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Google Takes Another Shot At Making Android Great On Low-Budget Smartphones (phonedog.com)
At its developer conference, Google unveiled Android Go, a project wherein Google will offer a version of Android that runs swiftly on budget, low-specced smartphones. With the new strategy, Google hopes to further improve the low-budget smartphone ecosystem in developing markets. Android Go will be focused around building a version of Android for phones with less memory, with the System UI and kernel able to run with as little as 512MB of memory. Apps will be optimized for low bandwidth and memory, with a version of Play Store designed for those markets that will highlight these apps. From a report: Another feature of Android Go will be data management. Android Go will let you easily see your data usage, and thanks to carrier integration, it'll also let you top-up with more data right on your device.
Seems to me that the best approach would be to get a bunch of Galaxy S3 phones and other older phones, and use those as the development platforms for mainline Android. Once whatever new reference version is developed on those, then you start looking at newer/faster phones for possible changes needed for the newer chipsets.
I don't know if it's still this way, but for a long time the business model was to based low-end stuff on yesteryear's high-end stuff, with the possibility of minor or moderate revisions. Intel's own 486 chip was produced until 2007 and eventually saw speeds of 150MHz, and clone producers like Cyrix also continued to produce 486-compatible chips long past their normal conventional PC application. I expect that CPUs and chipsets in older high-end smartphones continue to see mild revision and production for what become mid-grade and eventually low-end phones, after all, if these chips weren't still used then money spent developing them in the first place wasn't spent effectively.
It's fine for the rich consumer to spend money on the eight core phone with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage, but developers should always focus on the single core model with 512MB RAM and 32MB storage. After all, that which runs acceptably on the low-end model should be screaming fast on the high-end one.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Back in the mid 1990s Gateway 2000 made high quality desktops by the end of the decade they tried to compete with the cheaper manufacturers. Creating PC that after people own it, they don't go with gateway again.
Back in the early 2000s Dell made high quality desktops by the middle of the decade they tried to compete with the cheaper manufacturers. Creating PC that after people own it, they don't go with Dell again.
There is a big risk to have Android running on cheap devices. As people will associate the problems with the cheap device with the OS so when they figure they will want something nicer then they will no go with Android. Having a separate OS is smart because it can help the Premium devices to run with a premium OS.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Cool. But, any assurance that these phones will get frequent security updates? Budget-constrained consumers also deserve security.
Go... Away.....
(frail attempt at a joke... )
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Judging by the horrific performance Android has on even high-end phones, I'd appreciate it if this showed up on all phones.
How about you make android as a whole work better on low end devices instead of creating yet another version to support? What a strange concept.
What a great idea. Pretty sure that's what it is, it's configurations options within the main Android project.
"Android Go is a part of Android O and that it’ll be a part of every major Android release going forward."
One problem with supporting newer versions of any OS on older devices is the lack of storage. As operating systems gain features, they get bigger, so when you only have, for example, 2 GB of flash, making "Android as a whole work better" is a non-starter, because the whole 6+ GB of Android Nougat won't even fit.
At some point, the only options are to either A. define a standard subset of its features that are available everywhere and make others optional or B. stop supporting the old devices entirely. And at least from my perspective as an iOS developer, it is a lot easier to support older devices with missing features on a current OS than on an ancient OS that is missing features *and* has different bugs to work around. YMMV.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
developers should always focus on the single core model with 512MB RAM and 32MB storage. After all, that which runs acceptably on the low-end model should be screaming fast on the high-end one.
I don't agree with this. Developers should put effort into all relevant markets, yes, but developing only for low-end devices means simply not doing anything that might require more horsepower than the bottom end has, and makes high-end devices mostly pointless. If the low-end can run the software fast enough, then there won't be any difference between midrange and high-end devices. Meanwhile, the competition that does focus on the high end will own that market because feature-light blisteringly fast devices will be uninteresting compared to devices that actually use the available horsepower to be prettier and more interesting.
