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Google Launches Android P Beta 2 With Final APIs (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the now-this dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched the second Android P beta with final APIs and 157 new emoji. If you're a developer, this is your third Android P preview, and you can start testing your apps against this release by downloading the new preview from developer.android.com/preview. The preview includes an updated SDK with system images for the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, and the official Android Emulator. If you're already enrolled and received the Android P Beta 1 on your Pixel device, you'll automatically get the update to Beta 2.

40 comments

  1. Theme API? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So what happened to the Oreo Rootless Theme API, still gone?

  2. Why use a 26 letter alphabet by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

    When you can have 2,666 emojis!

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  3. Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My phone is about 16 month old, and by the time Android P becomes official, it would be over the 2-year limit in which Samsung would never provide any more update

    So, how may I get my phone to run Android P when it becomes official?

    1. Re:Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by Namarrgon · · Score: 3, Informative

      If Samsung won't come to the party, make sure your next phone supports Project Treble (should be any phone that shipped with Oreo, plus the original Pixels). That finally decouples the OS from the SoC drivers, and means any Treble phone can (theoretically) be upgraded with Google's own OS releases.

      Which is why you can also get this Beta 2 release on third party phones like the Essential Phone, Nokia 7 Plus, OnePlus 6, Oppo R15 Pro, Sony Xperia XZ2, Vivo X21 & X21UD, and Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, as well as Google's own Pixel series.

      Failing all that, LineageOS will work well with your Samsung.

      --
      Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
    2. Re:Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by Kokuyo · · Score: 1

      Root the thing and put a custom ROM on it. There usually is someone who will package a vanilla ROM or one with just a few optimizations.

      At this point, you're out of warranty anyway, right?

    3. Re:Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doesn't help you right now, but make sure your next phone gets more than a paltry 2-years of support before the manufacturer takes a big steamy dump on you and your still-perfectly-working hardware.

      There's several options out there.

    4. Re:Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 0

      Doesn't help you right now, but make sure your next phone gets more than a paltry 2-years of support before the manufacturer takes a big steamy dump on you and your still-perfectly-working hardware.

      There's several options out there.

      You REALLY mean:

      "Make sure your next phone is an iPhone."

      It's the only way to be sure...

    5. Re:Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Then you can't do anything that requires SafetyNet.

      No Android Pay (or whatever they call it now), no Snapchat, no banking apps, no Pokemon GO.

    6. Re: Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's bollocks.

      http://lmgtfy.com/?q=magisk

    7. Re:Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by trawg · · Score: 1

      If Samsung won't come to the party, make sure your next phone supports Project Treble (should be any phone that shipped with Oreo, plus the original Pixels). That finally decouples the OS from the SoC drivers, and means any Treble phone can (theoretically) be upgraded with Google's own OS releases.

      Treble has always sounded great but I've always been concerned that there's no authoritative Google source to confirm whether a device is "Treble certified" or "Treble compatible".

      Your post reminded me that Treble existed (my partner & I are in the market for new phones & I can't bring myself to buy a non-Google phone because of the operating system issue, and I can't bring myself to pay a fortune for a Pixel after being very happy with the cheap Nexus series for the last several years) so I had a quick search.

      I can see no obvious Google-owned/managed resources, though there's this Android police article with an old list that they say is no longer updated, but it points to this github page - which seems to be the most comprehensive list.

      So while I really like the idea of getting a Treble phone, there's still not enough info or clarity around the whole thing for me to feel comfortable trying to buy one yet. (e.g., will a Treble phone be Treble for ever? Or can vendors mess with it with subsequent updates of their own somehow? Will vendors & Google work closely enough on Treble standardisation to ensure that future updates won't cripple specific features on my phone?)

    8. Re:Samsung won't let my phone use it ! by Namarrgon · · Score: 1

      You can check it yourself by looking at the build.prop. There's also this reasonably up-to-date list.

      --
      Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
  4. emojis.... by phlawed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll admit to being a relatively old fart. Can someone please ELI5 the industri-wide obsession with emojis? To me, it rates a divison or two lower on "picks my interest"-scale than a new font. And I generally find fonts quite uninteresting. obl xkcd link

    No, honestly: I would like to know. I see no innovation in adding more emojis, no basic need covered and it is not as if a world of new possibilities suddenly opens itself because 157 new emojis were added. I am not against the very idea of emojis. I just don't understand the general hype and attention to emojis.

    I actually feel a slight bit of secondhand embarassment for this hangup. Is it just me?

    --
    Dag B
    1. Re:emojis.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Easy. Lack of real technical innovation. They have to have _some_ claim as to why you should by that new device even if it's nonsense.

