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Everything New In the Android 8.1 Oreo Developer Preview (theverge.com)
On Wednesday, Google launched the Android 8.1 Developer Preview. The new version of Android is available for Pixel and Nexus devices, and features a number of under-the-hood changes. The new version tests another change to notifications in which apps can only make a notification sound alert once per second. It also contains an Easter egg: the Android Oreo logo now looks like an actual cookie. The Verge reports that 8.1 is eventually supposed to activate the hidden Pixel Visual Core system-on-a-chip, which aims to make image processing smoother and HDR+ available to third-party developers.
What we really need is a feature to make my Pixel XL *TASTE* like an actual cookie.
I'm stuck at 7.1.2 until Project Fi releases the new version (or I force install the factory image and erase everything on my phone). At this rate, Motorola phones may start getting Oreo before all of Google's supported models have it!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Alphabet is an abhorrent corporation and they are far worse than Microsoft, IBM and SCO combined.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
And you can develop Android-compatible apps on it. Because it's a continuous fork of Android with customizations. I don't see them diverging FireOS from Android any further anytime soon because that is a lot more work for Amazon.
Why haven't we seen any really cool deal breaking features that would make us want to ditch iOS and switch to Android? For the most part Android and iOS have been just playing off each other, one will make a feature the other will incorporate it in the next version and vice versa.
10 years ago when Apple released the iPhone, it really had shaken the market up. It even forced Android to redesign its OS, hence giving Apple nearly a 2 year advantage, as competitor were in a mad rush to change their designs. Apple has gotten rather complacent. While the new iPhone X is a state of the art phone, in terms of processing power, however overall as a usefulness of a device it is on par with Samsung Galaxy and the Google Pixel, which have some additional cool features.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If the logo looked like an actual Easter Egg, that still wouldn't be an Easter Egg, unless it was hidden somehow, such as if it only looked like an actual cookie if the system clock was changed to the date of release of the Oreo cookie (or the Android Oreo release date, etc.).
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
How about:
- Proper GNU utilities instead of whatever *box flavour they've used in the past
- Collaboration with the xposed team
- Package pinning
- Official Magisk/SuperSU support
- Toggle switch for Doze
- Safetynet override
- Proper SD/local storage volume management
- Renewed committment to community development
- Proper OS-level package management and forced integrator acceptance of Google security patches for continued access to the Play Store
- Outlawing (forced) locked bootloaders on new devices in exchange for access to the Play Store
These changes would ensure their continued dominance as a platform, as us powerusers/developers would have little desire to seek alternatives.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
"The new version tests another change to notifications in which apps can only make a notification sound alert once per second."
This is definitely a minor thing, but once you've started looking at it should be a lot more limited. A configurable time would be ideal, but if you want to make it a sensible default it should be more like one sound alert every 10 minutes unless you've looked at a notification in between--if you're actually checking messages as they come in you'll still get all the defaults, but you won't have to silence 5 in a row if you're busy or don't care about them.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
For my next phone I'm gonna pony up and buy one with a pure full GNU Linux distro.
The problem is that there aren't many thing on the market yet.
Best contenders are :
Now they are making Sailfish OS which is a continuation of the same development (but have now renamed the core from Meego to mer).
They used to have some inhouse hardware (Jolla 1 Phone) then some manufacturer failure (Jolla Tablet), then some third party partner ship (Jolla C / Intex Aquasih). Their latest product is Sailfish X, done in partnership with Sony Open Devices, to Install Sailfish X on Sony Xperia X (single SIM version [the dual sim version isn't officially supported, but according to forum it works too), *not SIM-locked only* [SIM-locked phone cannot have their bootloader unlocked]). It's still an early beta, but if you're patient and willing to through the first few months of bugs, it might be worth giving it a try
it's a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, using modern features like Wayland, Systemd, etc. using RPM repositories for software distribution and significative developper community.
Darbacks for your specific target is that to make deployment on smartphone easier, it does rely on same (closed source) drivers that the chipset manufacturer provide for smartphone (using an adaptation layer called libhybris), so you still have manufacturer blobs, and some bits of the infeface still aren't under a copy-left license yet (but Jolla plans to, and in the main time the source is visible any way, as the interface is mostly QML and Javascript anyway. With lots of patches available in the communities too)
Good news is that they plan to develop a 100% pure Linux opensource phone with no blobs (partly by selecting chip with 100% opensource support, and partly by isolating problematic chips like baseband modem into separate chips that only communicate with the main chipset over a standard protocole - there's no "baseband modem actually serving as the chipset's northbridge" as in Qualcomm)
the drawbacks are that it's still in development (obviously), and that it uses a chipset that is either completely antique (currently their test are done on Freescale i.MX6, because that the only one with 100% opensource drivers supported by upstream kernel) or might be less exciting than other phone (they hope to be able to shift to FreeScale i.MX 8 as opensource support improves).
they plan pure linux interfaces, mostly gnome and KDE Plasma Active (yet another QML-based interface).
And I think that's about all currently active project of GNU/Linux phones, now that Ubuntu Touch has dropped the ball.
(Also, not interesting for you, but Sailfish OS, on their official commercial product support a proprietary compatibility layer - Alien-Dalvik by Myriad - that enables Android Apps (though currently only at 4.4 KitKat level).
Purism has promised to consider some container based solution (andbox -based, perhaps ?) to bring compatibility to Android Apps.
Tizen can download from their application store OpenMobile's Application Compatibility Layer.
So none of these will suffer from "not part of a big app ecosystem" networking effect)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
10 years ago when Apple released the iPhone, it really had shaken the market up.
Well, depends on your point of reference.
By comparison of common feature phone of the era : Yes it was revolutionary.
By comparison of what PDAs have been doing for the past few decades, starting from Psion, PalmOS, etc.. : The iPhone was just "meh..."
It was just a bit more modern than the then current iterations of PalmOS that started to show their age. And it was just a little bit less sucky then Microsoft's usual Windows bullshit. On the hand iOS completely lacked any 3rd party apps support, whereas the main competitors back then had vibrant communities of 3rd party developers and apps markets.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They are at android 7.0 as of October per the Wikipedia
Did you forget Oracle, or do you consider them, combined with the others, to be worse than Alphabet?
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
I always found it comical after driving into the outback for a week without WiFi or mobile reception, when coming back to the real world I would suddenly hit a tower and my phone would go mental giving the Facebook notification sound over and over again in such rapid succession that each sound cut off the previous one.
When I first thought about this I figured there should be a priority based system where each app only triggers a notification sound once per priority level and not at all if the same or a higher priority message comes through.