9 ms·

Android: The word Google didn't say during the Pixel 3 event

122 points by telotortium 8y ago

xg15 8y ago
I'm just as surprised that in this whole article the word "Fuchsia" appeared exactly a single time (and that occurrence was in parentheses). Couldn't the primary reason be just that? They are currently maintaining three distinct OS stacks - Android, Chrome OS and now Fuchsia - and there have been numerous messages in the past that they would likely to unify them. So my guess is they either want to de-emphasize Android to not have the OS fragmentation leak into marketing or they really plan to drop Android even as a technical foundation at some point.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  They are just as dysfunctional as Microsoft with their WinDev vs DevTools political issues. It is not only the multiple OSes, also the developer stacks. Android, Web/PWAs, Flutter, with each one presenting themselves as the solution for delivering software on Gooogle's platforms.
  - snodnipper 8y ago
    Totally agree. There is massive confusion in the space...the tooling appears hard to maintain and often unloved. There is a whole push to get Android devs using Kotlin...I'd love to know the stats on actual usage. Personally, I see Kotlin as movement rather than progress. At some point I think it would make sense to have a clean break. Personally, I'd love to see something like rust encouraged (possibly with JS frontend to ensure huge adoption). Probably never going to happen...so with that said, we'll probably end up with dart...suitable for writing macros around machine learning code.
    - dangets 8y ago
      There was a recent blog post following KotlinConf 2018, saying 27% of top 1000 google play apps use Kotlin. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/kotlin-momentum-for-android-and-beyond.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/kotlin-mom...
  - int_19h 8y ago
    If you don't mind me asking - do you still feel that way (multiple incoherent stacks) about the Windows development ecosystem as it is today?
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Yes, completely. .NET is all about VB.NET and C#. F# doesn't get to play with all the toys, namely GUI tooling, .NET Native, EF. C++ on UWP is on transition fase from C++/CX to C++/WinRT. Which is a good thing as C++/WinRT is a C++17 framework, but maybe that could have been the original design to start with, without having an external MVP push for it (Kenny Kerr). .NET gets access to DirectX only via third party bindings, the closest it gets with Microsoft own tooling is the Visual Layer on UWP. A victim of the usual WinDev vs DevTools, because we should all be using DirectXTK instead. Ideally they would like everyone to be on .NET Core, but even with the upcoming .NET Core 3.0, not everything is going to be supported, so we keep targeting .NET Framework for our Windows deployments, as we use Java/C++ instead on multiplatorm projects. Then it looks like the JS folks took over DevTools with VSCode, Skype on React Native, VS 2017 installer on Electron, UWP Hosted Apps are now PWAs. However I could rant equally well over other ecosystems that I know well. Developer tooling from OS vendors is just another product like everything else they do sell, so naturally they fall under the same sales/marketing/support/politics.
      - int_19h 8y ago
        I'm not sure if it qualifies as incoherent, though. This is how I would sort it into buckets: Cross-platform UI - HTML/JS/Electron Backend and services - .NET Core Low-level graphics and other high-perf / low-level stuff - C++ Within each of those there are transitions in progress, like .NET -> .NET Core or C++/CX -> C++/WinRT, but it's fairly clear which one is legacy and which one is taking over; it just takes time. The buckets themselves are also fairly well defined. The only clear overlap is between all three stacks when it comes to UWP apps. But none of them try to position itself as the "one true stack" for that platform - they're presented as choices, depending on one's existing skills, perf requirements, and cross-platform needs or lack thereof.
- wtracy 8y ago
  I've never seen any evidence that Google intends to release a new consumer os called Fuschia. I'm reasonably convinced that Fuschia is a testbed for a new kernel that will eventually replace the hacked up Linux kernel underpinning chromeos and possibly Android. End-users will (theoretically) never notice that anything happened other than a normal os upgrade. That's just my take, though.
glenrivard 8y ago
Just makes sense. They will move to Fuchsia and is starting the process of moving away from the "Android" brand. We have seen it already with Wear OS and other places.
- jaytaylor 8y ago
  Thanks, I hadn't yet heard of Fuchsia. More info for any others who are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia
  - codetrotter 8y ago
    I’d heard of it but didn’t know it was open source. Is Fuchsia in a state where you can boot it in a VM? Wikipedia mentioned how to develop applications for it with Dart. Did anyone try developing applications for it? In a talk [1] by Sam Altman I saw on the YC channel on YouTube, Sam said that an advantage that startups have over big corp is that the latter are not able to “turn their battleship around” as fast, developing software for new platforms. Hmmm... (pondering). [1]: I think it was this one: https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc
    - hurricaneSlider 8y ago
      One of the writers at ARS got it to work: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-on-the-pixelbook-it-works-it-actually-works/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-o...
