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Andy Rubin Steps Down As Chief of Google Android
Nerval's Lobster writes "Andy Rubin is stepping down as head of Google's Android division, according to the company. 'Having exceeded even the crazy ambitious goals we dreamed of for Android — and with a really strong leadership team in place — Andy's decided it's time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google,' Google CEO Larry Page wrote in a March 13 note on Google's official blog. 'Going forward, Sundar Pichai will lead Android, in addition to his existing work with Chrome and Apps.' If Rubin had any other reasons for departing, the blog posting left them unexplained. Android has been activated on 750 million devices around the world, according to Google, on top of some 25 billion apps downloaded from the Google Play storefront. It remains to be seen whether 'start a new chapter at Google' is some sort of polite corporate euphemism for Rubin's eventual departure from the company, or if he really is taking over another project or division. Page suggested in his blog posting that Pichai 'will do a tremendous job doubling down on Android as we work to push the ecosystem forward,' which doesn't offer a lot about the operating system's future direction: Pichai does have direct control over three core platforms, raising the possibility that Google could try and exploit further crossovers between the three. But what form that will take is anyone's guess."
When I am asked whether somebody should be moved from their current position, where I know they are doing a very good job to something else, which may seem to be more prestigious, I generally advise to increase their pay and keep them in their current job.
I am not saying anything...
You can't handle the truth.
I use a Transformer Prime w/ keyboard dock as my primary laptop. Thanks to a great app ecosystem, it's more useful than a ($1300!) Chromebook.
Here's hoping Pichai works toward realizing the potential of Android, and phases out Chrome as an "operating system."
I use a Transformer Prime w/ keyboard dock as my primary laptop. Thanks to a great app ecosystem, it's more useful than a ($1300!) Chromebook.
Can a docked Transformer Prime display two things side-by-side yet? Android's policy of all maximized all the time is one of the things keeping me on my aging netbook.
Maybe Sundar Pichai will be less of an arrogant idiot about certain things:
* Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.
* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
* MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
* Maps crashes all the time. Surely you know that. Fix it.
* Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest.
* Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted.
* Android is not a community project. Fix that.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
This marks the beginning of the end for Teh Google !! The players are getting out !!
RIM---BLACKBERRY RULEZ !!
It's a good thing they announced the new pope before this news broke...saves us from the 50 Andy Rubin is the new pope jokes...
People in high visibility roles who decide to move on will make sure the world knows of their intentions to leave well in advance, to squelch any rumors that they've been pushed aside.
Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.
Home button. Or are you referring to applications that hold services open?
Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
Android 4.2 fixed that on my Nexus 7 tablet.
MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
True, I had trouble copying files between my Nexus 7 tablet and my Xubuntu laptop. But other than MTP, what royalty-free protocol for transferring files is compatible with a Windows host without having to download drivers, become an administrator, and install them? FAT over MSC, the solution used in Android 2.x, was found not to be royalty-free; Microsoft has been winning lawsuits with its FAT patents.
Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest.
AOSP is a Linux distribution, but it is not GNU/Linux. If GNU/Linux had been marketed as RMS had suggested, there would have been no dishonesty.
Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? All popular Android devices, except for early AT&T devices (many of which have since been updated) and certain Nook products, have the "Unknown sources" switch, and Nexus devices can be reformatted to rootable using commands like fastboot oem unlock.
Android is not a community project.
In what way?
There is no reason that Android couldn't be built on top of any other kernel like FreeBSD, XNU etc...
Other than that nobody has yet bothered to do it. Show me a working ROM of Android/kFreeBSD working on a Nexus device, and I'll agree that Android is kernel-independent in the same way Debian is becoming.
Why is a move toward feature parity between Chrome for Android and Chrome for PCs "reason to fear"?
Andy Rubin created Android. This is a big achievement.
What are the achievements of Sundar Pichai? His wikipedia page reveals nothing. He was a talking person for Google in introducing some recent new technology.
But what did he actually achieve?
He looks like a career manager, equipped with all the right tools: thirst for power, unlimited patients to sit through all the meetings, etc.
It looks like his main skill and achievement is getting to the high positions, and he seems to succeed in that.
That's why I am not hopeful for any changes in Android.
Are Google burying the news of Andy Rubin's departure?
Using the home button does not end the app, it's still running in the background using memory.
So I close Firefox on my GNU/Linux laptop. When I open it again, it hardly accesses the disk at all; that's because Firefox is still present in the disk cache using memory. Likewise, in Android, when the user switches away from a particular application's activity, Android keeps the application in a "cached" state until another process needs the RAM, assuming that the user is likely to return to the application. It's like the early controversy over SuperFetch in Windows Vista and Windows 7: What use is RAM if you're not using it? Or are you assuming that a device can cut power to half the RAM?
Also on my 'grinds my gears' list are apps that reactivate themselves after being force stopped.
Including applications associated with background services that other applications use, or applications that receive notifications as part of doing their job?
Am I the only one that thinks that Android still seems like an amateurish hack?
