10 ms·

Android 8.0 Oreo, thoroughly reviewed

205 points by Yossi_Frenkel 9y ago

richardwhiuk 9y ago
The link here is to page 3 - any chance a mod can fix it to go to the start of the article?
- sctb 9y ago
  Thanks, updated!
mtgx 9y ago
Keeping my fingers crossed that Project Treble is the real deal and would actually make it possible for a "generic AOSP image" to be installed on virtually any mobile device that came with Android. That's the dream, isn't it? But I think we've been burned too many times by Google's promises to "make it easier" for OEMs to update devices and other such promises, or at least these projects always sounded much better than they turned out to be. Hopefully this time it is different. I would be curious to know when Project Treble started. I imagine something like this, and if it was serious enough, would take 3-4 years of development and thought put into it? If it's less than two years then I would probably be worried about just how much thought and development Google put into it. I would also be disappointed that Google only started taking such a project seriously two years ago - or seven years after Android officially launched. Some could say this "feature" should have been enabled from day one.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  Is Project Treble "backwards compatible" with old models? If so I hope it will work out for Fairphone users, especially the first model which is doesn't receive as much support as the Fairphone 2
  - xbmcuser 9y ago
    Not backwards compatible mostly this has seperated the hardware drivers from the os itself but unless the device system partition is repatitioned and the drivers been provided by the hardware manufacturer old phones won't get updated any time soon. Mostly the newer phones that are released with Android O will have the ability to update to the latest version of Android missing a few things that your phone doesn't support like iOS does with older iPhones even if the Oem no longer procides updates..
  - Mindwipe 9y ago
    No. In theory you could backport it to older phones, and OEMs allegedly might, but I wouldn't expect that to be the norm and it's not mandatory from Google in order to get Oreo.
- discreditable 9y ago
  > make it possible for a "generic AOSP image" to be installed on virtually any mobile device that came with Android I would really love that. It would take the "how crappy is the vendor UI?" problem out of the equation when looking to purchase a phone.
wavesplash 9y ago
Oreo Battery life is atrocious on Nexus 5X. Do not upgrade if you can avoid it.
- bostand 9y ago
  Stop that! You cannot judge battery life after only a few days, specially after an update.
  - oelmekki 9y ago
    Would you care to explain why? (provided that when we speak of battery life, we mean how much time it can go without recharging, and not after how many years you have to change it)
    - mhogomchungu 9y ago
      How do you measure battery life? 1. Do you charge it to 100% and live it alone until charge goes to 0%? 2. Do you unplug it in the morning and use it "normally" and see what charge will be left when you put it again on a charger when you go to sleep? Different use cases drains battery at a different rate and its hard to use a new phone/a phone with a new OS "normally" because more time than usual will go into trying to understand it. It may also happen that you start using the phone at a time when your phone usable is above your average.
      - oelmekki 9y ago
        I have a daily routine, always charging my phone at the same time, always using it at the same time. If after an update I notice the day after my battery is drained one hour before the usual time, it sounds pretty safe to assume the update did something regarding it. But I won't decide I know for sure it's a problem for everybody, obviously (which doesn't mean either it isn't). EDIT: but as philjohn mentioned, you can expect to use your phone more after an update (especially a major release) to try new features and because of renewed interest.
    - 9y ago
awjr 9y ago
The summary from page 9 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-thoroughly-reviewed/9/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-tho... The Good Project Treble isn't a silver bullet for Android's update problems, but it's the first time in a long time Google has changed Android to make system update development easier. I love the smaller "by the way" notification section. It really cleans up the notification panel, while still letting the user read less-important notifications at their leisure. I just wish I could demote any app to "less important," regardless of what version of Android it targets. The automatically-colored media notifications look amazing! Sometimes I cycle through songs with the notification panel just to see what it comes up with. The background processing lockdown has been a long time coming. Finally, we'll see the end of wakelocks. Picture-in-picture on a phone is great for videos, and Google's experiments with things like Google Maps look very promising. EmojiCompat and downloadable fonts means Android users should get new emojis super fast. You don't even need Android O for this to work—it will work on Android 4.4 and up! The Bad Google's revamp of notification controls has the side effect of removing fine-grained notification controls for most apps. We'll have to wait for every app to upgrade to get the controls back. The ambient notification display gets a huge downgrade, changing from showing the full notification panel to only showing tiny status bar icons. Snoozing notifications could be a great feature, but the timing options are so limited that it's useless. A max of one hour? Seriously? Give me a time picker. The disabling of Chrome's picture-in-picture support specifically for youtube.com is downright sleazy. That's not how Web browsers are supposed to act. The Ugly Updates—they're still a huge problem. Here's hoping Treble actually helps.
- kinlan 9y ago
