be the reverse of true if you aren't on a freemium modal). - That non-Westerners don't buy apps at all or that we simply shouldn't care. .
    - izacus 11y ago
      No, no, I did not want to imply any of that. Just that: - For pretty much any of our apps the actual breakdown of Android versions is nothing like what the Play store shows. - The amount of new Androids is significantly higher (we actually have an app with 57% 5.x and 80% on 4.4 or newer - Samsung updates have been significant for it) and varies greatly - The users with newer devices and newer Android versions are usually more engaged, use apps more and also advertise them more which makes for a good network effect. - We have noticed a major shift to apps with Material design, arrogant Apple marketing aside, there's alot of users on Android that DO care about design, UX and those tend to have rather newish phones. Depending on your app you should of course also care for people on worse phones. If you're providing a public service app (e.g. showing public transport schedules), you should probably target as low as 2.3 (even though, perhaps actually building 2 APKs for that usecase makes sense). If you're building a modern 3D game, you should probably target API 19+ since users with older devices probably won't be able to run it anyway. But in any case, DO YOUR RESEARCH, because the numbers vary greatly across demographics, app categories and regions.
e40 11y ago
I think the release lag for OEMs is far longer than Google thought it would be. Also, this lag is the reason they won't get rid of the Nexus program. Without it, they would not have a test bed for Android.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  Yeah, I imagine they figured that as long as they kept pushing out updated OS versions, essentially for free, the OEMs would have an easy way to keep offering updates without having to build any of the underlying "stuff" from scratch. But I think it ends up more like enterprise IT where OS updates get put off and only done when absolutely necessary. To OEMs who only really care about selling hardware, it's just more testing, deployment, and support cost (not to mention porting their customizations). I realize I'm not in the majority (outside of tech circles) but I really do like Android and the main criteria for choosing a device are specs, build quality, and likelihood of timely updates. My current phone is a Moto X and it's the first non-Nexus I've had in a while. And I only got that because I broke my Nexus 5 and we were still a way off from a refresh. The Moto seemed like a less extravagant (in terms of price and screen size) version of the Nexus 6. But if Lenovo undoes the good things Google did for Moto, I'll be back to the Nexus line regardless for my next phone. I got rid of the carrier as a middleman by avoiding carrier-branded and subsidized handsets but the OEM still plays a huge part as long as proprietary code is needed to port newer versions of the OS to a given device.

julianpye 11y ago

Right now according to my user demographics, I just decided to move to 4.2 (API 17). Which means that what I learned at I/O 2013 can finally be put to good use! The sad part is that I decided to skip looking enthusiastically under the hood of M, because I won't be able to use it anyway for quite some time.

izacus 11y ago
And 57% of our demographics are on 5.0 or newer, with 19+ covering over 80% of users actually using the app. Perhaps updating your app to the 5.x standard will actually make those users use it instead of running away to other Material apps ;)
- julianpye 11y ago
  There are many useful libraries to get a close-enough Material experience working on the older devices. And I am not talking about the official support library, which should be at least on a par of many MIT licensed Android extensions out in the marketplace.
  - xienze 11y ago
    There's more to the Android APIs than UI stuff, which is the majority of what's covered by workarounds like the Compatibility Library. This is a very real problem with Android development -- "hey look at all this cool stuff we've added and you'll be able to actually make use of in two years!"
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Not quite catching your point - if you set your min sdk to android 5.0, you will remove 43% of your users. That's kind of the problem. Luckily, Android has a great compatibility library so you can still use many of the new features.
  - xd1936 11y ago
    However, as discussed below, the amount of users in the world with Google Play ≠ active app users. If you collect stats on your app's actual usage, I think you'd find that they are much more up-to-date than the Developer Dashboard stats would have you believe.