    2. Re:emojis.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      people are barely literate. i used to be fascinated about ancient egypt. now post eternal september, social media boom and emkoji i realise it is just one of many idiocracy like civilsations to leave large enough artifacts to showup on our radar.
      fuck emojis and egypt

    3. Re:emojis.... by jgfenix · · Score: 1

      I agree with you. Since a few years ago the only thing news worthy that the Unicode Consortium does is to release new stupid emojis. I thought that the race-variant emojis were stupid (the original ones were race neutral after all) but now they are releaseing gender-neutral? (again, the original emojis were gender-neutral until they decided to release female variants=. Its ridiculous. Soon the emojis font file will take 1 Gigabyte.

    4. Re:emojis.... by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

      In that particular case this is a politically correct update: gender neutral emoji, redhead emoji variants, real gun replaced by squirt gun, ...

      As for why emoji matter, I think it is just an instance of the bike-shed effect.
      Small pictures are easy to understand, anyone can have an opinion about how a burger should look like. As a result, people talk a lot about it, even though it is trivial. Things like colorimetry, computer security and machine learning require some level of technical knowledge and people just leave that to the experts.

    5. Re:emojis.... by msk · · Score: 1

      Ancient Egyptian isn't the only language to use pictographic writing.

      Is your vitriol also directed at Chinese?

    6. Re:emojis.... by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 1

      You don't have to understand them. Just be absolutely sure never to use glyphs containing aubergines or peaches, or especially both together.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    7. Re:emojis.... by iampiti · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It seems the few last Unicode updates have been centered about adding politically correct emoji. I understand why that may be appealing to some people but for the insensitive bastard that I am feels like superficial shit.
      Also, some time ago here in Spain some people organized themselves to petition the Unicode consortium for a paella emoji. Is it really so important to have an emoji of your favourite dish?
      The thing about emojis is that, being images, are particularly suitable for politics games and pressures (see the recently added redhead emojis) so between that and the fact that you can represent anything with an image it looks like Unicode will be more and more cluttered with tons of redundant and stupid emojis (are they gonna ad an image for every possible dish?). Eventually they'll run out of code points and they'll have to develop a new standard with a gazillioni bits for code points

    8. Re:emojis.... by GuB-42 · · Score: 2

      TL;DR There are more than enough space for new emoji and everything we can throw in Unicode.

      Unicode has 17 planes, each containing 65536 code points. Emoji currently sit in plane 1, which isn't even half full. There are currently 1212 code points for emoji, so it means that there is room for 30x more without leaving plane 1.

      If we manage to exceed that, planes 3-13 are still unassigned. It means there are 720896 more code points available.

      But that 17 plane limit is just here to satisfy UTF-16. UTF-8, by far the most common standard today can go up do 32768 planes, that's 2 billion code points.

      And it doesn't stop here. A lot of emoji are created by combining several characters. Flags are made by combining 2 'flag letters". So R and U will show the flag of Russia. Skin colored and gendered emoji can be created by combining a skin tone or gender symbol with a person emoji. The possibilities are endless.

      Of course, what applies to emoji apply to any writing system.

      Yeah, Unicode is big. They could add an image for every single person on earth if they wanted to.

    9. Re:emojis.... by iampiti · · Score: 1

      Well my comment about running out of space was sarcastic (really) but my actual point was that I feel they shouldn't add every PC thing someone thinks about

  5. Linux is Doomed. Doomed, I Say!!! by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 0

    ...and 157 new Emojis!!!! ...And after ALL the unmitigated SHIT you Slashtards give Apple for announcing new Emojis... You turds oughta be ashamed of yourselves!

    Full disclosure: If I use 3 Emojis in a week that is a lot for me; but still...

    1. Re:Linux is Doomed. Doomed, I Say!!! by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 1

      Hate to Reply to my own Post; but the Title to my OP, above SHOULD read:

      ANDROID is Doomed. Doomed, I Say!!!

      It's what I get for posting within 5 minutes of awakening.

      But the rest of my OP stands.

    2. Re:Linux is Doomed. Doomed, I Say!!! by jrumney · · Score: 1

      Actually it was the unicode consortium that introduced 157 new emojis back in February. iOS 12 and Android P are just following suit.

    3. Re:Linux is Doomed. Doomed, I Say!!! by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      His point still stands.

      Unicode consortium introduces a bunch of stupid new emoji; response around here: meh
      Android adds those emoji, response around here: meh
      Apple adds those same emoji, response around here: OMG APPLE HAS NOTHING, THEY CAN'T INNOVATE ONLY COPY, THEY ARE JUST ADDING STUPID EMOJI LOL NICE UPDATE LOL EMOJI FOR ALL THE LITTLE GIRLS TO USE ON WHATSAPP

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    4. Re:Linux is Doomed. Doomed, I Say!!! by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 1

      His point still stands.

