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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.

25 of 40 comments (clear)

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

    When you can have 2,666 emojis!

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  2. 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"?
  3. 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?

  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 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.

    2. 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.

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

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

      Is your vitriol also directed at Chinese?

    4. 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.
    5. 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

    6. 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.

    7. 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. 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.

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

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

  7. 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.

  8. 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

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

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

  10. 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.
  11. 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!!!

  12. 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-...

  13. 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

  14. 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.

  15. 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?)

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

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

  17. 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"?