ronald_dregan 11y ago

yea too bad android is a complete piece of trash. buggy inconsistent piece of shit. they can't do anything about it though, it's just the "open" (to manufacturers, at least) nature of android itself that forces it to be utter garbage. eh whatever, only like 2% of android users will ever see all the new bugs and garbage google added anyway.

clumsysmurf 11y ago

I predict that only Nexus devices will get 6.0 initially, just like 4.0 and (to a lesser degree 5.0) before that. But OEMs will wait for 6.1 to let the bugs settle out. After 5.0 and its memory leak bugs etc, i'm wary.

xd1936 11y ago
I don't know. Marshmallow feels a lot more iterative than KitKat → Lollipop did. I'd say ICS → Jellybean = Lollipop → Marshmallow Refinements, tweaks, and moderate improvements, as opposed to a whole rethinking of design.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
Oh please. Android 5.0 introduced a new runtime that was the cause of a lot of the issues. These have been ironed out in 5.1.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Pretty sure that was exactly his point; major issues until the point one release so why wouldn't they wait?

xasos 11y ago

Really big fan of the simplified permissions feature. It's something I've always wanted that Android never had. In addition to the supposed battery usage improvements, I'm looking forward to the new streamlined Android Pay features.

jzzskijj 11y ago
Just learned about this and it seems really great! This is something I always wished for when I was developing for Android and actively using apps. When the most of the apps seemed to require me to give permission to access my personal information, I quit installing and using apps. "The M Developer Preview introduces a new app permissions model which streamlines the process for users to install and upgrade apps. If an app running on the M Preview supports the new permissions model, the user does not have to grant any permissions when they install or upgrade the app. Instead, the app requests permissions as it needs them, and the system shows a dialog to the user asking for the permission. If an app supports the new permissions model, it can still be installed and run on devices running older versions of Android, using the old permissions model on those devices." https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime-permissions.html https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime-permi...

jl6 11y ago

Really hoping 6.0 and the new Nexus phones have pen support so I can get over my disappointment that the Galaxy Note 5 won't be released in Europe.

bitmapbrother 11y ago
Android M gets native Bluetooth stylus support so it should be supported.
- winslow 11y ago
  Why does a stylus need bluetooth? I thought it interacted with the display much like a finger (just more precise). Unless they are using thermal touch sensors?
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    Most stylus' have at least one additional button (on a Surface Pro, there's 3).
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Why does a stylus need bluetooth? I thought it interacted with the display much like a finger (just more precise). Styluses often have interaction mechanisms other than the pointer (e.g., the button on Samsung's "S-Pen".)

bitwize 11y ago

Android as a platform is toast. With the flagrant security issues, anyone who cares about security will buy an iPhone or BlackBerry. Add to that the blatant Oracle IP infringement and you've got a recipe for a platform with no future. The smart mobile devs are noping the fuck out of the Android ecosystem.

farmdve 11y ago
I like the fact that it's open source, mostly excluding some third-party binary blobs, but on most phones I can install custom ROMs and kernels, and even fiddle with these binary blobs.
- josteink 11y ago
  People who bought into Apple's closed garden (with a capitol c) need to rationalise their investment. Part of that rationalisation is at will dismissing the value of open technology, despite 99% of the internet and 90% of the Apple ecosystem lives atop of it. Considering how lots of full on FOSS Linux users were lured to the Apple platform for its (at the time) impressive desktop, this has probably caused one of the biggest damages to open source software we have seen in recent time.
  - sjwright 11y ago
    Android is marching ever further away from open source with every release. They're boiling the frog and you didn't notice.
    - josteink 11y ago
      Good point. Too bad it remains the most viable open-source mobile OS around.
51Cards 11y ago
You're correct... at ~78% of the mobile market share the platform is definitely on its last legs. Better to focus development on the remaining 22%, esp with that 30% Apple market overhead.... ??? Android definitely has hurdles to overcome but it's far from "toast". I really can't conceive where that view would come from?

