6 ms·

Android 3.0 Platform Preview and Updated SDK Tools

69 points by daleharvey 16y ago

dpcan 16y ago
This is great, but the phone market can't seem to keep up with these new versions. I was just at a wireless store last night and their one in-store device would only run 1.6. Their sold out device was only 2.1 The next device was still 2.1, "hopefully" 2.2 I asked if I could update, they said it wasn't possible and they didn't know for sure when it would be. As a developer, what am I supposed to do here? Develop for 2.2 and 3.0 and just wait it out? Nope. I still have to make my games compatible with 1.6 if I want to reach the majority of the market.
- Kylekramer 16y ago
  Not really. Targeting 2.1+ gets you 87% of the market [1], a clear majority. Beyond that, does every Android thread have to talk about this? It is a well covered topic, everyone knows the deal. Android has a problem with updates. It isn't ideal, but things are what they are. We all know this. How about we focus on what this post is about, a 3.0 preview. 1. http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    Plus the smartphone market (and Android's share of the same) are growing briskly so it makes sense to forge ahead, for both developers and Google. I don't know if Google planned for this, or they just got lucky but even with all the moaning and groaning about it they've got over 50% on 2.2 in 6 months.
- cryptoz 16y ago
  The percentage of users that have a Windows computer running only Windows XP is much higher than the percentage of users with an Android phone running 1.6. Like, much much higher. I think Google is doing a fantastic job keeping users up to date, much better than most OS vendors out there.
  - rimantas 16y ago
    How many of those with XP are using it because they want to, not because they cannot upgrade compared to those with older versions of Android?
    - zmmmmm 16y ago
      I imagine that quite a lot of the people on XP cannot upgrade. Quite a lot are probably using it because their hardware is just not supported on new versions of Windows. The Vista change in driver model basically meant a huge amount of old hardware became useless. Another bunch of them are using it because they don't want to pay for a new version of Windows, which is prohibitively expensive to buy "off the shelf". So they "cannot" afford to. And another fraction cannot upgrade because their computer is just too slow or doesn't have the RAM to run newer versions. And another fraction have older software that isn't compatible or is not supported on newer versions of Windows (the reason most corporate and business customers are probably stuck there). So actually I think quite a lot of Windows users are "stuck" on older versions, and in many ways they are worse off than Android users because there is not thriving community of Windows ROM developers making free upgrades.
    - Andys 16y ago
      How many just don't care that they're running XP?
- abstractbill 16y ago
  The free new handset I got from Sprint in exchange for renewing my contract came with 2.2, and they had tons of them in stock.
jjcm 16y ago
A video of Honeycomb's new "Holographic" UI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUGNCIozp0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUGNCIozp0 Not sure yet how well that theme will go over. When the Sense UI came out it was certainly more flashy and pretty than the stock UI, but at a major cost to battery life. Hopefully holographic has mitigated some of this. It'll be interesting to see their UI builder in action once they finalize it. One of the larger gripes I've heard from iOS developers turned android is the lack of decent/fast UI construction tools.
- tedreed 16y ago
  I've used my current phone with both SenseUI and without, and did not notice any difference in battery life, FWIW.
- ugh 16y ago
  I’m worried about the proliferation of so many different themes. There was never an Android device I picked up and felt immediately familiar with and Google now seems to encourage this by making Honeycomb again look entirely different. I don’t really understand that. Couldn’t they just dial up the visual attractiveness without going so far away from how Android looks on Phones? The behavior is probably (mostly?) unchanged which is good but crass visual changes can be disorienting. (I’m also personally not a fan of the aesthetics but the iPad’s frequent kitschyness is in my eyes in a different way but equally ugly.)
- argarg 16y ago
  I don't know if you ever used an Android phone, but I've always preferred the stock UI by far compared to SenseUI, and as another replier mentioned, I don't think there is a noticeable battery life difference between the two.
blinkingled 16y ago
From the article - High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework lets developers add great visual effects to their apps. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. For adding rich 3D scenes, developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript. This ought to do a lot of good for smoothness and sleek animations. The selection ability is also great - looks like Apps can selectively enable hardware acceleration based on their needs and underlying hardware capabilities. Support for multicore processor architectures: Android 3.0 is optimized to run on either single- or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance. Would be great to know what they did to optimize it for dual core - may be some parallel GC tweaks, and some API additions for task bindings etc. Rich multimedia: New multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, give developers new ways to bring rich content to users. DRM - NetFlix can finally shut up! I am not unhappy as it is pluggable - if I don't want it I won't install the plug. Enhancements for enterprise: New administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration, help enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively. Encrypted storage is too little too late unless I am misunderstanding it - this looks like it's limited to storing Exchange data only, and not system wide encryption. But they are going somewhere with it which is good.