    - leetrout 8y ago
      I've not seen it in a VM (and I am not a low level hacker) but the getting started docs outline the build process so it would assume it's doable... https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/getting_started.md https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/getting_...
- sthu11182 8y ago
  why move away from the android brand? why not call "fuchsia" "android 10"? It would seem to me a waste of branding of a well known term around the world even if on a technical level, it is not the same. Or is there a plan to continue the use of android in some way.
xrd 8y ago
I'm using the Chromebook Pixelbook as my primary development device. I love it ergonomically: great keyboard, love the ability to flip the keyboard behind and use as a touchscreen. ChromeOS could be really big, and it makes sense as a brand to switch again from Android for the reason. But, the fact that I lose access to the sound services almost every single time I use the machine is crazy. The response from Google is not encouraging. https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!topic/chromebook-central/Va6NLP09NJM https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top... Basically: Reboot Or, just wipe all your data! If they really expect people to use these as their primary machines or even as just a browsing device, you MUST have sound working 100% of the time. Mine is setup as a developer machine so it could be that I'm bleeding edge. But I'm loathe to switch back, lose all my data, just to see if that fixes things.
- kyrra 8y ago
  Are you saying that you are in beta or Canary channel? I'm on Canary Channel to get access to crostini, but there are definitely some bugs I've hit over the last few months because of being on Canary.
  - williamstein 8y ago
    Crostini is now in stable and works well there.
    - xrd 8y ago
      Switching back to stable (I was on dev) has made audio work reliably for the last 48 hours. And, I can still use crostini/containers now that it is in stable. Crossing fingers!
      - xrd 8y ago
        I think the issue is that if you set your device up for Android Studio and want to connect an external device via USB (https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/development-environment https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/development-environm...) this command will break your sound: sudo crossystem dev_enable_udc=1 It's a PITA, but you can always enable USB, set your device to TCPIP, connect via network, and then turn off dev_enable_udc=0, and reboot...
rainygold 8y ago
Is Fuchsia considered to be Unix?
- leetrout 8y ago
  No, I don't think so. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuchsia/comments/7pywqu/how_unixlikeposix_compliant_will_fuchsia_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuchsia/comments/7pywqu/how_unixlik... https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/04/google-fuchsia-zircon-early-look https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/04/google-fuchsia-zircon-ear... https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/concepts.md https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/concepts...
- diebir 8y ago
  Any OS w/o a POSIX interface is probably a non-starter at this point. Anything POSIX is arguably UNIX. This said, who cares about the kernel? Android is not about the kernel. There are 100x more difficult problems up the stack than the kernel. My guess nothing will happen there. It has been too hard to get Android where it is.
  - wtracy 8y ago
    My pet theory is that Google intends to eventually port the existing userspace for chromeos and Android to the Fuschia kernel. As long as your apps run inside Chrome's runtime, or interact with the Android APIs instead of the low level POSIX APIs, they'll never know the difference. (And we all know that Android's existing POSIX support is minimalistic, to say the least.)
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    In a twisted way, POSIX is C's runtime that the committee wasn't willing to make part of ISO C. So unless one is coding in straight C there is very little pressure to care about POSIX anyway, as all other languages, including C++, have a better OS independent standard library.
- itomato 8y ago
  An important question as the OIN Patent Pool is directed toward a "Linux System"
legostormtroopr 8y ago
The word Google didn't say is "Android". This title has been edited, but its still unclear what word wasn't said. #stopclickbait
adrianmonk 8y ago
One possible interpretation is that someone simply decided the presentation should keep things simple and avoid confusing people by mentioning more than one brand. This is a pretty common strategy in communication: pick one main idea you want to get across, and stick to that only. If you throw in everything that you can think of but the kitchen sink, the distraction does more harm than good. Following that reasoning, Pixel is the brand of those specific phones, so that is the brand you mention on that occasion.
lawrenceyan 8y ago
I assume since Fuschia will be replacing Android soon as the all-in-one OS of Google, that they're sidelining the Android name.
jrs95 8y ago
Is this because of Fuschia? Maybe, but after Google released a phone with both a notch and a chin, I have absolutely no faith in their ability to succeed in bringing that OS to market.
rapnie 8y ago
I hear no one talking about possible privacy issues when using a ChromeBook for your work. Is that a non-issue (i.e well addressed)?

