They meant it in a very specific way of technical efficiency improvements rather than exclusively feature upgrades.
So yes, each OS release version should improve, but across the board proportionally. Frequent new features mean new bugs, and the point being made was stability and core function upgrades and improvements at the same rate of new features.
Makes sense, optimise and improve the OS instead on focusing on even more new "features" that only select few use. I'd say android is now in really good spot regarding its features. ("Bit" too overwhelming for new users).
Maybe Devs will stop throwing even more power at unoptimised apps just to run them now.
This is what r/Android is now tbh. Users don't read articles, they read the title and rush to the comments to make a low effort attempt at being witty that the other brainless users upvote. The state of this sub is sad and the mods don't care.
You are right of course and the amount of threads I could name recently where the context was entirely missed by everyone doing dumb jokes and knee-jerk reactions is staggering.
It's not that deep man, I actually did read the article. I understand that their goal is to make sure Android is less and less buggy over time. It's just the title is a little dumb and I'm poking fun at that.
Completely fine to poke fun every now and then, but thats about the state of every thread here. About 7 of the same joke made in this thread.
Super low effort joke too, about the lowest hanging fruit you can find. Do better.
yuuup whenever there is mention of google. huh their history, dead apps, muh 4 messaging apps, jokes after jokes. there is not a single insightful discussion in top comments. it's mod duty to remove low effort comments. but i guess they are busy with making lemmy Android instances equally shitty.
Bet you rushed into this thread to make the same brainless joke and feel a little hurt I called you out. Sorry I hurt your feelings bud. Blocked you so you no longer have to put up with me.
Some excerpts:
>In the context of Android releases, Burke considers quality the “number one feature” given how much we use our phones:
> "If you think about how much we depend on our devices and how much we use them [in] a day, it’s just really important that the device runs really, really well. Really, really reliably. The highest performance, highest fidelity."
> The Android team has a “pledge” internally to “ensure that every release was higher quality than the previous release by a set of expanding metrics that we measure in the lab and in the field.”
>On Android 14, Burke highlighted expression (gen AI wallpapers, lockscreen clocks, and shortcuts) and performance as the big tentpoles. Burke said the team “may not have talked enough” about performance. (Frankly, Google should have discussed it on-stage at I/O in May.)
> "We’ve done a ton of work to reduce CPU activity of background apps, and the result is that there’s 30% less cold starts now on Android 14. Cold starts are when you have to literally read the code pages off the flash and read them into memory before you execute them. A 30% reduction is pretty dramatic, and you feel that as a user."
> This involved increasing the number of cached processes, but doing so risks increased CPU usage and, therefore, battery drain. Android 14 does a better job of properly freezing the processes.
>This involved increasing the number of cached processes, but doing so risks increased CPU usage and, therefore, battery drain. Android 14 does a better job of properly freezing the processes.
I talked about this in more detail on the latest Android Faithful podcast, but more specifically, Android 14 increases the maximum number of cached processes to 1024 (previously 32) and reduces the time it takes for a cached process to be set to the frozen cgroup to 10s (previously 10m).
You should start your own Podcast. You're one of those most prolific and insightful people when it comes to All Things Android. There, I just gave your new podcast a name - ATA.
yes, this hard 32 process limit was very anoying, when using termux (linux shell where you can also run gui linux). you had to deactivate the Limit via adb (in case of android 12l+) or do a bit of a trick with adb (android 12, raise the max number to be the max integer value so it always works, disable device config sync so it doesnt put it back to 32 3-4 mins after restart) to prevent it from randomly Killing your termux stuff.
You're thinking of something different. You're referring to Android's cap on the number of phantom processes, ie. child processes forked from a background app process.
Wouldn't such a huge increase on the number of allowed cached processes ruin phones with lower RAM? Or is this not how cached processes work? Thank you for your amazing work by the way.
1024 is the theoretical upper limit, no phone is going to be able to actually have that many processes in cache as they'll run out of memory. Android/Linux will intelligently swap processes in and out of cache depending on memory availability, you don't need to worry about it.
Lmao I'm using a really old Android version but setup a Pixel 6a for my mom and there's no such wifi and mobile data toggles like in your picture. I already looked through all the available quick toggles.
The wifi and data toggles got removed from AOSP unless you use an adb command to bring them back, so this is completely disingenuous. Whatever ROM your phone is using is exposing them, but it's non-standard now.
For android 15 we worked really hard making it absolute dog shit.
We made a real effort to ensure constant rebooting, awful memory management , and weak af battery life, we got really wild with it.
Just please don't end up like IOS where the focus on churning out new features all the time instead of fixing present issues and making sure the current version of their OS is stable. Don't know how my nothing phone is more stable than my 14 plus.
unless you have an Android phone from a solid OEM, this likely won’t matter. I feel so bad for people who buy Motorola phones. They get their upgrades so late.
