I'm not sure I could tell you which version of Android is on my chromeos pc. The apps are each in little Windows. Are some apps not supported because the version of Android is too old?
Google stated they'd scuttled updating to 8 in lieu of going straight to 9. That didn't happen and now we're at 10. I'm a little concerned the train won't ever arrive at the station.
7.1.1 in Settings > Google Play Store > Manage Android Preferences > About
Indeed. But it does look nicer/work better for what black themes are actually good at: Using at night.
So while the additional battery savings between "true black" and grey are within the margin of error, the battery benefits remain for both and the non-battery benefits remain for our eyes.
No way, dark mode is great. Combine it with an internet browser that has a night mode (Samsung's fork of Chrome) and the phones are significantly more pleasant to use at night.
Dark mode is only great if absolutely every single website and app you use support it, and you are never shown bright images ever, because then your eyes explode. This is, it's useless.
That's a fallacious argument. Imperfect solutions can still be superior to the unmitigated problem, and they are in this case. You're essentially arguing that unless the solution is perfect, they shouldn't even try, and I'd point out you haven't justified or even tried to justify that black or white point of view.
In this case, yes. I think it's better to use light apps at a low brightness level than to use dark apps that might or might not blast a white screen at you. I think that flash of light is terrible for your eyesight, much worse than constant light apps.
I'm inclined to agree with you that sustained periods of darkness that include rapid change of light level may be less healthy for the eyes than consistent levels of overall brighter display with such shocks, but I'd like to see some research to back it up.
This is a prerequisite for that. You're not gonna manually turn on dark mode in every single app for much longer, your OS will support it as a setting and third-party apps (including browsers) will read that setting and adjust accordingly.
True black looks nicer in the same way that oversaturated TVs look "nicer" in the showroom: it's great for grabbing your attention, but a pretty crap experience in the long run.
White on True black UI has way too much contrast and is much more fatiguing than white on dark gray.
Eh, I don't agree at all. Maybe that's the case if you don't use adaptive brightness and your whites are max intensity. I prefer a dark theme I can use all day and let the brightness setting modulate the contrast. That way, direct sunlight kicks in the high contrast capability to make the theme usable during the day (which destroys these gray "dark" themes), while dropping the overall contrast ratio to something similar to these gray themes and emitting less light overall at night.
Pure black doesn't feel like I'm looking at a box light and makes transitions between text and media much more consistent. I end up futzing with the brightness for mixed media (like embedded videos or images) far more when using a gray dark theme, since the true brightness will be much more intense for "media white" than "text white", and the perceived brightness between them will be even higher than that.
Dark themes used to be about practicality and health. Current gray dark themes seem to be born from poor contrast ratio LCD limitations and justification for the aesthetics around the old Holo theme. As someone that has religiously converted their most common sites to dark themes with custom CSS (a few hundred as of now), gray on gray themes feel foggy and I only use light-but-still-dark gray backgrounds on sites that change frequently so I can see if there's a new text element that needs to be styled.
(But, I'm probably in the minority. I also drop font sizes to reasonable levels, delete rounded corners on elements, and remove the miles of whitespace from sites unwilling to accept that a two paragraph "story" isn't worthy of the engagement metrics they get by wasting the reader's time scrolling.)
Many Google apps already do. It was weird during the Android 10 Beta because Google was releasing apps with partial support for Dark mode which made them hard to use. You'd sometimes get dark grey text on black background, for instance.
I believe there is an API for hooking into notification text prior to display, which allows the Signal app to decrypt the message. The Signal server doesn't have access to the plaintext message in order to send it in a GCM.
Signal dev here. Just wanted to make it clear that the GCM/FCM we send are completely empty. It just wakes up the app so we can fetch the encrypted messages, at which point we decrypt them and show them to the user.
Push notification from GCM should not contain any user data. It should be treated just like a notification to the app to check its event source and then display user notification with data sourced from there.
Looks like they are starting to get seriously concerned about projecting non-monoplistic "fair competition" image. Unfortunately most devs know it's not the case in reality.
That's equally absurd that a horizontal bar is a rip-off and that Google ripped it off. I've been running my Samsung with only gestures for months now, I can't see a reason to need something like that.