  Just as a quick point and I will drop it in the article comments too. I'm the lead for our Chrome Developer Relations team. Chrome doesn't disable picture in picture for Youtube, Youtube disable it in Chrome. They listen to resize events iirc and then exit fullscreen mode (the only way to currently get to pip mode in Chrome).
lukepothier 9y ago
If it's true that Chrome on Oreo genuinely prevents picture-in-picture for YouTube specifically, that's a troubling precedent to set. Why not allow all websites to enable/disable PiP (maybe via a meta tag, in the way that tab theme colours already work)? If I query https://m.youtube.com https://m.youtube.com while emulating a Nexus 5X, the response contains: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no, target-densityDpi=medium-dpi"> Is that what is preventing PiP on YouTube or is it some sort of underhanded inter-Google arrangement between Chrome and YouTube?
- kinlan 9y ago
  Shared below too. Just as a quick point and I will drop it in the article comments too. I'm the lead for our Chrome Developer Relations team. Chrome doesn't disable picture in picture for Youtube, Youtube disable it in Chrome. They listen to resize events iirc and then exit fullscreen mode (the only way to currently get to pip mode in Chrome).
  - lukepothier 9y ago
    That's interesting, and a relief.
    - kinlan 9y ago
      If you are interested, there is also a spec under development at the moment to make it more explicit - https://wicg.github.io/picture-in-picture/ https://wicg.github.io/picture-in-picture/
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Then Chrome should have an option to stop the resize handler from firing when entering PiP mode. The user should always have the right to override what the website is doing.
    - kinlan 9y ago
      So you would like us to not tell the page what the render is doing? I'm not sure how that would play out for any number of API's that exist on the web. Developer's have consistently had the means to override the default actions of the browser (think drag and drop) but I don't think hiding side-effects or user actions helps anyone.
haddr 9y ago
Quick comment on notifications: it seems that Android has really worked them out nicely. Now I even more prefer Android notifications to iPhone notifications.
- rovek 9y ago
  Confirm dismissal of a notification is one of my biggest of myriad gripes with atrocious iOS design after 4 months.
afro88 9y ago
The music notifications with colours chosen from the artwork is really nice. Does anyone know much about the method behind this?
- pennaMan 9y ago
  I'm guessing they are using the Palette class from the support libs to extract the colors from the artwork: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/graphics/Palette.html https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/g...
Jedd 9y ago
After my Pixel updated recently to Oreo, being frustrated by a constant notification for Twilight (a red-tinting background app) and starting to search on google for a solution -- I discovered quite a lot of people have been asking 'how to suppress notifications on oreo' recently. FWIW you can control the notification snooze timeout, but you're going to need Tasker [1] (or similar). Interestingly I evidently bought this several years ago - can't remember why - and haven't installed it on at least the last two phones, since some version of Android a few years ago shipped with whatever native functionality Tasker used to provide for me. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Oreo actually broke Twilight on non-Pixel devices, I'm surprised it still works for you, I guess Twilight can access the night mode driver. I'm surprised more people aren't complaining about this.
- grepthisab 9y ago
  In the middle of updating my Pixel XL, use Twilight daily. Will it still work after the update?
  - izacus 9y ago
    Pixels have a built-in tinting mode which actually does filtering on compositor level. What does Twilight add to that?
    - Jedd 9y ago
      Gentle transition periods (I have mine set to a half hour), offsets from sunset/sunrise, hue (and other smart bulb) integration. A few other features that I don't use. I'm experimenting now with native compositor, which hopefully presents a better colour mix than Twilight was able to (good but not perfect).
  - mcescalante 9y ago
xbmcuser 9y ago
Duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15171605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15171605
sdotsen 9y ago
Can anyone confirm if they brought back the ability to select a wifi/Bluetooth connection via a drop-down from the swipe down option? You know, without having to click and go into the screen to select the device you want to connect to.
- Mindwipe 9y ago
  They did (I don't think it was ever gone as such, they just messed up the gesture, but it's back).
AndrewDucker 9y ago
I knew Project Treble was exciting, but this is really interesting: >Treble promises to change everything. Malchev says that Treble standardizes Android hardware support to such a degree that generic Android builds compiled from AOSP can boot and run on every Treble device. In fact, these "raw AOSP" builds are what will be used for some of the CTS testing Google requires all Android OEMs to pass in order to license the Google apps—it's not just that they should work, they are required to work. Ron paints a rosy future here: >Custom ROMs shouldn't need to be painstakingly hand-crafted for individual devices anymore—a single build should be able to cover multiple Treble devices from multiple manufacturers. Imagine the next time a major new version of Android is released—on Day One of the AOSP code drop, a single build (or a small handful of builds) could cover every Treble device with an unlocked bootloader, with a "download Android 9.0 here" link on XDA or some other technical website. If this comes to fruition, the ROM community is going to go nuts. This is enormously exciting and Oreo will turn out to be a real turning point for Android. One thing that is interesting though is the implication that Android updates will get more iOS-y in the future. By that I mean certain features will be missing from updated phones because the HAL layer doesn't support it. (Copied over from previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167138)