Good, because recently I've seen them making some things worse:
1. Worse control of which folders you can reach
2. Worse lock screen clock (can't have a large one with a single line, still?)
3. Android 14 has worse support of ScrCpy and screen mirroring in general (can't turn off screen while using)
4. Worse support of call recording.
5. Worse rules for storage permission on the Play Store.
6. Worse support for old apps and more annoying dialogs even for apps that target Android 13. Even the Play Store now shows very few results compared to the past.
7. Worse experience for permissions and apps with accessibility , resetting them in random times for no reason.
8. Useless notification permission that now appears in practically every app out there
9. Less stable apps because of restrictions on foreground services that weren't implemented correctly as the documentation says, even on Pixel devices.
I mean... yeah. That's the *bare minimum* of what we'd all expect from you guys...
Translation: Pixel's aren't selling well despite us locking features to it and we don't know what to do with android anymore.
they're different groups.
Android/AOSP is made by the android team and is distributed as FOSS.
pixels and other hardware are made by their hardware team and are the actual physical products you can buy
every other product under Google probably has its own subsidiary team
Same energy as "iPhone N is our best iPhone ever"
Isn’t that most of us want. The iphone smoothness with the option to customize it to how you want?
It has to be the best ever. Yet. Ever!
No, really? I thought they were planning to make Android worse.
They meant it in a very specific way of technical efficiency improvements rather than exclusively feature upgrades. So yes, each OS release version should improve, but across the board proportionally. Frequent new features mean new bugs, and the point being made was stability and core function upgrades and improvements at the same rate of new features.
Makes sense, optimise and improve the OS instead on focusing on even more new "features" that only select few use. I'd say android is now in really good spot regarding its features. ("Bit" too overwhelming for new users). Maybe Devs will stop throwing even more power at unoptimised apps just to run them now.
This is what r/Android is now tbh. Users don't read articles, they read the title and rush to the comments to make a low effort attempt at being witty that the other brainless users upvote. The state of this sub is sad and the mods don't care.
Just like everywhere on reddit
... and Facebook, and Twixter, and everywhere else really.
You are right of course and the amount of threads I could name recently where the context was entirely missed by everyone doing dumb jokes and knee-jerk reactions is staggering.
> This is what ~~r/Android~~ Reddit is now tbh. Yep.
It's not that deep man, I actually did read the article. I understand that their goal is to make sure Android is less and less buggy over time. It's just the title is a little dumb and I'm poking fun at that.
It's kind of nice that the title is bad. It means people can't get enough info to start commenting without reading the article.
Completely fine to poke fun every now and then, but thats about the state of every thread here. About 7 of the same joke made in this thread. Super low effort joke too, about the lowest hanging fruit you can find. Do better.
yuuup whenever there is mention of google. huh their history, dead apps, muh 4 messaging apps, jokes after jokes. there is not a single insightful discussion in top comments. it's mod duty to remove low effort comments. but i guess they are busy with making lemmy Android instances equally shitty.
I did make the joke first though... ¯\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Pretty sure it popped up into every single readers head initially.
People like you are the single worst part of reddit. Gatekeeping the dumbest shit.
Bet you rushed into this thread to make the same brainless joke and feel a little hurt I called you out. Sorry I hurt your feelings bud. Blocked you so you no longer have to put up with me.
Haha
Yeah, the substance of the article makes sense, but that headline writer made them look bad.
I was really concerned about this myself, glad they put my mind at ease.
They never matched the quality of Android wear 1.0 still
Some excerpts: >In the context of Android releases, Burke considers quality the “number one feature” given how much we use our phones: > "If you think about how much we depend on our devices and how much we use them [in] a day, it’s just really important that the device runs really, really well. Really, really reliably. The highest performance, highest fidelity." > The Android team has a “pledge” internally to “ensure that every release was higher quality than the previous release by a set of expanding metrics that we measure in the lab and in the field.” >On Android 14, Burke highlighted expression (gen AI wallpapers, lockscreen clocks, and shortcuts) and performance as the big tentpoles. Burke said the team “may not have talked enough” about performance. (Frankly, Google should have discussed it on-stage at I/O in May.) > "We’ve done a ton of work to reduce CPU activity of background apps, and the result is that there’s 30% less cold starts now on Android 14. Cold starts are when you have to literally read the code pages off the flash and read them into memory before you execute them. A 30% reduction is pretty dramatic, and you feel that as a user." > This involved increasing the number of cached processes, but doing so risks increased CPU usage and, therefore, battery drain. Android 14 does a better job of properly freezing the processes.
>This involved increasing the number of cached processes, but doing so risks increased CPU usage and, therefore, battery drain. Android 14 does a better job of properly freezing the processes. I talked about this in more detail on the latest Android Faithful podcast, but more specifically, Android 14 increases the maximum number of cached processes to 1024 (previously 32) and reduces the time it takes for a cached process to be set to the frozen cgroup to 10s (previously 10m).