Just at the top of the page there's a screenshot of the Assistant. If you toggle dark mode (there's a floating button at the bottom of the screen to do so) the text changes from "when is my flight" to "what time is my flight".
Some phones in the Android One program should also have a decent chance of getting it quickly. Everything else will probably get quite a few of the features from the closed source parts of Android that are shipped by the Play Store anyway.
What are you calling "Android OS" in this context? My understanding is that a lot of APIs that used to be shipped with AOSP and be updated with each new Android version are now shipped in the Play store to avoid the mess that is Android fragmentation.
Looks groovy, but my 2 year old LG is stuck at Android 8 with Security updates stopped in January.
I wish android hardware was better supported for the long haul. I would even go as far as saying i would pay yearly for android maintenance than to pitch my phone for a OS update. My phone has plenty of power....at least we have XDA forums.
I had a difficult time picking between the Pixel 3 or the Razer Phone 2, but the Razer Phone 2 was much better and not really difficult to root, along with Treble support. In the end, it was either pay an extra $100-$150 for native updates and a better camera app on the Pixel, or pay less for a much better phone overall and have unlock my phone for more recent updates and try using a modded camera app. So far I'm still happy with my choice.
Your right I used to have a Nexus tablet, it was great and well supported, until it kept running out of space. I require something with a microsd card slot, i travel to a lot of places with zero internet access and any information or media or whatever i need needs to be on my phone (i carry a work laptop, i am not going to carry 2 laptops). When i looked none of the google phones provided that, maybe they do now.
Also 2 years ago i paid $700 for the phone. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, so i should pitch it to get another expensive phone? There is android 9 on the XDA forums for my phone.
Off topic, but i find it commical that my 17 and 18 years old kids yell at me because my 14 year old car gets about 27 miles to the gallon and pollutes so much, but every year they beg me to buy them a new phone so they can junk their old ones......
Yeah, Project Treble is great and everything, but phones not being updated to the latest version of Android when they're less than 2 years old is a marketing/roadmap limitation, not a technical one.
1. The release candidate of this update has been available for recent devices from most major vendors for quite a while now.
2. You DON'T want this update right now anyway. At this point it is just a tech demo for Pixel people and far from stable. 6 to 9 months from now it will be good enough as a daily driver.
Currently installing the update on my ~200$ Essential Phone - I mean it's not like there aren't good Android vendors, but obviously the majority of buyers don't vote with their wallet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes I missed that. Makes sense I guess but I still think the name and logo were a fun and lovable part of Android, and a popular tourist spot at the Google campus.
As a recent iOS user coming from Android, this almost makes me want to go back. I really do miss the Smart Reply and native Google Assistant features. But alas, iMessage pressure is real in my friend's group.
It's not just green bubbles. Tapbacks are awkward and pictures and videos don't send as reliably.
With my "green bubble" friends, we usually use Telegram or Signal or Keybase instead.
I'd love to see a standardized IM/Text protocol instead of 1000 fragmented platforms. I've got on the order of 10 chat apps on my phone right now, all used in different contexts.
> I'd love to see a standardized IM/Text protocol instead of 1000 fragmented platforms. I've got on the order of 10 chat apps on my phone right now, all used in different contexts.
Apple could easily open the protocol, but they won't. They also won't use any of the other ones so as long as you'll be using iOS, you'll be in the iMessage garden and everyone else will be in another garden.
Try Matrix[1]. It's a protocol specification with multiple open-source implementations. It has federation so that you can choose which server to use (or run your own) and still communicate with everyone else. It has end-to-end encryption (although at the moment it only works in one client, but it's coming along).
> I'd love to see a standardized IM/Text protocol instead of 1000 fragmented platforms.
I'm hoping that's what RCS[1] will be (ids? And that's why I referenced it above). It's supposed to by the successor to SMS, but it's been around for quite a while and not adopted, so I'm not sure what's going on with it.
Edit: It looks like as of a couple months ago it's live in the UK and France, and just those two countries.[2]
I spend lots of time with my teenage nephew—it’s all iMessage, Snapchat, Discord, GroupMe (surprisingly, because I’m old enough to use that!), and sometimes even Instagram DMs. Granted, he lives in the US, so that might change things.