- masklinn 16y ago
  > I am not unhappy as it is pluggable - if I don't want it I won't install the plug. Pluggable does not mean "as a plugin". As a user, you won't be given any choice in the matter (short of not installing the application at all of course).
  - blinkingled 16y ago
    Right - I meant if I don't need/install Netflix for example, the DRM plug won't be on my phone. So yeah - I might get Netflix bundled on VZW phone but I have a choice to go with another one that doesn't ship with it.
junkbit 16y ago
The emulator is unusably slow on my Core2Duo. Launching the browser spikes 100% cpu then timesout. Anybody have better luck on a modern i7?
- blinkingled 16y ago
  On my i7 Win7 laptop with 8G RAM it isn't exactly fast - but it is borderline acceptable. Core2 should not be drastically different - have you tried increasing the default RAMSIZE from 96Mb to say 256Mb?
  - junkbit 16y ago
    Yes I did 1024 to simulate the tablets. I'm going to try switching from openjdk-6 to sun. EDIT: still no better. sun-java6-jdk is in the Ubuntu partner repo for maverick now though
    - jamie 16y ago
      Slow is being charitable. It's molasses. This is what the docs say: About emulator performance Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer and the WXGA screen is significantly larger than what the emulator normally handles, emulator performance is much slower than usual. In particular, initializing the emulator can be slow and can take several minutes, depending on your hardware. When the emulator is booting there is limited user feedback, so please be patient and continue waiting until you see the home screen appear. We're working hard to resolve the performance issues in the emulator and it will improve in future releases. In the meantime, we wanted to give developers access to new APIs and an basic test environment as early as possible. Keeping in mind that performance on the emulator does not reflect the speed or performance of apps on actual devices running Android 3.0, developing and testing on the emulator is still an important tool in evaluating your application's appearance and functionality on the new platform.
- zrgiu 16y ago
  it's unusable on my i5 either. clicks take 20-30 seconds to register. Just sad
macrael 16y ago
Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. Does this mean that 3.0 is not going to ship on phones? I haven't seen it demoed on phones at all.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  While I'm not sure there's any technical reason that 3.0 won't run on phones (once they release the code to AOSP), it seems that strategically at least this release is similar to iOS 3.2. (3.2 was iPad-only, 4.0 and 4.1 were iPhone/iPod-only, and 4.2 finally unified the two branches.)
  - Zev 16y ago
    ..this release is similar to iOS 3.2. (3.2 was iPad-only, 4.0 and 4.1 were iPhone/iPod-only, and 4.2 finally unified the two branches.) My guess is that iOS 3.2 for the iPad was a fork of an earlier version of iOS, worked on by a separate group of people than those that were working on iOS 4.0 for the iPhone[1]. The split was because it took a few months for it to all be merged back together in a stable way, not for any big strategic reason. 1. Remember, the iPad was a big secret - even within Apple.
    - mbrubeck 16y ago
      Even though the secrecy around Honeycomb doesn't compare to the iPad, Google still does Android development in secret. Privileged hardware partners get to participate in development of the next release before it's revealed to the public (or even to other handset makers). Aside from secrecy, there are other reasons (like product schedules) that Honeycomb may have been developed on a branch, concurrent with Gingerbread development. Previous releases like Cupcake and Donut were developed on long-lived branches, with frequent merges from the AOSP mainline. The end result could be the same, even if the rationale is slightly different.
- orangecat 16y ago
  My question as well, especially since it's coming so soon after Gingerbread. My guess would be that Google will only advise its use for tablets (although being open source, people will certainly try to put it on phones), and then the next major Android release will be "universal".
callahad 16y ago
I'm stuck in 90° rotated mode :(

69 points by daleharvey 16y ago

dpcan 16y ago

This is great, but the phone market can't seem to keep up with these new versions. I was just at a wireless store last night and their one in-store device would only run 1.6. Their sold out device was only 2.1 The next device was still 2.1, "hopefully" 2.2 I asked if I could update, they said it wasn't possible and they didn't know for sure when it would be. As a developer, what am I supposed to do here? Develop for 2.2 and 3.0 and just wait it out? Nope. I still have to make my games compatible with 1.6 if I want to reach the majority of the market.