- epmaybe 9y ago
  > By that I mean certain features will be missing from updated phones because the HAL layer doesn't support it. What features are you referring to? Also, will that be worse than the current situation for Android devices?
maufl 9y ago
Can somebody say something about what Treble means for other open source OS for phones, e.g. Sailfish? Might it be possible to use the vendor provided Treble core for other OSs?
- pas 9y ago
  Yes. The question is access and licencing.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
How many people build their own ROMs? When I bought my Pixel I tried my hand at building my own ROM, but I kept stumbling and eventually gave up. Admittedly, I was running a newer version of Ubuntu than the one they suggested in the docs, but I didn't expect it would break everything. Am I right in guessing that using a VM would be the easiest path to success? I've been a bit frustrated with android's sparse docs and unreliable build tool. Whenever I try searching for additional information, all I find are questionable tutorials and xda-developer threads. I don't have anything against the forum itself, but I find it a bit questionable to see so many people happily propagating and flashing random binaries. Is xda-developers still the main place to go when looking for help, or have any other communities started to overthrow them? Now with 8.0 out, it seems like a good chance to retry building my own ROM. I'm thinking of forking CopperheadOS [0], and applying some minor patches on top. Is anyone here running their own ROM, or Copperhead in particular? I'd love to hear about your experience, along with any pros and cons. F-Droid seems to be capable of handling all of my requirements. My only big remaining concern would be with Project Fi; I'm uncertain if the service will work if Google Apps aren't installed. [0] https://copperhead.co/android/ https://copperhead.co/android/
- Veratyr 9y ago
  > Am I right in guessing that using a VM would be the easiest path to success? I've been able to successfully build Android on Arch Linux. Depending on which particular ROM you're building, much of the required build environment is packaged with the source. I just needed repo's dependencies and to rebuild the prebuilt Bison with the included source. > I've been a bit frustrated with android's sparse docs and unreliable build tool. The guide at https://source.android.com/source/ https://source.android.com/source/ should result in a working AOSP build. I've followed it before without problems. My guess is you're trying to do something weird that makes sense to you that isn't really supported. > Is xda-developers still the main place to go when looking for help, or have any other communities started to overthrow them? XDA is still the primary place ROM development is carried out, yes. Finding a ROM's IRC channel can be helpful too. > Is anyone here running their own ROM, or Copperhead in particular? I built Copperhead for my Pixel but unfortunately it resulted in a bootloop so I gave up on it. I'm running PureNexus right now and might try Copperhead later. > My only big remaining concern would be with Project Fi; I'm uncertain if the service will work if Google Apps aren't installed. I don't think it'll work totally bereft of Google services but you might be able to manage it with MicroG: https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/
hateful 9y ago
They lost me at "light grey notification panel"? I spent some time trying to get the dark grey one to black with no luck - and now it's even worse.
- harrygeez 9y ago
  you can probably achieve it by modifying framework-res.apk. At least it worked on Nougat, copied the colors from Pixel to get its blue theme on my Nexus 5
edoceo 9y ago
The upgrade reset/reenabled all the audio alerts for mail, calendar and SMS that I had disabled. Why did Google reset my notification preferences!?
sahaskatta 9y ago
This was particularly interesting: >Google shared a fun statistic at I/O 2017: The company expects one-third of Android devices shipped in 2017 to cost under $100. Even more so considering that the US is the 2nd largest market for phones of that price point. > While the long term goal is to tackle the 5 billion users without internet access, immediately this helps the US market too. Google says the US will be the second most popular market for these sub-$100 phones.
kijin 9y ago
The third set of pictures on page 4 shows a "Rotate" notification that is 47 years old. A timestamp must have been set to zero somewhere...
wyclif 9y ago
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but what are the best hardware/carrier options in USA currently if you want vanilla Oreo that updates reliably instead of a custom ROM (w/ no carrier or third-party overlays and skins)?
- js2 9y ago
  Google Fi/Pixel.
- Navarr 9y ago
  Basically just pick up a Pixel and put it on whatever carrier you prefer. I prefer T-Mobile.
zeep 9y ago
A bit off-topic but will Android P/9.0 be the last version before you have to switch to Fuchsia?
- on_and_off 9y ago
  There are no official plans for Fuchsia. If anything O makes you think that Google plans to keep Android around for the long run since it aims at putting it in a good architectural position for the next 5/10 years.
- pitaj 9y ago
  Why would it be? Fuchsia is very much still in development AFAIK and is more of a research OS than anything else.
Severian 9y ago
I really hope they updated the audio stack to make latency lower. Right now doing anything sub 10ms with audio is impossible.
- eco 9y ago
  It says right in the article that there is a new low latency audio API.
  - Severian 9y ago
    Yeah, I saw that at the end of the article. A little short on details. I hope it really is low latency though, and can be used for real-time synths, trackers, dj mixers, etc. It would be nice in the future to have a small attachable audio interface we could hook up to our phones or tablets and work out some tunes on the go. I hope Android can start doing the same things as iOS in this regard. Hopefully we'll see some reviews once hardware and apps make a foray into this new API.