Lots of people don't care at all. The only time I hear about this whole "green bubble bad" thing is online. In real life, I have never once encountered this sentiment. (I'm not saying this sentiment doesn't exist IRL, I'm saying that it's not universal.)
Eh, don't want to make any assumptions on your age, but I'm young enough that iPhones were introduced around when I was in middle/high school. Here in the US, living in an upper-middle class area, lots of kids got them right off the bat.
I've never had anyone SERIOUSLY be mad about me being the green bubble, but when you're doing large group text coordination and someone drops me in, then starts doing tapbacks and sending rich media, I get some shit. And it gets thrown out as a joke in general conversation all the time. "Oh, he's a GREEN bubble..."
> Here in the US, living in an upper-middle class area, lots of kids got them right off the bat.
I'm sure that correct, but how common iPhones are, even amongst your age group, greatly depends on where in the US you are. In my area, iPhones are not nearly as common as they are in other areas, and there is generally little peer pressure in the grade/high schools to have them. Having a smartphone generally is expected, but few people care about whether or not it's an iPhone.
I've never heard of this until today, but green is my favorite color. I am confused how two functioning adults can care about this. It sounds like an unreasonably childish thing to care about. If someone has different phone then you and they want you to change to appease them then tell them to deal with it.
The color is simply an indicator of an inferior system. It's not the color itself that people care about. They care about the encryption, quality of media, timestamps, delivery receipts, etc.
I've had a few friends passive aggressively mention I am the reason our group chat is MMS vs iMessage.
Or even worse: I just simply got excluded from group chats. That was the saddest one because when hanging out in person, a friend will mention a conversation from the group chat and I wouldn't know what's going on and they would just awkwardly pretend it didn't happen. Or say they'd add me to the group and never actually do it.
iMessage FOMO is a real thing and the social pressure (in the US at least) is insane.
> the social pressure (in the US at least) is insane.
This isn't a US-wide thing. This is about the priorities of a certain subculture, nothing more. Your friends just happen to be embedded in that subculture. My condolences.
The subculture of people who have iPhones? As much as Apple would want this to be, I don't believe there is a cohesive subculture that describes all iPhone users.
In my experience, in most countries (and outside the US especially) WhatsApp has already won the network effects battle, and it's the default messaging app in any smartphone.
Even people with iPhone will all have WhatsApp installed.
What part of Asia? I'm guessing you mean China/Korea/Japan. Whatsapp is by far the dominant messaging platform on the Indian subcontinent, extending as far the Middle East.
Here's a map that shows WhatsApp leading in most regions. And for Europe, even in countries where FB Messenger is the dominant app, most people will still have WhatsApp installed to ensure good "friend coverage". It is common to have (and regularly use) at least 2 if not more messaging apps.
Interesting; in whatever cultural bubble I'm embedded in, every group chat (even among five friends without any shared purpose) is its own Discord server.
I doubt that includes family, co-workers or neighbors, right? Here in germany WhatsApp is so ubiquitous that beside various friends circles you'll likely have groups for family, work, (sports) clubs, or your fellow kindergarten parents, etc.
It's the default form of mobile communication here.
If you've got friends who have time to complain about it, but not the time to move conversation to WhatsApp/FB/line/telegram/WeChat/...anything and prefer to exclude you, are they really friends? This honestly makes me angry when people say they're pressured into buying a high cost device.
I agree! Trust me, I was resentful for buying an iPhone too. They are my friend because we can't really move the conversation to any other platform. Some of my friends took #DeleteFacebook very seriously and deleted Insta/WhatsApp/FB while others refuse to download Line/WeChat/Telegram or any others because I'd be the only one they'd use that with. The network effect is bad and the only "standardized" communication platform that we all have is SMS. But because they are all iPhone users, it defaults to iMessage and they hate me for causing them to default to SMS/MMS because they see it as "slower and not as instant"... So other than emailing one another, there wasn't really any other options...
> because I'd be the only one they'd use that with
I started using hangouts, WhatsApp, signal, FB, and just yesterday line for a single person. This is really not a good excuse. People should be more important than tech.