Kylekramer 16y ago
Not really. Targeting 2.1+ gets you 87% of the market [1], a clear majority. Beyond that, does every Android thread have to talk about this? It is a well covered topic, everyone knows the deal. Android has a problem with updates. It isn't ideal, but things are what they are. We all know this. How about we focus on what this post is about, a 3.0 preview. 1. http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  Plus the smartphone market (and Android's share of the same) are growing briskly so it makes sense to forge ahead, for both developers and Google. I don't know if Google planned for this, or they just got lucky but even with all the moaning and groaning about it they've got over 50% on 2.2 in 6 months.
cryptoz 16y ago
The percentage of users that have a Windows computer running only Windows XP is much higher than the percentage of users with an Android phone running 1.6. Like, much much higher. I think Google is doing a fantastic job keeping users up to date, much better than most OS vendors out there.
- rimantas 16y ago
  How many of those with XP are using it because they want to, not because they cannot upgrade compared to those with older versions of Android?
  - zmmmmm 16y ago
    I imagine that quite a lot of the people on XP cannot upgrade. Quite a lot are probably using it because their hardware is just not supported on new versions of Windows. The Vista change in driver model basically meant a huge amount of old hardware became useless. Another bunch of them are using it because they don't want to pay for a new version of Windows, which is prohibitively expensive to buy "off the shelf". So they "cannot" afford to. And another fraction cannot upgrade because their computer is just too slow or doesn't have the RAM to run newer versions. And another fraction have older software that isn't compatible or is not supported on newer versions of Windows (the reason most corporate and business customers are probably stuck there). So actually I think quite a lot of Windows users are "stuck" on older versions, and in many ways they are worse off than Android users because there is not thriving community of Windows ROM developers making free upgrades.
  - Andys 16y ago
    How many just don't care that they're running XP?
abstractbill 16y ago
The free new handset I got from Sprint in exchange for renewing my contract came with 2.2, and they had tons of them in stock.

jjcm 16y ago

A video of Honeycomb's new "Holographic" UI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUGNCIozp0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUGNCIozp0 Not sure yet how well that theme will go over. When the Sense UI came out it was certainly more flashy and pretty than the stock UI, but at a major cost to battery life. Hopefully holographic has mitigated some of this. It'll be interesting to see their UI builder in action once they finalize it. One of the larger gripes I've heard from iOS developers turned android is the lack of decent/fast UI construction tools.

tedreed 16y ago
I've used my current phone with both SenseUI and without, and did not notice any difference in battery life, FWIW.
ugh 16y ago
I’m worried about the proliferation of so many different themes. There was never an Android device I picked up and felt immediately familiar with and Google now seems to encourage this by making Honeycomb again look entirely different. I don’t really understand that. Couldn’t they just dial up the visual attractiveness without going so far away from how Android looks on Phones? The behavior is probably (mostly?) unchanged which is good but crass visual changes can be disorienting. (I’m also personally not a fan of the aesthetics but the iPad’s frequent kitschyness is in my eyes in a different way but equally ugly.)
argarg 16y ago
I don't know if you ever used an Android phone, but I've always preferred the stock UI by far compared to SenseUI, and as another replier mentioned, I don't think there is a noticeable battery life difference between the two.