      Unicode consortium introduces a bunch of stupid new emoji; response around here: meh
      Android adds those emoji, response around here: meh
      Apple adds those same emoji, response around here: OMG APPLE HAS NOTHING, THEY CAN'T INNOVATE ONLY COPY, THEY ARE JUST ADDING STUPID EMOJI LOL NICE UPDATE LOL EMOJI FOR ALL THE LITTLE GIRLS TO USE ON WHATSAPP

      Thanks! I fully expected to simply be Punish-Modded into Oblivion, LOL!!!

    5. Re: Linux is Doomed. Doomed, I Say!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You Tim Cocksucker's n1gger hubbies are so adorable.

  6. Fork Unicode as WhatTheFuckcode.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Eliminate all emoji characters, change it from UTF8 to WTF8 and make part of the mission statement that only existing languages or new languages with full grammar and syntax be allowed codes. This won't stop ALL abuses of unicode, but it sure would make it less messy than having something littered with dumb emojis you have to filter out, or make special exceptions for. Especially when/if internationalized domain names really start to take off. I wonder if anyone has truly thought through what a mess that will be when you have not only 'deviant characters' that visually match with the ASCII standard characters, but also a mess of emojis you have to try and remember/input for a particular url. Sure will make blocking messier, among other things.

    1. Re:Fork Unicode as WhatTheFuckcode.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Indeed. Feels like the unicode consortium is re-inventing Chinese, poorly [*].

      [*] Maybe, like in east Asia, we'll end up using phonetic + dictionary-lookup based text input methods to enter complex symbols. The current situation of having to page through increasingly large (sub-)lists of emojis based on category will become untenable at some point..

    2. Re:Fork Unicode as WhatTheFuckcode.... by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 1

      only existing languages or new languages with full grammar and syntax be allowed codes

      âïðY'©. Not sure if you can display it, but it means "challenge accepted" in my new constructed language.

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

  7. Now with vegan-inclusive lettuce emoji by wimpy · · Score: 1

    https://i.redd.it/zs832f78ug21...

  8. Name it already! by freeze128 · · Score: 1

    Google better give it a name soon. It's very awkward to call it "Android Pee".

    1. Re:Name it already! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No more awkward than half the names they've given previous releases. I felt measurably stupider any time "Android Ice Cream Sandwich" or "Android Lollipop" was mentioned.

    2. Re:Name it already! by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 0

      Google better give it a name soon. It's very awkward to call it "Android Pee".

      I, for one, think it is entirely appropriate.

      And just think, you are but three updates away from Android "Shit" and then "Android Turd". ...and you already HAVE the Emoji for those!

      (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

  9. Stop features, start optimising by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    Seriously, just spend one full month with zero features being added, none at all and let all your coders just try to increase performance, because, Android isn't bad but it's not good. I've been on it for 7 years now and still older iPhones with half the specs feel snappier.
    I don't care if the iPhone is faking the snappy feel, the end result is it feels right.

    Project treble is the first particularly clever sounding, big improvement in a while too, keep at this kind of stuff

    I also very much echo the other guy. More emoji? Who cares! This is a bullet point? Really? Really?

    1. Re:Stop features, start optimising by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 1

      Seriously, just spend one full month with zero features being added, none at all and let all your coders just try to increase performance, because, Android isn't bad but it's not good. I've been on it for 7 years now and still older iPhones with half the specs feel snappier.
      I don't care if the iPhone is faking the snappy feel, the end result is it feels right.

      Project treble is the first particularly clever sounding, big improvement in a while too, keep at this kind of stuff

      I also very much echo the other guy. More emoji? Who cares! This is a bullet point? Really? Really?

      But Apple ISN'T faking the Snappier feel! They just know more about ARM than nearly anyone else on the planet, seriously.

      Oh, and if you happened to watch the WWDC 2018 Keynote a few days ago, one of the very first things they talked about (maybe even the first) in the iOS segment was that their new version, iOS 12, now in beta release, was SPECIFICALLY redesigned to bring significant performance improvements, ESPECIALLY TO THE OLDEST MODELS supported (which is back to the iPhone 5s, released in 2013).

      There is only so much ReNICEing and other skulduggery you can pull to effect those kinds of changes without changing hardware.

      Oh, and did I mention that they are doing all this while ALSO significantly improving battery life? (A fact noted by many who have installed iOS 11.4, too).

      Oh, and unlike Android Pee, iOS 12 added some SERIOUS meat onto its bones. This is anything but an "Emoji Update":

      https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-...

  10. can't wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For the new emoji

  11. Funny.... by Luthair · · Score: 2

    They supposedly refactored Android to make it easier for manufacturers to provide upgrades yet they're still abandoning the Nexus 5X and 6p

  12. Re:"picks my interest" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The word you're looking for is "piques."

    http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique-peak-peek/
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/pique-vs-peak-vs-peek
    https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/peak-peek-pique/

  13. Thank God.. by JohnStock · · Score: 1

    We have gender neutral emojis.. Who cares about the IT side of things. ffs.. the world should burn.