205 points by Yossi_Frenkel 9y ago

richardwhiuk 9y ago

The link here is to page 3 - any chance a mod can fix it to go to the start of the article?

sctb 9y ago
Thanks, updated!

mtgx 9y ago

Keeping my fingers crossed that Project Treble is the real deal and would actually make it possible for a "generic AOSP image" to be installed on virtually any mobile device that came with Android. That's the dream, isn't it? But I think we've been burned too many times by Google's promises to "make it easier" for OEMs to update devices and other such promises, or at least these projects always sounded much better than they turned out to be. Hopefully this time it is different. I would be curious to know when Project Treble started. I imagine something like this, and if it was serious enough, would take 3-4 years of development and thought put into it? If it's less than two years then I would probably be worried about just how much thought and development Google put into it. I would also be disappointed that Google only started taking such a project seriously two years ago - or seven years after Android officially launched. Some could say this "feature" should have been enabled from day one.

vanderZwan 9y ago
Is Project Treble "backwards compatible" with old models? If so I hope it will work out for Fairphone users, especially the first model which is doesn't receive as much support as the Fairphone 2
- xbmcuser 9y ago
  Not backwards compatible mostly this has seperated the hardware drivers from the os itself but unless the device system partition is repatitioned and the drivers been provided by the hardware manufacturer old phones won't get updated any time soon. Mostly the newer phones that are released with Android O will have the ability to update to the latest version of Android missing a few things that your phone doesn't support like iOS does with older iPhones even if the Oem no longer procides updates..
- Mindwipe 9y ago
  No. In theory you could backport it to older phones, and OEMs allegedly might, but I wouldn't expect that to be the norm and it's not mandatory from Google in order to get Oreo.
discreditable 9y ago
> make it possible for a "generic AOSP image" to be installed on virtually any mobile device that came with Android I would really love that. It would take the "how crappy is the vendor UI?" problem out of the equation when looking to purchase a phone.

wavesplash 9y ago

Oreo Battery life is atrocious on Nexus 5X. Do not upgrade if you can avoid it.