blinkingled 16y ago

From the article - High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework lets developers add great visual effects to their apps. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. For adding rich 3D scenes, developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript. This ought to do a lot of good for smoothness and sleek animations. The selection ability is also great - looks like Apps can selectively enable hardware acceleration based on their needs and underlying hardware capabilities. Support for multicore processor architectures: Android 3.0 is optimized to run on either single- or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance. Would be great to know what they did to optimize it for dual core - may be some parallel GC tweaks, and some API additions for task bindings etc. Rich multimedia: New multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, give developers new ways to bring rich content to users. DRM - NetFlix can finally shut up! I am not unhappy as it is pluggable - if I don't want it I won't install the plug. Enhancements for enterprise: New administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration, help enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively. Encrypted storage is too little too late unless I am misunderstanding it - this looks like it's limited to storing Exchange data only, and not system wide encryption. But they are going somewhere with it which is good.

masklinn 16y ago
> I am not unhappy as it is pluggable - if I don't want it I won't install the plug. Pluggable does not mean "as a plugin". As a user, you won't be given any choice in the matter (short of not installing the application at all of course).
- blinkingled 16y ago
  Right - I meant if I don't need/install Netflix for example, the DRM plug won't be on my phone. So yeah - I might get Netflix bundled on VZW phone but I have a choice to go with another one that doesn't ship with it.

junkbit 16y ago

The emulator is unusably slow on my Core2Duo. Launching the browser spikes 100% cpu then timesout. Anybody have better luck on a modern i7?

blinkingled 16y ago
On my i7 Win7 laptop with 8G RAM it isn't exactly fast - but it is borderline acceptable. Core2 should not be drastically different - have you tried increasing the default RAMSIZE from 96Mb to say 256Mb?
- junkbit 16y ago
  Yes I did 1024 to simulate the tablets. I'm going to try switching from openjdk-6 to sun. EDIT: still no better. sun-java6-jdk is in the Ubuntu partner repo for maverick now though
  - jamie 16y ago
    Slow is being charitable. It's molasses. This is what the docs say: About emulator performance Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer and the WXGA screen is significantly larger than what the emulator normally handles, emulator performance is much slower than usual. In particular, initializing the emulator can be slow and can take several minutes, depending on your hardware. When the emulator is booting there is limited user feedback, so please be patient and continue waiting until you see the home screen appear. We're working hard to resolve the performance issues in the emulator and it will improve in future releases. In the meantime, we wanted to give developers access to new APIs and an basic test environment as early as possible. Keeping in mind that performance on the emulator does not reflect the speed or performance of apps on actual devices running Android 3.0, developing and testing on the emulator is still an important tool in evaluating your application's appearance and functionality on the new platform.
zrgiu 16y ago
it's unusable on my i5 either. clicks take 20-30 seconds to register. Just sad

macrael 16y ago

Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. Does this mean that 3.0 is not going to ship on phones? I haven't seen it demoed on phones at all.

mbrubeck 16y ago
While I'm not sure there's any technical reason that 3.0 won't run on phones (once they release the code to AOSP), it seems that strategically at least this release is similar to iOS 3.2. (3.2 was iPad-only, 4.0 and 4.1 were iPhone/iPod-only, and 4.2 finally unified the two branches.)
- Zev 16y ago
  ..this release is similar to iOS 3.2. (3.2 was iPad-only, 4.0 and 4.1 were iPhone/iPod-only, and 4.2 finally unified the two branches.) My guess is that iOS 3.2 for the iPad was a fork of an earlier version of iOS, worked on by a separate group of people than those that were working on iOS 4.0 for the iPhone[1]. The split was because it took a few months for it to all be merged back together in a stable way, not for any big strategic reason. 1. Remember, the iPad was a big secret - even within Apple.
  - mbrubeck 16y ago
    Even though the secrecy around Honeycomb doesn't compare to the iPad, Google still does Android development in secret. Privileged hardware partners get to participate in development of the next release before it's revealed to the public (or even to other handset makers). Aside from secrecy, there are other reasons (like product schedules) that Honeycomb may have been developed on a branch, concurrent with Gingerbread development. Previous releases like Cupcake and Donut were developed on long-lived branches, with frequent merges from the AOSP mainline. The end result could be the same, even if the rationale is slightly different.
orangecat 16y ago
My question as well, especially since it's coming so soon after Gingerbread. My guess would be that Google will only advise its use for tablets (although being open source, people will certainly try to put it on phones), and then the next major Android release will be "universal".

callahad 16y ago

I'm stuck in 90° rotated mode :(