Agreed. Unfortunately, many millennials don't see it that way. There's so many stories about the Green Bubble effect and how lazy people are to switch to anything else. It's sad.
>not the time to move conversation to WhatsApp/FB/line/telegram/WeChat/
None of these are an alternative to iMessage. They all either are missing key features or require you to deal with unencrypted communications or relayed encryption.
WhatsApp, though, is still owned by Facebook and, therefore, has all kinds of privacy concerns. Last I heard, the encryption wasn't e2e and used a key that was generated by the app. If that's the case, then Facebook has a copy of that key.
The key has to be generated either in the app or on some server. There are no other choices really, unless you use only ephemeral keys - and that gives you secrecy but doesn't validate the other side. (And you can still copy that key) WhatsApp is e2e on all devices since 2016 and uses open whisper, which is the same encryption as signal.
Regarding the key - you have to trust the app it doesn't share it with the app authors. That's regardless of who/how implements the encryption. And it's true for iMessage as well.
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that, according to the security white paper released by Apple, that the key is generated on-device in the Secure Enclave and that Apple never has access to it. The Enclave itself also doesn't have network access so there's no way for that to be transmitted anywhere by any other means except for physical access, which is also limited in the hardware.
To be fair, if I was in such a group I would probably be the one passive aggressive about them using a messaging suite locked into a single platform too expensive for most people to afford (instead of Signal, Whatsapp, etc), so maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on your friends.
This is my friends too. I gave in to the pressure for a different reason, so it’s nice to not be excluded again. GroupMe seems to be the lowest common denominator for proper group chats (50+ people).
> But alas, iMessage pressure is real in my friend's group.
Man, in my extended family SMS text group, this comes up once every couple weeks. One of us will note they aren't getting a random message, or someone will send a video and the quality will be crap, and the iPhone users will all mention how if we all had iPhones, this wouldn't be a problem.
Cue a few of is getting kind of triggered because it's only Apple's co-opting of SMS on their phones that those people think that's really an Android problem and not some slick marketing on Apple's end to get their users to tell other people how their SMS texting is so much better. Not that we couldn't all just switch to some third party app (or hangouts even), and then we'd all have a comparable experience, but that's entirely lost on most of them, and not worth griping about after the first or second time or you come across as that weird relative that can't just do the easy thing[1]).
I can't wait for RCS messaging. I'm honestly wondering it Apple will support it, or try to segment the text messaging market even more.
1: As if buying a $750 phone is the "easy thing".
Edit: Changed $1000 to $750, since that's the lowest cost I could find for a 1 year old phone, and I don't think buying multiple year old hardware is something you can expect out of someone else, even if it might be my preferred strategy).
No iOS user thinks its "Android's" problem, but they do know that being on Android is the problem.
iOS = 1 ecosystem.
Android = infinite ecosystems with no cohesion.
One has native capability and consistent user experience which is now better for social interaction. The other has people rationalizing how a non-native app can be used which also wouldn't solve the aforementioned problem of receiving a random type of message, because nobody wants that experience, they want the rich experience that is native to iOS.
The android native experiences described even in OP's blog post won't be available for AGES on most people's devices, and even in that age they won't be reliable features because of custom OS' and devices won't be allowed to support it, based on the preference of those distributors.
iOS users aren't confused about that shitshow, iOS users know that it doesn't matter why, there is simply no consensus to fixing it on android, no path to consensus on fixing on android, and a group of hopeful technology enthusiasts that missed the memo on how android cohesion will never get better.
What is the benefit of this cohesion that you're missing? Why should different Android devices be any more cohesive in terms of features than Android devices vs. iOS devices? If you want the latest features, you buy an Android One, Pixel, or Nokia phone. If you don't, you buy an iOS phone or some other Android phone.
That right, you're correct. If I want to buy a new phone that's three years old, I can pay $450 for an iPhone 7. Or $600 for a 2 year old phone, or $750, for a phone released a year ago, which is more what I would consider when buying a new phone (why would I buy a new phone that's multiple years old hardware?). So, I think $750 is a fair amount to reference, and I agree that $1000 is a bit high.
