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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.

4 of 40 comments (clear)

  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. 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 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.

  3. 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