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Android O First Developer Preview Featuring Notification Channels, Background Limits Now Available (googleblog.com)
A year after Google released the Android N Developer Preview, the company has made available the developer preview of the next major version of Android, "Android O." You will not want to put it on your primary Android smartphone as the preview is likely to have rough edges. Google says as much. "it's early days, there are more features coming, and there's still plenty of stabilization and performance work ahead of us. But it's booting :)."
The company is using the developer preview to give beta testers a sneak peek into some new features, such as "notification channels," which will offer users the ability to group notifications. There is also Picture in Picture, which will enable you to have a video appear in a small window on top of homescreen or any application. Google is also adding "multi-display support" and improved "keyboard navigation." Your guess is as good as mine as to what these features will actually do. There's also better "background limits" which will supposedly help save battery, and wider Wi-Fi support to include things like Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN).
No word on what "O" in Android O stands for.
The company is using the developer preview to give beta testers a sneak peek into some new features, such as "notification channels," which will offer users the ability to group notifications. There is also Picture in Picture, which will enable you to have a video appear in a small window on top of homescreen or any application. Google is also adding "multi-display support" and improved "keyboard navigation." Your guess is as good as mine as to what these features will actually do. There's also better "background limits" which will supposedly help save battery, and wider Wi-Fi support to include things like Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN).
No word on what "O" in Android O stands for.
I switched away from Android a while ago, mainly because I could not control permissions individually per app. E.g., I couldn't install a news app and just deny access to my location - I could say yes to all permissions and install, or no to all permissions and skip installation. Will that be addressed?
Well .... O for Android Oreo seems fitting.
Still waiting for subfolders. Until they arrive, Android is the last place I turn for anything where I have to actually organize anything. Which is mostly everything. iOS is no better.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think Nova Launcher offers that, but I could be wrong.
Color Management was introduced in Microsoft Windows... 95! And yet, here we are in 2017, and it is FINALLY being added to Android!? HOLYSHIT, Been seriously waiting YEARS for this. Now if only Apple could get their head out of their ass and support it in iOS too...
The problem with 3rd party adding is that they can break, leaving you with various levels of leftover problems. This is really something that should be implemented in the GUI. There's a reason computers have hierarchical filesystems. There's a reason Android uses one too, underneath the GUI. It's because they are a profoundly useful way to organize information. I'm not railing at you here... I appreciate the pointer. I'm just frustrated by how annoyingly stupid the Android GUI remains after all this time. And iOS.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
.... you do know that all Android builds have a candy/dessert that the letter stands for, right?
Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean, KitKat, Lollipop, Marshmallow, Nougat, etc.
Please tell me your comment is because you're mortally stupid.
I believe they meant which tasty treat starting with the letter O would become the codename.
N if for Nougat
O is for O.....
how about being able to cast to your TV and still have a screen on your phone to control video? or whatever?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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Google is also adding "multi-display support" and improved "keyboard navigation." Your guess is as good as mine as to what these features will actually do.
My guess is that former adds support for multiple displays and the latter improves the navigation of the keyboard.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The summary doesn't ask what it means; it asks what it stands for.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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The O stands for Observation
I wonder why Android can't have some bigger improvements to it. Google has a lot of developer resources, and some items added might make it a lot more developer and enterprise friendly:
A hypervisor comes to mind, so Android can have a VM for work, a VM for home, etc. This is especially useful with dual-SIM phones, or a phone using the SIM for one VM, and Google Voice for another.
A filesystem like APFS with deduplication, bit rot protection, encryption provisions on a block level, and other items.
A way to have nandroid built into the OS, so not just /data, but the entire phone, ROM, apps, and stored stuff can be dumped out as a backup. This would make life a lot easier should an OTA update cause a bricking.
The ability to scale down the OS to fit on phones 4+ years old, and work well (as in run all existing apps.) If Windows, which is an OS far more complex, can do this, it would be useful if Android could run on devices with far fewer CPUs/RAM/storage, as there is a big market for lower end Android devices, especially as the economy worsens.
The ability to do containerization.
The ability to do OTA updates as compressed diffs, so even if /system was modified, updates can still take.
That is the GUI. A launcher completely replaces your homescreen and apps drawer, which is just an app. The default launcher has no special privlidges or permissions over a third party, so implementing it there is no more technically valuable than doing so in a 3rd party. So find a 3rd party you like and use it instead. That's one of the benefits of Android- swap out the parts you don't like.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I agree with you there. Android has the ability to have a useful, hierarchical filesystem and method to organize apps. It just is a matter of it not being implemented.
