Google Releases Android 5.0 Lollipop SDK and Nexus Preview Images

An anonymous reader writes: As promised, Google today released the full Android 5.0 Lollipop SDK, along with updated developer images for Nexus 5, Nexus 7 (2013), ADT-1, and the Android emulator. The latest version of Android isn't available just yet, but the company is giving developers a head start (about two weeks), so they can test their apps on the new platform. To get the latest Android 5.0 SDK, fire up Android SDK Manager and head to the Tools section, followed by latest SDK Tools, SDK Platform-tools, and SDK Build-tools. Select everything under the Android 5.0 section, hit "Install packages...", accept the licensing agreement, and finally click Install. Google also rolled out updated resources for their Material Design guidelines.

Comments

Just make it fast

[danbob999]

Android didn't need a new design overhaul. I just hope the new OS is fast and functional.

Re:Just make it fast

[DaHat]

How fast can any OS (or person) run with a stick up ones rear the way the Lollipop mascot seems to ?

Re:Just make it fast

[Anonymous Coward]

They did need a design overhaul. Windows Phone with it's tile layout was way superior.

Re:Just make it fast

[PhrostyMcByte]

This please. My tablet becoming unusable while automatic updates get installed is mind-boggling.

Re:Just make it fast

[_UnderTow_]

I had the same issue with my Note 3. With it deciding that 10 apps needed to be updated at the same time I was using my phone for navigation or transferring money to my spending account.

I decided to just shut off all automatic updates from the google play store, and I've been much happier since. I still get notifications when apps need updating, which is fine since I can decide to update when it makes sense for me. I wouldn't mind the auto updates if it didn't make the phone damn near unusable while it was happening.

Re:Just make it fast

[rtb61]

It should have been named 'Lamington' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... then Google could have held global 'lamington' bake sales. So instead of a stick in the butt or a very long penis that touches the ground, we could have a chocolate and coconut covered bugdroid.

Re:Just make it fast

[kthreadd]

I see. It appears that Android is not as easy to customize as I thought, that you could just replace individual components like the UI if you wanted.

Re:Just make it fast

[rwa2]

Yes it's faster, since they're migrating from the Dalvik JIT runtime to the new ART precompiled app runtime.
But actually, you don't really have to wait for Android 5 to hit your device, it's been buried in the developer options dialog since 4.2.2 http://www.cultofandroid.com/5...

Hit our Nexus 4 and 5 with this yesterday after reading about it in an arstechnica comment... they're much snappier opening and switching between apps now.

Re:Just make it fast

[Scot Seese]

One of the drivers behind Android L was improving performance on low to mid range Android devices. Google is interested in improving the Android experience for those customers with the 1 cent contract phones, and other flotsam at the bottom of the product menu.

Android L allegedly will perform smoothly, even on devices with 512mb RAM. Which should be a win for those customers with 1gb and 2gb handsets made within the last 2-3 years, as they will be lightning fast.

Re:Just make it fast

[JackAxe]

You can easily replace the Launcher -- which is like the Finder on a Mac -- so the UI; 3rd party Launchers can even be downloaded from GooglePlay's store. You can also change out any Android's default components and use a 3rd party options. So a few examples, maps, browser, mail, of course keyboards, etc... You can even completely get rid of Google's options. Android does not force you to conform and even provides the tools for free that work on pretty much any computer so that you can change what you don't like -- given you have the know how.

And with Android, you can downgrade to an older OS and still be supported by Google's services, or pick and choose from the tons of 3rd party options if you don't want to use anything Google.

Android is easy to customize for most. Now for the person who thinks there child is a genius because they know how to launch an app, probably not, and they especially would not be able to downgrade an OS.

And experience always trumps assumptions -- which are generally based on bias -- so why not actually give Android a try and experience it for yourself?

Re:Just make it fast

[arglebargle_xiv]

Don't check for updates, do not notify for updates

Isn't this the Android default anyway? If you want an update to your OS (not your apps, your OS) you throw away your current phone and buy a new one.

Android

[Anonymous Coward]

Android 5.0? What about helping your current user base? There's still a lot of users stuck with lower versions of Android.

It's been over 300 days since the release of Kit Kat but only 25% of the devices run it.

Re:Android

[CastrTroy]

If it's anything like the rest of Android development, if you haven't used it in a few months, it's most likely completely changed from the way you did it last time.