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

Please Google, how about some real battery improvements this time? I was disappointed to hear that the new "doze" feature is only for completely stationary phones. So sitting in your pocket or the bottom of your purse won't set it off because there's too much motion. I imagine this will be nice for tablets that sit on the kitchen counter all day, but might not affect phone battery life at all. Apparently, the battery gains from Volta in 5.0 didn't do much and from what I've read many of the popular apps never bothered supporting the new APIs for their own reasons. On the plus side, hearing about monthly security updates tackles my biggest concern with the platform. The problem is only a handful of the biggest players have signed on for that, and even then these updates need carrier approval for some asinine reason. The smaller OEM's will probably never deliver these updates.

andor 11y ago
"App standby" in Android M also works for non-stationary phones. It disables services and background data for apps that you don't use for some time. https://developer.android.com/preview/behavior-changes.html#behavior-power https://developer.android.com/preview/behavior-changes.html#... I'm pretty sure that Google cares a lot about battery life, but there's no magic way to save energy, so don't expect too much from optimizations. Apps, not the OS, use most of the energy for CPU, screen and radio time. The new features only limit the apps a bit by disabling or rescheduling background tasks.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Well, I don't think my demands are unrealistic. Compared to my iOS devices, Android does terribly, even with much higher capacity batteries. It would be great if google caught up.
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    Google did. It's called Doze.
MichaelGG 11y ago

Rangi42 11y ago

> The Android emulator system images and developer preview system images have been updated for supported Nexus devices (Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 & Nexus Player) to help with your testing. The Nexus 7 is pointedly absent. Will they even get an OTA update for the final Android M release?

niedzielski 11y ago

I thought I was the jaded dev until I started reading these comments! There's a lot of stuff I hate about Android but, in my opinion, the tools, first and third party libraries, testing support, and design have made really great progress this year alone. Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along (and I'm on Linux!), the Support libraries are filling in a lot more holes than they ever did before (and I have to support Gingerbread!), Robolectric is at 3.0 RC3 and you can finally run it in Android Studio, and Material Design is getting more well defined and seeing more and more saturation into other tech (Polymer hit 1.0!).

vorg 11y ago
> Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along Too bad Gradle only allows us to use one language (i.e. Groovy) to configure the builds. Because Maven uses generic XML, any language can sit atop it. E.g. Polyglot Maven [1] not only allows us to use Groovy, but also Clojure, Scala, and Ruby to configure its builds. [1] https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven
- niedzielski 11y ago
  Build systems have been particularly tumultuous for Android. It was unfun to build an app in Eclipse, then want CI and have to write a lot of boilerplate in Ant. The complete translation of all that Ant code and related CI materials to Gradle / Android Studio took weeks for my team on a large codebase. And, if you're a platform dev, you also have to support nonrecursive Make. I'm not a big Groovy fan either but I am a big fan of picking something that works. The transition was painful but I'm glad the road ahead looks clear and focused.
  - vorg 11y ago
    If Gradle's configuration API was opened up so other languages besides Groovy were allowed, such as Clojure, Scala, JRuby, and even Jython, Gradle would attract a lot more developers who are put off by Groovy. Even Gradle's website and promotional materials avoids using the word "Groovy", instead saying "Gradle DSL", but that's not enough to win over hardcore Python or Ruby shops. As for your case and many others already reluctantly using Groovy in Gradle, translating it all from Groovy-Gradle to, say, Ruby-Gradle wouldn't take weeks but hours because only the syntax would need to be translated almost one-to-one, leaving all the Gradle configuration names and sequences unchanged. In fact, because it could be done incrementally, only minutes spread out over several days.

needusername 11y ago

Slightly OT: Does anybody have an ETA of Java 8 in Android?

richardboegli 11y ago

I think that next version of Android will be called Oreo. Just putting it out there, so when I am right in a year or so time we can refer back to this comment ;-) I'll write up a separate post later as to why I think it'll be called that.