I've personally given up on the latest and greatest launcher that is thrown at me on a phone, and just use Nova Launcher. That way, regardless of make/model, I have the same look. You are right, it isn't perfect and brings oddball issues, but it at least ensures some UI consistency, which is a strong point for iOS.
Are we getting zram configured with swap device size = 4x RAM, mem_limit = 50% RAM, vm.swappiness = 100? That will give effective doubling of RAM for approximately no performance hit.
've not found the performance asymptote yet. The crude theoretical limit is exchanging 100% of working RAM for 3x the compressed space (100% compressed to an average 3:1, although 4:1 happens sometimes--typically you average 3:1). The frequency of page decompression increases as you reduce the working RAM (the part not holding compressed data). Page decompression takes approximately twice as much time as a worst-case CPU cache miss (full row-precharge, RAS, and CAS), so decompressing pages with relative infrequency is cheap, and can be effectively free.
Generally, a block of code operates multiple instructions per byte of an immediate working set, so e.g. 16KiB eats 400,000 CPU cycles decompressing and then the application spends 4,000,000 cycles operating on that area. The application will use part of its hot working set as well, so the time spent working on that page spans more cycles than just that. Depending on how fast the program works through working set, you can end up expending approximately 0% of CPU on swapping into zram; or, if the working set space is tiny and swapping is frequent, you can expend much of your time swapping in and out.
Prefetching and caching further complicates this. The Linux kernel can background-prefetch swap by reading sequential pages ahead or by taking explicit hints via madvise() such as WILLNEED (get the page ready), SEQUENTIAL (aggressive read-ahead), or RANDOM (read-ahead not useful) from the application. If the system uses 99.7% of the CPU, then there are 3mS per 1 second interval to decompress pages into a cache (without freeing from zram), and to compress pages into zram (without freeing from RAM--mark as not-dirty). That's 4.8 million cycles per 1.6GHz core--on a 4 core phone, that's plenty to compress many pages per second, and decompression is way fast. Efficient prediction can really reduce the cost of swapping into zram to a real-time 0.
As I said: that's if you have the CPU time unused. At 3mS per 1 second interval, as above, with 26 cycles per byte, a 4k page takes 106,496 cycles to decompress. With four cores loaded to 99.7%, that's 45 pages per core or 180 pages, 720k per second you can afford to swap in--no room for swapping out. If you're not running through that much cold-set data per second, zram costs power usage, but not performance. As well, the amount of data you can churn through is limited by nominal CPU usage, and the churn in practice is nowhere near the theoretical limit (effectively a MOV %eax,$addr loop with $addr+=4096 iterations), so low-CPU-usage operation would tend to inflict less power consumption.
I didn't go looking for the performance asymptote because the return between 2x and 3x RAM capacity isn't worth bothering with. With half the working set, the amount of swapping is negligible; even when you start digging deep into swap, the rate of data moving in and out of zram is low enough to not inflict a visible performance impact. The real-time impact vanishes as soon as the CPU is more-idle, so if there's a 30mS stall every 10 seconds you suddenly have time to catch up on 3mS of slowdown and break even. This is, thus, a fine place to simply settle for now, without worrying about the variability of workloads like you'd have to if you pushed to the limit based on large data analysis of common workloads.
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Ossum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaIZF8uUTtk
No word on what "O" in Android O stands for.
My money's on "Ovaltine", which is both in keeping with their naming scheme and a fun reminder of A Christmas Story.
They probably won't use Oreo, because that names a trademark. (You could argue that this is another area of business...but better to avoid legal wrangles.) Orangeade would probably be safe, but it's not similar to marshmallow or nougat. I suppose they could just use orange. (That would let them use quince for "q". But I still don't see how they'd handle 'x'.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So... based on the above comments, I bought Nova launcher pro.
When I started it, all my current folders and apps.... gone. It appears I'll have to set everything up again. Am I wrong? Changing back to the Touchwiz, everything came right back. Need to explore this a little more, and seeing as it didn't destroy my previous setup (for which I am grateful), I will indeed experiment. First I guess I have to make a series of notes about the current arrangement and then go into Nova and rebuild it from the ground up. Seems... tedious. But I have the time, so... onwards.
Thanks for the tip (you and others.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Found it -- import. Very good. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.