Re:Android

[tepples]

Nexus devices are supported about as long as iDevices. And Windows Phone 7 devices never got 8 either.

Re:Android

[fustakrakich]

Sounds perfectly cromulent to me...

Re:Android

[radl33t]

Running kitkat on my 3.5 year old galaxy s2 for about 9 months. phone is awesome as hell.

Re:Android

[mwvdlee]

I bought a Nexus 7 2012 in the assumption Google would update the OS as long as the hardware could handle it.
Luckily CyanogenMod still fully supports it.

Re:Android

[Anonymous Coward]

2012 Nexus 7 is getting 5.0:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/all-current-nexuses-including-nexus-4-and-2012-nexus-7-will-get-lollipop/

Re:Android

[Ichijo]

There's still a lot of users stuck with lower versions of Android.

That's not google's problem, that's handset manufacturer's problem.

It's also Google's problem if they don't want a lot of users stuck on older versions of Android.

Re:Android

[swillden]

I bought a Nexus 7 2012 in the assumption Google would update the OS as long as the hardware could handle it. Luckily CyanogenMod still fully supports it.

If you didn't have CM on it, you'd get 5.0 on November 3rd. Android has announced that N7 (2012 and 2013) will be in the first group of Nexus devices to get it.

Re:Android

[ArhcAngel]

It WAS the OEM's problem that's why they began locking their sh!t down. They couldn't have you upgrading the software on your device and not need the newest shiny. How would they stay in business if they let you do that. I bought the original Nook Color. Arguably the most hacker friendly android device ever made. I am running KitKat 4.4.4 on it ATM and it runs faster than when it was new. B&N realized to their horror they had not locked consumers into the B&N ecosystem and future devices were considerably less friendly to customization. I also have a Galaxy S (D700) running KitKat 4.4.4 with no noticeable issues. The hoops needed to get KitKat on the Galaxy SII (D710) were a veritable nightmare because Samsung started mucking with the works to keep me out. It has gotten so bad root ability and customize ability are now selling features for some OEMs.

Re:Android

[tepples]

A fourth-generation iPod touch purchased the day before the fifth-generation iPod touch came out had less than a year before Apple introduced an iOS version that it couldn't handle. The fourth-generation iPod touch had 256 MB of RAM, but iOS 7, the first iOS not from Nintendo to recognize Bluetooth joysticks, required twice that.

Re:Android

[adolf]

Care to share the name of that mysterious ROM?

Sure thing!

Liquidsmooth. Running on a VZW Motorola Droid Bionic. Beautiful, simple. Fast. Easy.

Re:Android

[markass530]

can you not read? The 2012 nexus is getting Lolipop

Re:Android

[drinkypoo]

CM has ad-hoc wifi and usb mass storage support. Will I get that with this new version of Android, or is Google still ignoring those issues?

Re:Android

[Rob Y.]

It's not quite the same, since any Dell machine can be upgraded by its owner. The problem with Android devices and upgrades is that the devices tend to be locked down so that only the manufacturer can provide updates. And because of all the modifications they make, it's not that easy to do. Plus, in the US at least, planned obsolescence is the standard. Only now is the competition becoming stiff enough that timely upgrades are a possible selling point.

it seems to me that there are 3 viable models.
1. Stick with vanilla Android and generate sales based on the promise of rapid updates - Moto seems to be following this model. A variant would be to sell unlocked devices and let Cyanogenmod do the work of providing the OS.
2. Skin the hell out of it, make your changes actually useful, and charge a premium. Samsung? Don't know how useful their changes are, and they're starting to lose the ability to charge that premium. Perhaps they should course correct and move to a model where they charge less upfront, but make timely updates available - for a nominal price.
3. Go for the lowest possible price and assume your devices are more or less disposable. Stinks, but seems to be happening. Maybe Android One devices will do an end run around this model and provide low-cost, modest performance devices with timely upgrades.

Re:Android

[swillden]

CM has ad-hoc wifi and usb mass storage support. Will I get that with this new version of Android, or is Google still ignoring those issues?

