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The performance issue stood out to me at first too, but with no UI and Dalvik really only being optional and Google's background services stripped out, this is
by Eridrus 10y ago
The performance issue stood out to me at first too, but with no UI and Dalvik really only being optional and Google's background services stripped out, this is mostly just a weird Linux, so I'm not sure why this would perform significantly worse than any other Linux-based OS.
Sadly I don't know enough about hardware economics to say whether hosting a whole OS is crazy or not, but we've been trading off CPU time for less developer time in every other area of development, so I don't see why it would be different here. To the extent that the OS itself is not what is causing you problems, you can keep optimising your app code as you go and release on cheaper and cheaper hardware if you want.
- cbdfghh 10y agoSo what's the advantage of using Android over straight Linux?
- Eridrus 10y agoThe advantage seems to be that you don't have to worry about the details and you get updating for free. Writing good update code is hard and thankless, but you can certainly do it yourself. Not a tonne of benefits, but not a tonne of costs either. I'm sure Samsung won't use this, but this might be good for projects just getting off the ground.
- stbtrax 10y agosome are: access to media frameworks, there are more android app devs and resources out there compared to whatever linux GUI framework you might use.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoIf you don't have a tight power budget hosting a 'whole OS' isn't crazy (though it doesn't mean it isn't wasteful). Most chips will use an RTOS for the timing guarantees, and they generally provide better power resilience than other OS's.