That's why I paid 475 for the OnePlus 7 (not the pro I can't stand the pop out camera). I was going in for the latest tech, I don't want 3 year old tech for that price.
Because if I bought a new phone last year, why would I want to spend money to buy a new phone now that's worse than what I already had?
Telling someone to buy an iPhone because of this is pretentious. Telling them to buy an iPhone that may be worse performance wise than their current phone is way worse.
It seems like in your original post, you were saying that iPhone was not a good value. Yet the A series chips consistently outperform Snapdragon by years, and software support for iPhone probably means a years old model has more official life than a latest Android.
I don’t think the reply was suggesting you get a new phone specifically. They were responding to your claim that iPhone is on face not a good value.
No, I wasn't saying it's not a good value. I was saying it's a ridiculous thing to ask of someone that may have a completely serviceable phone that might even be brand new. It's like telling someone to buy a Mercedes or Volvo. It may be a very good product, but that doesn't mean there's not a lot of assumptions in any recommendation to buy one, especially if it doesn't consider the quality, cost or age of your current car other than "not a Mercedes or Volvo".
Except in this case you can buy iPhone for $450 which is less than the OnePlus6 in my locale. SOCs compare favorably between the two devices. I guess I’m not seeing why iPhone is akin to a luxury car brand.
> Man, in my extended family SMS text group, this comes up once every couple weeks. One of us will note they aren't getting a random message, or someone will send a video and the quality will be crap, and the iPhone users will all mention how if we all had iPhones, this wouldn't be a problem.
IMO a reasonable compromise is WhatsApp. Rich features like iMessage's but portable and lots of people already use it.
I have never had a Facebook account and I've always been wary of them. I think it's fair to be concerned about privacy w/WhatsApp but I'm torn because it's a very practical solution.
Yeah, Signal or Telegram might be a much better balance. But I don't want to be a salesman and try and push the technically superior choice on my friends and family. If I did, though, I would probably push one of those.
I don't like suggesting Telegram because it is not end-to-end encrypted.
I prefer WhatsApp (where it's Facebook that has access to all the metadata like who speaks to whom, but not the message contents), or Signal (which is also end-to-end encrypted and doesn't have the "Facebook" problem).
Note that even though I advocate for WhatsApp I recognize that it's not really what I would call "end to end encrypted". Any time that you allow a broker to execute the initial key exchange, you're implicitly trusting the broker. And beyond that: if you let the broker re-exchange keys without even informing you (!!!) then it's a stretch to call it "end to end encrypted." But if the system re-transmits old messages encrypted with the new keys without user interaction then "end to end encrypted" has lost all meaning whatsoever.
You can opt-in to at least be informed of new key exchanges, so at least I can tell myself that I took some precautions. But if I'm honest I know that it's not very effective.
It's a subtle point, but I would describe "end to end" as covering the humans on both ends. Your WhatsApp client on your phone participates in the key regeneration and/or key update without user interaction. WhatsApp's default UI configuration doesn't notify anyone about key changes. Defaults matter, defaults for secure software matters extra. Nearly no one enables this notification feature.
And even if they did, the client helpfully sent old messages encrypted with the new key. Even when you are notified, you're notified after the fact.
It does only exist on your device. Sadly, the WhatsApp client will receive a message from WhatsApp backend: "Fred Smith got a new phone and you should trust this new public key from Fred because I say so. Fred would love to have all the context so please re-send the old messages but encrypted with this new key." The WhatsApp client helpfully complies and hopes that Fred really did get a new phone and it's not Eve who somehow tricked WhatsApp into believing she was Fred. Or maybe WhatsApp was compelled by a lawful order to make it look as if Fred got a new phone.
The WhatsApp client never requests or even informs the user that this event took place. Though it is possible to change the config opt-in to get informed whether this occurred, it is not possible to deny the request for old messages.
They are replying to a comment about Telegram, and mention other messaging apps which are better. They also do not say that they're all just as bad, unclear where you got that from?
I don't get whats so confusing about that. The cited article is over 3 years old, from a site whose parent company's founder got sued out of existence for leaking private sex tapes.[1]
Is that what we consider the standard bearer for technical opinions on apps?