I'm sure no version of Android from Google will include USB mass storage. Doing that requires unmounting /data to remount it as USB mass storage, which creates all sorts of issues. That's why Android switched to using MTP -- back in J, IIRC. It was something of an issue back then because MTP support wasn't very good on the major desktop OSes, but it is now so I'm not sure why anyone would care for the inferior solution. I'm also somewhat surprised that CM still manages to offer it and suspect that continuing to offer it will become increasingly difficult, requiring increasingly deep modifications of the OS and breaking more and more apps, because the assumption that /data is never unmounted is getting deeply ingrained in the system.

Now that Lollipop has SELinux enabled in enforcing mode I think CM will have to start hacking out SELinux rules to support UMS, or disable SELinux altogether.

I don't believe L includes ad-hoc Wifi. I'm curious to hear what you use it for. I've never felt any need for it, and it's not obvious to me how it would be useful if you aren't running servers on your mobile device, which would require a rooted OS anyway. If you're going to break the security model by rooting you might as well go all the way and install CM or similar. I expect the CM guys will have an L-based version not too long after release, so if CM is what you need, you should use it.

Re:Android

[drinkypoo]

I don't believe L includes ad-hoc Wifi. I'm curious to hear what you use it for.

I want to experiment with mesh networking, which requires it.

As for mass storage, I meant as a USB host, I should have been more clear. Most devices have support for this, but vanilla android doesn't.

Re: Android

[Redbehrend]

I agree CM is falling behind in a year they are gonna wish they took Googles offer lol
There are some awesome rom teams blowing CM out of the water right now.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

The 2012 Nexus 7 supports usb mass storage and has supported it even with the original version of Android shipped.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

I'm sure no version of Android from Google will include USB mass storage. Doing that requires unmounting /data to remount it as USB mass storage, which creates all sorts of issues.

That makes no sense what so ever. Tell me again how USB Mass Storage is magically different from the myriad of devices out there which have SD cards?
Also the Nexus 7 2012 has supported USB Mass Storage from the beginning. It mounts in /etc/usb. But you can't move apps to it. You can however move apps to external SD cards on devices which have support for them.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

Vanilla Android most definitely does support USB OTG and I use a Nexus 7 with USB based telemetry for my quad copter. By default out of the box it won't automount USB devices, but there are two options. Either buy an app that sits and waits for a USB Mass Storage device which will automount it, or root the device with the instructions on Google's own website (rooting a Nexus device is perfectly legit) and follow some video guides on setting it up to automount.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

Right because rooting android and editing a text file or simply spending $4 is so much easier than installing CM.

Something has been validatedvalidated in this thread that's for sure.

Re:Android

[swillden]

That makes no sense what so ever. Tell me again how USB Mass Storage is magically different from the myriad of devices out there which have SD cards?

I was talking about the phone as a target device, and my explanation as to why it changed to use MTP for that purpose is correct. You and the GP were talking about it as a host. I don't know why stock Android doesn't acts as a USM host.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

Clearly more difficult than a Google search. Seriously the first three articles I click on have links to apps and YouTube videos of how to do it. But whatever, enjoy your cyanogen mod. You need it for adhoc support anyway since android doesn't support it. Just don't sit there and claim USB otg doesn't work because you haven't put the effort in.

By the way the absurdity of complaining about an app that costs half the price of the USB otg cable and 0.75% of the tablet cost is astounding.

Oh and while cm installs work week and are automated for old hardware I wish you the best if luck installing it on a brand new tablet where choice boils down to spend $4 or spend a week battling with a buggy nightly build that barely works and takes forever to become stable.

In 2012 it was damn difficult to install Cm. $4 well spent.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

Oh right, though I still don't understand your comment, especially since Android devices used to be a USB Mass Storage Device.

I thought the move to MTP was due to the way the OS handles such devices exposing more functionality. e.g. Nikon's DSLRs used to be USB Mass Storage and upset a lot of people when they switched to MTP. The reason was detecting the device as a media device exposed the camera to remote control ability and the ability to get a continuous live video feed on the PC. I always figured a mobile phone as a device with a myriad of different sensors and features makes more sense as an MTP device.

I don't understand your comment as my Android phone from a few years back was recognised as a USB Mass storage device.

Re:Android

[swillden]

I don't understand your comment as my Android phone from a few years back was recognised as a USB Mass storage device.

Yes, it was. The problem with UMS is that it's a block-level protocol, not a file-level protocol. This means that when storage is mounted via UMS, the host has no way to coordinate with the target device, which is a big problem if the target device is actually operating on the file system. Basically, it's not safe to have two operating system simultaneously using the same block device.