bostand 9y ago
Stop that! You cannot judge battery life after only a few days, specially after an update.
- oelmekki 9y ago
  Would you care to explain why? (provided that when we speak of battery life, we mean how much time it can go without recharging, and not after how many years you have to change it)
  - mhogomchungu 9y ago
    How do you measure battery life? 1. Do you charge it to 100% and live it alone until charge goes to 0%? 2. Do you unplug it in the morning and use it "normally" and see what charge will be left when you put it again on a charger when you go to sleep? Different use cases drains battery at a different rate and its hard to use a new phone/a phone with a new OS "normally" because more time than usual will go into trying to understand it. It may also happen that you start using the phone at a time when your phone usable is above your average.
    - oelmekki 9y ago
      I have a daily routine, always charging my phone at the same time, always using it at the same time. If after an update I notice the day after my battery is drained one hour before the usual time, it sounds pretty safe to assume the update did something regarding it. But I won't decide I know for sure it's a problem for everybody, obviously (which doesn't mean either it isn't). EDIT: but as philjohn mentioned, you can expect to use your phone more after an update (especially a major release) to try new features and because of renewed interest.
  - 9y ago

awjr 9y ago

The summary from page 9 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-thoroughly-reviewed/9/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-tho... The Good Project Treble isn't a silver bullet for Android's update problems, but it's the first time in a long time Google has changed Android to make system update development easier. I love the smaller "by the way" notification section. It really cleans up the notification panel, while still letting the user read less-important notifications at their leisure. I just wish I could demote any app to "less important," regardless of what version of Android it targets. The automatically-colored media notifications look amazing! Sometimes I cycle through songs with the notification panel just to see what it comes up with. The background processing lockdown has been a long time coming. Finally, we'll see the end of wakelocks. Picture-in-picture on a phone is great for videos, and Google's experiments with things like Google Maps look very promising. EmojiCompat and downloadable fonts means Android users should get new emojis super fast. You don't even need Android O for this to work—it will work on Android 4.4 and up! The Bad Google's revamp of notification controls has the side effect of removing fine-grained notification controls for most apps. We'll have to wait for every app to upgrade to get the controls back. The ambient notification display gets a huge downgrade, changing from showing the full notification panel to only showing tiny status bar icons. Snoozing notifications could be a great feature, but the timing options are so limited that it's useless. A max of one hour? Seriously? Give me a time picker. The disabling of Chrome's picture-in-picture support specifically for youtube.com is downright sleazy. That's not how Web browsers are supposed to act. The Ugly Updates—they're still a huge problem. Here's hoping Treble actually helps.

kinlan 9y ago
Just as a quick point and I will drop it in the article comments too. I'm the lead for our Chrome Developer Relations team. Chrome doesn't disable picture in picture for Youtube, Youtube disable it in Chrome. They listen to resize events iirc and then exit fullscreen mode (the only way to currently get to pip mode in Chrome).

lukepothier 9y ago

If it's true that Chrome on Oreo genuinely prevents picture-in-picture for YouTube specifically, that's a troubling precedent to set. Why not allow all websites to enable/disable PiP (maybe via a meta tag, in the way that tab theme colours already work)? If I query https://m.youtube.com https://m.youtube.com while emulating a Nexus 5X, the response contains: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no, target-densityDpi=medium-dpi"> Is that what is preventing PiP on YouTube or is it some sort of underhanded inter-Google arrangement between Chrome and YouTube?

kinlan 9y ago
Shared below too. Just as a quick point and I will drop it in the article comments too. I'm the lead for our Chrome Developer Relations team. Chrome doesn't disable picture in picture for Youtube, Youtube disable it in Chrome. They listen to resize events iirc and then exit fullscreen mode (the only way to currently get to pip mode in Chrome).
- lukepothier 9y ago
  That's interesting, and a relief.
  - kinlan 9y ago
    If you are interested, there is also a spec under development at the moment to make it more explicit - https://wicg.github.io/picture-in-picture/ https://wicg.github.io/picture-in-picture/
- kuschku 9y ago
  Then Chrome should have an option to stop the resize handler from firing when entering PiP mode. The user should always have the right to override what the website is doing.
  - kinlan 9y ago
    So you would like us to not tell the page what the render is doing? I'm not sure how that would play out for any number of API's that exist on the web. Developer's have consistently had the means to override the default actions of the browser (think drag and drop) but I don't think hiding side-effects or user actions helps anyone.