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After the Go! and Go programming languages, the Go project. I know there is Go in Google, but come on, it is not that hard to find new names!
The old fogies on Slash dot can probably remember operating systems that ran fine on 10,000KB of memory and seemed to do at least as much as a phone would need to do.
Said "old fogies" are mostly younger than I am, and they're wrong, unless you define what "a phone would need to do" as much less than what phones do today. I started programming on a machine with 1 KiB of RAM, upgraded to one with 16 KiB, then 256 KiB, and as recently as a few years ago I was writing code for a device with only 256 bytes of RAM (no, that's not a typo). Much of my work today is on devices with only 64 KiB of RAM. I know what can be done with small amounts of memory... and you can't manage all of the hardware in a modern smartphone and provide the services required to run all of the apps users want to run in 10 MB of RAM.
Make the Android developers personally only use a 510,000KB phone and it will run fine.
Sure. And it will do less than an iPhone, and do it more slowly (having RAM to cache data is critical to performance).
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It's kind of like IE, google won't do it because they don't need to; there's no serious competitive imperative to do so when people keep buying/using their stuff. If anything, people must like buggy, slow, unreliable and spying phone OS's!
How about you just fork off one of the older branches of Android (2.x?), fix all the security holes you've refused to backport because Google is filled with engineers who look at reliability engineering entirely the wrong way, add the bare minimum features needed for future compatibility (TLS, etc) or that are no-brainer efficiency improvements, and then offer that as a stable branch.
Or am I missing the point?
#FeatureBloatSucks
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Bloated, spyware, crapware infested OS with barely functional stock applications.
I now completely understand why so many people buy iphones and why there's so much malware on android.
we need an open cell phone OS now more than ever.
Absolute statements are never true
Go... Away.....
(frail attempt at a joke... )
Go on.
I mean, Go on Go on Go on Go on Go on...
Google: mrs doyle go on
I used to run GEM and Windows 3 (not at the same time) on a machine with 640KB of RAM, but that was definitely cramped. The main reason that 512MB is no longer enough is that the web has become a bloated monstrosity. Web pages are now on average larger than the original Doom, yet have a user experience no better than 10KB of text with light formatting.
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Why on earth is Android 6GB?!? That's bigger than a clean install of macOS, including all of the standard apps. It sounds like the solution is to stop bundling so much crap and focus on a sensible base system that people can then install useful software on top of.
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Early Android phones had a similar spec, and ran without issue. It's cutting back on the bloat, or enhancements, however you want to classify it.
2) Restore customisable contact lists: Individual ringtones appeared in 2005, yet smartphones don't support them.
You can assign a specific ringtone to an individual contact with Android, not sure what you mean.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yep. When I step back and look at what's really been achieved in end-user computing in the last twenty years I am not impressed. The wheel has been reinvented dozens of times but it's still a wheel.
Anyone remember Hypercard on the early Macintoshes? It was a GUI-based markup-language tool that could do some graphics and video. Given how most people use their computers, we're really not a lot past Hypercard.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I think I was wrong about that number. After a little digging, I've concluded that the correct number for Nougat is probably closer to 4.5 GB. For comparison, the base installation size for iOS is about 4.3 GB, which is to say that the size difference is statistical noise. But the difference still doesn't change the fact that a user with a 16 GB device is in a world of hurt on either platform, nor the fact that a 2 GB device would be completely infeasible on either platform.
Either way, even if I had been correct about that number, Sierra would still only be smaller because of a technicality. The Sierra installer is almost 5GB, and historically, the installed size of OS X was at least 2x the installer size, because the installer package is highly compressed. However, newer versions of OS X bend the rules through the use of transparent file compression on disk, making the OS installation take less space. Unfortunately, that sort of trickery is probably not practical on a cell phone with its severely limited CPU and even more severely limited battery capacity, which is why Sierra appears to take only slightly more disk space than iOS or Android when in actuality it is closer to 3x as big.
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How about better monitoring of data usage for all phones? It's not just a concern for the low end of the market...