Because of that, when Android acted as a UMS target, it had to unmount the file system, which had all sorts of unpleasant effects on the system design. Among them, it forced the user-writable data to be partitioned into the portion that could be accessed via UMS and the portion that could not, which required guessing how large each should be. That enforced separation also added all sorts of subtle complexities to the OS, which had to take into account when /data was available and when it was not. SD cards have this same complexity, but core OS operational data isn't stored on them. Finally, it also forced the UMS-mountable data partition to be vFAT, which created many limitations around both functionality and (especially) security. /data could be ext3, or f2fs, or whatever, but MTP support is better across desktop OSes than support for random Linux file systems.

MTP is a file-level protocol. It leaves the Android Linux kernel in charge of managing the file system and just provides an API for browsing and manipulating the files, without exposing details of the file system representation.

UMS is like attaching your hard drive directly to another machine. MTP is like running an FTP server.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

Wait, hangon, what has any of this got to do with the data partition? That partition is not user accessible in any normal use case. Android specifically mounts user accessible data in the SDcard partition though the name varies from device, especially on those which have 2 SD cards. The only way to get access to /data is to root the device. Apps don't store data in /data, only the apps and the OS themselves reside there.

The vfat thing is an issue though. I can't recall if I saw that on my older phone or not anymore, but I agree if it did mount paritions as FAT then it would create security issues.

Re:Android

[thegarbz]

In 2012 it was damn difficult to install Cm.

Maybe for you.

Yeah rose coloured glasses and all that. I don't think this conversation will get anywhere when you compare installing CM9 to clicking a button on the Play Store.

Re:Android

[swillden]

The structure varies from device to device, yes. On the Nexus devices I'm most familiar with, which don't have SD card slots, there is no real sdcard partition. There is an /scdard, but it's a symlink. The advantage to not having a separate partition is not having to create a hard decision about how much to allocate to /data and how much to /scdard. This is one of the benefits of MTP over UMS that I mentioned, and it means that in terms of storage allocation you need only talk about /data, since it's the only r/w partitiion (except for actual SD cards, of course).

Android

[kick6]

That's not google's problem, that's handset manufacturer's problem. That's like saying Dell should "just give everyone win8" because, you know, potato.

news for nerds?

[ganjadude]

To get the latest Android 5.0 SDK, fire up Android SDK Manager and head to the Tools section, followed by latest SDK Tools, SDK Platform-tools, and SDK Build-tools. Select everything under the Android 5.0 section, hit "Install packages...", accept the licensing agreement, and finally click Install.

or their grandparents???? Thanks, I think If I am a developer, I know how to update my toolset just fine

Re:news for nerds?

[dotancohen]

I think If I am a developer, I know how to update my toolset just fine

I know developers who could not install the text editor that they edit PHP with. I'm not joking, and I have to deal with them regularly.

Re:news for nerds?

[ArcadeMan]

Damnit Jim! I'm a Web Monkey, not a tech support monkey!

Re:android must be doing something right

[ArcadeMan]

I see what you did there. Give me a break.

Re: android must be doing something right

[johnsnails]

Have a kit-kat

Re:android must be doing something right

[0123456]

Unlike Windows, which regreses with every new release, Android is still improving. We actually look forward to new Android releases, rather than fear them.

Re:Point?

[0123456]

Uh, so developers can check their software works properly before the new release is pushed to end users?

No updates to supported codecs?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I kind of thought Google might finally get around to supporting their own vp9 video codec and opus for audio, but they seem to be dragging their feet on this. Still.

Only one truely needed feature

[ilsaloving]

There's only one feature that Android desperately needs, and it's one I doubt that will ever happen.

Google needs to copy iOS's control over app behaviour. The unfortunate fact is, most developers are no where near as good as they think they are (regardless of platform), and there are way too many apps that will obliterate your battery even when they're only running in the background.

This is inexcusable for a mobile operating system that, by definition, runs on devices with limited battery life. It's even worse when you have a phone that doesn't have an easily replaceable battery.

Too bad this will never happen. That's why I gave up on Android and switch to iOS, despite Apple's obsessive control freakery. When all's said and done, I need a device that I can trust to work reliably. If I wanted a device where I *needed* to screw around and poke at it right down to the OS level just to make it work properly, I'd be using Gentoo.