haddr 9y ago

Quick comment on notifications: it seems that Android has really worked them out nicely. Now I even more prefer Android notifications to iPhone notifications.

rovek 9y ago
Confirm dismissal of a notification is one of my biggest of myriad gripes with atrocious iOS design after 4 months.

afro88 9y ago

The music notifications with colours chosen from the artwork is really nice. Does anyone know much about the method behind this?

pennaMan 9y ago
I'm guessing they are using the Palette class from the support libs to extract the colors from the artwork: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/graphics/Palette.html https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v7/g...

Jedd 9y ago

After my Pixel updated recently to Oreo, being frustrated by a constant notification for Twilight (a red-tinting background app) and starting to search on google for a solution -- I discovered quite a lot of people have been asking 'how to suppress notifications on oreo' recently. FWIW you can control the notification snooze timeout, but you're going to need Tasker [1] (or similar). Interestingly I evidently bought this several years ago - can't remember why - and haven't installed it on at least the last two phones, since some version of Android a few years ago shipped with whatever native functionality Tasker used to provide for me. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....

Eridrus 9y ago
Oreo actually broke Twilight on non-Pixel devices, I'm surprised it still works for you, I guess Twilight can access the night mode driver. I'm surprised more people aren't complaining about this.
grepthisab 9y ago
In the middle of updating my Pixel XL, use Twilight daily. Will it still work after the update?
- izacus 9y ago
  Pixels have a built-in tinting mode which actually does filtering on compositor level. What does Twilight add to that?
  - Jedd 9y ago
    Gentle transition periods (I have mine set to a half hour), offsets from sunset/sunrise, hue (and other smart bulb) integration. A few other features that I don't use. I'm experimenting now with native compositor, which hopefully presents a better colour mix than Twilight was able to (good but not perfect).
- mcescalante 9y ago

xbmcuser 9y ago

Duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15171605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15171605

sdotsen 9y ago

Can anyone confirm if they brought back the ability to select a wifi/Bluetooth connection via a drop-down from the swipe down option? You know, without having to click and go into the screen to select the device you want to connect to.

Mindwipe 9y ago
They did (I don't think it was ever gone as such, they just messed up the gesture, but it's back).

AndrewDucker 9y ago

I knew Project Treble was exciting, but this is really interesting: >Treble promises to change everything. Malchev says that Treble standardizes Android hardware support to such a degree that generic Android builds compiled from AOSP can boot and run on every Treble device. In fact, these "raw AOSP" builds are what will be used for some of the CTS testing Google requires all Android OEMs to pass in order to license the Google apps—it's not just that they should work, they are required to work. Ron paints a rosy future here: >Custom ROMs shouldn't need to be painstakingly hand-crafted for individual devices anymore—a single build should be able to cover multiple Treble devices from multiple manufacturers. Imagine the next time a major new version of Android is released—on Day One of the AOSP code drop, a single build (or a small handful of builds) could cover every Treble device with an unlocked bootloader, with a "download Android 9.0 here" link on XDA or some other technical website. If this comes to fruition, the ROM community is going to go nuts. This is enormously exciting and Oreo will turn out to be a real turning point for Android. One thing that is interesting though is the implication that Android updates will get more iOS-y in the future. By that I mean certain features will be missing from updated phones because the HAL layer doesn't support it. (Copied over from previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167138)

epmaybe 9y ago
> By that I mean certain features will be missing from updated phones because the HAL layer doesn't support it. What features are you referring to? Also, will that be worse than the current situation for Android devices?

maufl 9y ago

Can somebody say something about what Treble means for other open source OS for phones, e.g. Sailfish? Might it be possible to use the vendor provided Treble core for other OSs?

pas 9y ago
Yes. The question is access and licencing.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