122 points by telotortium 8y ago

xg15 8y ago

I'm just as surprised that in this whole article the word "Fuchsia" appeared exactly a single time (and that occurrence was in parentheses). Couldn't the primary reason be just that? They are currently maintaining three distinct OS stacks - Android, Chrome OS and now Fuchsia - and there have been numerous messages in the past that they would likely to unify them. So my guess is they either want to de-emphasize Android to not have the OS fragmentation leak into marketing or they really plan to drop Android even as a technical foundation at some point.

pjmlp 8y ago
They are just as dysfunctional as Microsoft with their WinDev vs DevTools political issues. It is not only the multiple OSes, also the developer stacks. Android, Web/PWAs, Flutter, with each one presenting themselves as the solution for delivering software on Gooogle's platforms.
- snodnipper 8y ago
  Totally agree. There is massive confusion in the space...the tooling appears hard to maintain and often unloved. There is a whole push to get Android devs using Kotlin...I'd love to know the stats on actual usage. Personally, I see Kotlin as movement rather than progress. At some point I think it would make sense to have a clean break. Personally, I'd love to see something like rust encouraged (possibly with JS frontend to ensure huge adoption). Probably never going to happen...so with that said, we'll probably end up with dart...suitable for writing macros around machine learning code.
  - dangets 8y ago
    There was a recent blog post following KotlinConf 2018, saying 27% of top 1000 google play apps use Kotlin. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/kotlin-momentum-for-android-and-beyond.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/kotlin-mom...
- int_19h 8y ago
  If you don't mind me asking - do you still feel that way (multiple incoherent stacks) about the Windows development ecosystem as it is today?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Yes, completely. .NET is all about VB.NET and C#. F# doesn't get to play with all the toys, namely GUI tooling, .NET Native, EF. C++ on UWP is on transition fase from C++/CX to C++/WinRT. Which is a good thing as C++/WinRT is a C++17 framework, but maybe that could have been the original design to start with, without having an external MVP push for it (Kenny Kerr). .NET gets access to DirectX only via third party bindings, the closest it gets with Microsoft own tooling is the Visual Layer on UWP. A victim of the usual WinDev vs DevTools, because we should all be using DirectXTK instead. Ideally they would like everyone to be on .NET Core, but even with the upcoming .NET Core 3.0, not everything is going to be supported, so we keep targeting .NET Framework for our Windows deployments, as we use Java/C++ instead on multiplatorm projects. Then it looks like the JS folks took over DevTools with VSCode, Skype on React Native, VS 2017 installer on Electron, UWP Hosted Apps are now PWAs. However I could rant equally well over other ecosystems that I know well. Developer tooling from OS vendors is just another product like everything else they do sell, so naturally they fall under the same sales/marketing/support/politics.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      I'm not sure if it qualifies as incoherent, though. This is how I would sort it into buckets: Cross-platform UI - HTML/JS/Electron Backend and services - .NET Core Low-level graphics and other high-perf / low-level stuff - C++ Within each of those there are transitions in progress, like .NET -> .NET Core or C++/CX -> C++/WinRT, but it's fairly clear which one is legacy and which one is taking over; it just takes time. The buckets themselves are also fairly well defined. The only clear overlap is between all three stacks when it comes to UWP apps. But none of them try to position itself as the "one true stack" for that platform - they're presented as choices, depending on one's existing skills, perf requirements, and cross-platform needs or lack thereof.
wtracy 8y ago
I've never seen any evidence that Google intends to release a new consumer os called Fuschia. I'm reasonably convinced that Fuschia is a testbed for a new kernel that will eventually replace the hacked up Linux kernel underpinning chromeos and possibly Android. End-users will (theoretically) never notice that anything happened other than a normal os upgrade. That's just my take, though.

glenrivard 8y ago

Just makes sense. They will move to Fuchsia and is starting the process of moving away from the "Android" brand. We have seen it already with Wear OS and other places.