Yep.
Am I the only one that thinks that Android still seems like an amateurish hack?
Yep.
Hey, be fair. There are probably millions of apple fanboys who honestly "think" whatever their church elders tell them they should be thinking.
[On] my Samsung Galaxy s3 [...] I also encountered "not enough memory" message when starting up app that takes a lot of memory. Killing running apps was solution.
I haven't seen that happen on my Nexus 7 tablet. Android is supposed to automatically kill applications that have no visible activities or running services. Perhaps Samsung screwed something up with TouchWiz. One more reason to stick with mostly stock Android (Nexus or CM), I guess.
The other option I see is running a samba server on the phone.
I ended up running a file manager with a Samba client on my Nexus 7 and running a Samba server on my laptop.
Which lawsuits did Microsoft ever win?
Microsoft v. TomTom was taken to U.S. court and the International Trade Commission but was settled. A separate case in Germany resulted in a win for Microsoft at the German Supreme Court.
Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Agreed, back back back back back is no way to exit an app, the idea that I always want to move forward is silly. Sometimes I just want to say 'I've finished with this close it' and that does need a standard way.
MTP is too slow, ditch it, I just want file access. Agreed, I was shocked to 'upgrade' to Windows 7 (which has MTP support) only to find it was unbelievably slower due to the MTP than my old unupgraded XP box. MTP is the work of idiots, Android should show as a file system in Windows, (is it an option somewhere?)
"Maps crashes all the time" never had this problem.
" Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest" Pedantic.
"Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted." Don't care, unlocking shouldn't be necessary.
"Android is not a community project. Fix that.", nah, it's got 50 large corps working on it, stuff like the Galaxy Note, Sony Ericcson widget kit etc. so I'm happy with that.
Are Google burying the news of Andy Rubin's departure?
Rubin isn't leaving Google, he's moving to another project.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Am I the only one that thinks that Android still seems like an amateurish hack?
No you're not. Android is the Windows of the mobile world.
(And funnily enough, Windows Phone isn't!)
[An Android application with no visible activity and no running service is] not in a cached state, is it? It's in a running in the background state. Often slowing the device down.
The process still exists in RAM, but it's blocked until it receives an intent to start an activity or service, and the scheduler skips it. You're right that some poorly engineered applications keep a service open longer than necessary, such as a music player that keeps its audio decoder service decoding silence instead of shutting off at the end of a song, but that's by no means limited to Android.
Even after the VFAT patents have expired, FAT32 officially tops out at 32 GB, and ExFAT's patents still have years to go before they expire.
A much more likely, and indeed common case is an Android app that is repeatedly polling some web service.
This is also solvable: file a bug report on the developer's issue tracker requesting a switch to GCM, so that the application can receive a push notification from Google that the web service has new information to pass.
Android tends to slow down, and reduce battery life over time as more apps are left running in the background. iOS doesn't.
Android also has a tool to tell the user what application is causing the device to wake up and drain its battery. For me, "Screen" is the biggest culprit by far, taking a two-thirds supermajority of juice on my Nexus 7. From there, if the user thinks an application is misbehaving, it's just two taps to uninstall it until the developer pushes out a fixed version. In any case, I don't see how that outweighs several application categories being absent from the App Store for reasons other than battery use.
There a quite a large number of reports that he (like Jeff Huber, who just stepped down as Senior VP of Geo and Commerce as those two units are being split up and merged with other units -- Geo with Search and Commerce with Advertising) is moving to Google's "X Lab", so "secret project at Google" seems likely.
You can ask [for proper push notification support], but you won't necessarily get.
Likewise, developers can ask for a review with three or more stars, but they won't necessarily get.
EVERY time Android comes out worse, you go back to that old saw?
Anybody who wants to take advantage of the pros of iOS but also run a forbidden application would need to either carry two devices or buy a second computer to run Xcode and pay $99 per year to join the developer program. And if the concern is saving battery charge for making an urgent phone call, that's all the more reason to carry a tablet and a feature phone.
They don't want roulette - Russian or chat.
A lot of people who don't want chat roulette and don't want Russian roulette want wardriving. And a lot of people who don't want any of those three want short-term video rentals. Or a launcher that adapts to a particular disability. Or emulators to play classic games that they own a copy of on floppy or CD but whose publisher has since gone out of business. Or a web browser supporting upload of media types other than pictures and video to a web page. Or a web browser supporting any of several other features that Apple purposely leaves out of Safari.
That's the beauty of my "old saw" as you call it: you can't get away with proving that nobody wants one thing; you have to prove that nobody wants a whole bunch of things. iOS is not for everyone.
What have IAP subscriptions got to do with video rental? Nothing.
I thought IAP was the only way to charge the user for something within an app.
That would be because it's for iOS developers.
Then what analogous document is for people considering becoming iOS developers?
There are apps show maps of local public access hotspots.
Which platform do you recommend for running apps to collect data to contribute to the database used by the "apps show maps of local public access hotspots" that you mention?