How many people build their own ROMs? When I bought my Pixel I tried my hand at building my own ROM, but I kept stumbling and eventually gave up. Admittedly, I was running a newer version of Ubuntu than the one they suggested in the docs, but I didn't expect it would break everything. Am I right in guessing that using a VM would be the easiest path to success? I've been a bit frustrated with android's sparse docs and unreliable build tool. Whenever I try searching for additional information, all I find are questionable tutorials and xda-developer threads. I don't have anything against the forum itself, but I find it a bit questionable to see so many people happily propagating and flashing random binaries. Is xda-developers still the main place to go when looking for help, or have any other communities started to overthrow them? Now with 8.0 out, it seems like a good chance to retry building my own ROM. I'm thinking of forking CopperheadOS [0], and applying some minor patches on top. Is anyone here running their own ROM, or Copperhead in particular? I'd love to hear about your experience, along with any pros and cons. F-Droid seems to be capable of handling all of my requirements. My only big remaining concern would be with Project Fi; I'm uncertain if the service will work if Google Apps aren't installed. [0] https://copperhead.co/android/ https://copperhead.co/android/

Veratyr 9y ago
> Am I right in guessing that using a VM would be the easiest path to success? I've been able to successfully build Android on Arch Linux. Depending on which particular ROM you're building, much of the required build environment is packaged with the source. I just needed repo's dependencies and to rebuild the prebuilt Bison with the included source. > I've been a bit frustrated with android's sparse docs and unreliable build tool. The guide at https://source.android.com/source/ https://source.android.com/source/ should result in a working AOSP build. I've followed it before without problems. My guess is you're trying to do something weird that makes sense to you that isn't really supported. > Is xda-developers still the main place to go when looking for help, or have any other communities started to overthrow them? XDA is still the primary place ROM development is carried out, yes. Finding a ROM's IRC channel can be helpful too. > Is anyone here running their own ROM, or Copperhead in particular? I built Copperhead for my Pixel but unfortunately it resulted in a bootloop so I gave up on it. I'm running PureNexus right now and might try Copperhead later. > My only big remaining concern would be with Project Fi; I'm uncertain if the service will work if Google Apps aren't installed. I don't think it'll work totally bereft of Google services but you might be able to manage it with MicroG: https://microg.org/ https://microg.org/

hateful 9y ago

They lost me at "light grey notification panel"? I spent some time trying to get the dark grey one to black with no luck - and now it's even worse.

harrygeez 9y ago
you can probably achieve it by modifying framework-res.apk. At least it worked on Nougat, copied the colors from Pixel to get its blue theme on my Nexus 5

edoceo 9y ago

The upgrade reset/reenabled all the audio alerts for mail, calendar and SMS that I had disabled. Why did Google reset my notification preferences!?

sahaskatta 9y ago

This was particularly interesting: >Google shared a fun statistic at I/O 2017: The company expects one-third of Android devices shipped in 2017 to cost under $100. Even more so considering that the US is the 2nd largest market for phones of that price point. > While the long term goal is to tackle the 5 billion users without internet access, immediately this helps the US market too. Google says the US will be the second most popular market for these sub-$100 phones.

kijin 9y ago

The third set of pictures on page 4 shows a "Rotate" notification that is 47 years old. A timestamp must have been set to zero somewhere...

wyclif 9y ago

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but what are the best hardware/carrier options in USA currently if you want vanilla Oreo that updates reliably instead of a custom ROM (w/ no carrier or third-party overlays and skins)?

js2 9y ago
Google Fi/Pixel.
Navarr 9y ago
Basically just pick up a Pixel and put it on whatever carrier you prefer. I prefer T-Mobile.

zeep 9y ago

A bit off-topic but will Android P/9.0 be the last version before you have to switch to Fuchsia?

on_and_off 9y ago
There are no official plans for Fuchsia. If anything O makes you think that Google plans to keep Android around for the long run since it aims at putting it in a good architectural position for the next 5/10 years.
pitaj 9y ago
Why would it be? Fuchsia is very much still in development AFAIK and is more of a research OS than anything else.

Severian 9y ago

I really hope they updated the audio stack to make latency lower. Right now doing anything sub 10ms with audio is impossible.

eco 9y ago
It says right in the article that there is a new low latency audio API.
- Severian 9y ago
  Yeah, I saw that at the end of the article. A little short on details. I hope it really is low latency though, and can be used for real-time synths, trackers, dj mixers, etc. It would be nice in the future to have a small attachable audio interface we could hook up to our phones or tablets and work out some tunes on the go. I hope Android can start doing the same things as iOS in this regard. Hopefully we'll see some reviews once hardware and apps make a foray into this new API.