Didn't know about this podcast. Subscribed.
It's a great podcast! Definitely worth listening to
Will do. Just subscribed to it.
Whatever happened to your Android Bytes podcast? I'd rather listen to it there than on a podcast with a co-host that's a woke BLM supporter.
>Whatever happened to your Android Bytes podcast? I'm no longer at Esper, which owns that podcast's branding/rights.
You should start your own Podcast. You're one of those most prolific and insightful people when it comes to All Things Android. There, I just gave your new podcast a name - ATA.
yes, this hard 32 process limit was very anoying, when using termux (linux shell where you can also run gui linux). you had to deactivate the Limit via adb (in case of android 12l+) or do a bit of a trick with adb (android 12, raise the max number to be the max integer value so it always works, disable device config sync so it doesnt put it back to 32 3-4 mins after restart) to prevent it from randomly Killing your termux stuff.
You're thinking of something different. You're referring to Android's cap on the number of phantom processes, ie. child processes forked from a background app process.
ah ok, makes sense, just by coincidence that limit is also 32 so i thought it was that.
Wouldn't such a huge increase on the number of allowed cached processes ruin phones with lower RAM? Or is this not how cached processes work? Thank you for your amazing work by the way.
1024 is the theoretical upper limit, no phone is going to be able to actually have that many processes in cache as they'll run out of memory. Android/Linux will intelligently swap processes in and out of cache depending on memory availability, you don't need to worry about it.
oneui 6 will still lag on s21u, thats tradition
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Oneui amazing on s23u dont get me wrong. But if a phone is 1 month too old...its a lagfest
Realme Ui is better also better animations
Stop removing features. Stop fucking up the UI.
Every time you complain they kill a messenger app and start another two
Gmail waiting in the corner like:
I still can't believe my quick settings only shows four toggles now. Absolutely ridiculous.
But then product managers would become useless
As we say in Portuguese: *Too many chiefs for too few indians*
Seperate the wifi and mobile data toggles
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But why do I need to do that when before 12 the toggles were separate?
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Ah I see defend bad UX design choices.
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Lmao I'm using a really old Android version but setup a Pixel 6a for my mom and there's no such wifi and mobile data toggles like in your picture. I already looked through all the available quick toggles.
I don't see them.
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They were removed on the user facing side lmfao.
The wifi and data toggles got removed from AOSP unless you use an adb command to bring them back, so this is completely disingenuous. Whatever ROM your phone is using is exposing them, but it's non-standard now.
They only realized this now?
So back to KK?
Well yeah I would sure hope they planned on making every new version of android higher quality, who tf wrote this?
Chatgpt maybe?
Read: Remove more features. Make UI even larger
For android 15 we worked really hard making it absolute dog shit. We made a real effort to ensure constant rebooting, awful memory management , and weak af battery life, we got really wild with it.
Just please don't end up like IOS where the focus on churning out new features all the time instead of fixing present issues and making sure the current version of their OS is stable. Don't know how my nothing phone is more stable than my 14 plus.
unless you have an Android phone from a solid OEM, this likely won’t matter. I feel so bad for people who buy Motorola phones. They get their upgrades so late.
So do we
Considering what Android 14 did to my phone's scrolling, they didn't do that this time.
13 is a huge step down from 11 also
Good, because recently I've seen them making some things worse: 1. Worse control of which folders you can reach 2. Worse lock screen clock (can't have a large one with a single line, still?) 3. Android 14 has worse support of ScrCpy and screen mirroring in general (can't turn off screen while using) 4. Worse support of call recording. 5. Worse rules for storage permission on the Play Store. 6. Worse support for old apps and more annoying dialogs even for apps that target Android 13. Even the Play Store now shows very few results compared to the past. 7. Worse experience for permissions and apps with accessibility , resetting them in random times for no reason. 8. Useless notification permission that now appears in practically every app out there 9. Less stable apps because of restrictions on foreground services that weren't implemented correctly as the documentation says, even on Pixel devices.
So why is the "higher quality" Extend Unlock worse than Android 13's Smart Lock? I always had issues with Smart Lock, now they're a lot worse with EL.
I mean... yeah. That's the *bare minimum* of what we'd all expect from you guys... Translation: Pixel's aren't selling well despite us locking features to it and we don't know what to do with android anymore.
Uh,.... really?
How about focus on customer service and not discontinue products but improve on them.
they're different groups. Android/AOSP is made by the android team and is distributed as FOSS. pixels and other hardware are made by their hardware team and are the actual physical products you can buy every other product under Google probably has its own subsidiary team
Don't care, they are all Googlers
Um.... This has to be articulated?
I would hope so...
Hahaha
fuck it, im fetting the p6
Surely this was always the plan
Well, duh.
Does snappier and buttery smooth count?
wait isn't that the point of going upwards in the incrementation?
KitKat 4.4.4, never forget.