jaytaylor 8y ago
Thanks, I hadn't yet heard of Fuchsia. More info for any others who are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia
- codetrotter 8y ago
  I’d heard of it but didn’t know it was open source. Is Fuchsia in a state where you can boot it in a VM? Wikipedia mentioned how to develop applications for it with Dart. Did anyone try developing applications for it? In a talk [1] by Sam Altman I saw on the YC channel on YouTube, Sam said that an advantage that startups have over big corp is that the latter are not able to “turn their battleship around” as fast, developing software for new platforms. Hmmm... (pondering). [1]: I think it was this one: https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc
  - hurricaneSlider 8y ago
    One of the writers at ARS got it to work: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-on-the-pixelbook-it-works-it-actually-works/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-o...
  - leetrout 8y ago
    I've not seen it in a VM (and I am not a low level hacker) but the getting started docs outline the build process so it would assume it's doable... https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/getting_started.md https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/getting_...
sthu11182 8y ago
why move away from the android brand? why not call "fuchsia" "android 10"? It would seem to me a waste of branding of a well known term around the world even if on a technical level, it is not the same. Or is there a plan to continue the use of android in some way.

xrd 8y ago

I'm using the Chromebook Pixelbook as my primary development device. I love it ergonomically: great keyboard, love the ability to flip the keyboard behind and use as a touchscreen. ChromeOS could be really big, and it makes sense as a brand to switch again from Android for the reason. But, the fact that I lose access to the sound services almost every single time I use the machine is crazy. The response from Google is not encouraging. https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!topic/chromebook-central/Va6NLP09NJM https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top... Basically: Reboot Or, just wipe all your data! If they really expect people to use these as their primary machines or even as just a browsing device, you MUST have sound working 100% of the time. Mine is setup as a developer machine so it could be that I'm bleeding edge. But I'm loathe to switch back, lose all my data, just to see if that fixes things.

kyrra 8y ago
Are you saying that you are in beta or Canary channel? I'm on Canary Channel to get access to crostini, but there are definitely some bugs I've hit over the last few months because of being on Canary.
- williamstein 8y ago
  Crostini is now in stable and works well there.
  - xrd 8y ago
    Switching back to stable (I was on dev) has made audio work reliably for the last 48 hours. And, I can still use crostini/containers now that it is in stable. Crossing fingers!
    - xrd 8y ago
      I think the issue is that if you set your device up for Android Studio and want to connect an external device via USB (https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/development-environment https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/development-environm...) this command will break your sound: sudo crossystem dev_enable_udc=1 It's a PITA, but you can always enable USB, set your device to TCPIP, connect via network, and then turn off dev_enable_udc=0, and reboot...

rainygold 8y ago

Is Fuchsia considered to be Unix?

leetrout 8y ago
No, I don't think so. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuchsia/comments/7pywqu/how_unixlikeposix_compliant_will_fuchsia_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuchsia/comments/7pywqu/how_unixlik... https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/04/google-fuchsia-zircon-early-look https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/04/google-fuchsia-zircon-ear... https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/concepts.md https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/concepts...
diebir 8y ago
Any OS w/o a POSIX interface is probably a non-starter at this point. Anything POSIX is arguably UNIX. This said, who cares about the kernel? Android is not about the kernel. There are 100x more difficult problems up the stack than the kernel. My guess nothing will happen there. It has been too hard to get Android where it is.
- wtracy 8y ago
  My pet theory is that Google intends to eventually port the existing userspace for chromeos and Android to the Fuschia kernel. As long as your apps run inside Chrome's runtime, or interact with the Android APIs instead of the low level POSIX APIs, they'll never know the difference. (And we all know that Android's existing POSIX support is minimalistic, to say the least.)
- pjmlp 8y ago
  In a twisted way, POSIX is C's runtime that the committee wasn't willing to make part of ISO C. So unless one is coding in straight C there is very little pressure to care about POSIX anyway, as all other languages, including C++, have a better OS independent standard library.
itomato 8y ago
An important question as the OIN Patent Pool is directed toward a "Linux System"

legostormtroopr 8y ago

The word Google didn't say is "Android". This title has been edited, but its still unclear what word wasn't said. #stopclickbait

adrianmonk 8y ago

One possible interpretation is that someone simply decided the presentation should keep things simple and avoid confusing people by mentioning more than one brand. This is a pretty common strategy in communication: pick one main idea you want to get across, and stick to that only. If you throw in everything that you can think of but the kitchen sink, the distraction does more harm than good. Following that reasoning, Pixel is the brand of those specific phones, so that is the brand you mention on that occasion.

lawrenceyan 8y ago

I assume since Fuschia will be replacing Android soon as the all-in-one OS of Google, that they're sidelining the Android name.

jrs95 8y ago

Is this because of Fuschia? Maybe, but after Google released a phone with both a notch and a chin, I have absolutely no faith in their ability to succeed in bringing that OS to market.

rapnie 8y ago

I hear no one talking about possible privacy issues when using a ChromeBook for your work. Is that a non-issue (i.e well addressed)?