Or do you belong to some kind of voting ring that downvotes opinions on apps they don't like?
[1]
Gawker to Pay Hulk Hogan $31 Million to Settle Sex Tape Lawsuit
That said, I use it a lot less now that I know that it is neither self-hostable, nor really open to third-party clients.
I would like to get rid of Android at some point, and I am tired of relying on third parties not to discontinue their products.
Nowadays, I use Matrix. There are a few downsides (the python server implementation makes the biggest public server quite slow, E2E isn't turned on by default yer -- though it should be at some point, and the clients' UX is generally rough around the edges).
And yeah, whatsapp is king of the network effect, though messenger would take the crown in my circles. That said, by deliberately staying out of these services, and providing my reasons, people ask me for alternatives they could use.
One thing that I like about Matrix is its compatibility with multiple bridges, which lets me connect with people on networks such as IRC, Discord, Telegram, etc. (depending on bridge availability). There is no public whatsapp bridge due to their TOS, and I haven't decided to give them my social graph just yet (though they probably have it already, thanks to having access to my friends'address books). I'd really like to see an officially-endorsed Matrix bridge.
If people really want to contact me, they can still phone me, write me an SMS, e-mail or a letter. Many still bother, but I get it's a tough call for simple acquaintances.
I still feel it's worth it holding to your principles. That's what they are for, and small numbers make the big numbers in the long run.
Update 8/31/2019: After publication of this article Telegram’s creators implemented several changes that are recognized by qualified cryptographers as a vast improvement to its encryption scheme. Since 2017, for example, the MTProto protocol has been recognized as IND-CCA secure.
Its still not actually on by default and you can't use encrypted chat synced between your desktop and phone. Group chats also don't have encryption and (last I checked) count be run e2e encrypted.
Probably 99%+ of conversation on Telegram are visible to the Telegram company.
You can pry Telegram from my cold, dead hands. Open source clients with cloud sync of messages plus the option of moving to encrypted end-to-end as needed is the perfect compromise.
My one wish is for the server codebase to be open sourced but given that Telegram is in the midst of a backend architectural change to the Telegram Open Network, I forgive them this, for now.
Every alternative is riddled with issues: WhatsApp is controlled by Facebook who let's face it may as well be the face of evil for Silicon Valley today; Signal is controlled by a power-tripping maniac who refuses to work with the open source commons on releasing to package repos like F-Droid, the app itself also has major deliverability issues; Wire would be good if they just sorted their notifications on mobile out but I've been waiting for that day for a few years now; Matrix is slow to deliver messages among networks larger than a handful.
Apple handed over its iCloud encryption keys and iMessage keyserver for Chinese users to the PRC, enabling mass surveillance of communications where at least one party is Chinese. Facebook and Google have not. I trust Facebook very little, but I trust Apple even less.
Yeah, having thought about it when this comes up, there's a very real trade-off between what people are willing to use because they've heard of it or might actually have it, whether that app/service will stay around or keep similar features in the future, and whether it's associated with a large org that may farm the data for personal information about you in some way (even if that's just your location).
Something like Signal seems good, but I imagine it may be a pain to get some of my extended family to adopt it (or to make sure things send using it).
WhatsApp would be good in that people have heard of it, and if they have Facebook it's probably easy for them to integrate with, but people are much more likely to have relative's phone numbers than service profile links, meaning they might opt to not use it in many cases.
Really, it needs to be ubiquitous on phones for it really to be a viable replacement that will be used 9 out of 10 times. That leaves RCS as an upgrade to SMS, but who knows if we'll ever get that. I know people complain about how it doesn't actually raise limits enough, but going from SMS to a limit fo 105 MB for videos and more features (even if not on parity with current systems) is a huge step, and I think the only one likely to achieve even close to the same deployment as SMS, and then only if Apple supports it too (assuming US networks actually get on board).
Err, WhatsApp does use phone numbers as identifiers rather than service profiles, which is why it is ubiquitous in most of the world (much more than iMessage).
If you install WhatsApp and I don't, and you send a message to my number what happens? I know what happens with SMS and RCS (which falls back to SMS), which is that it works, because every phone has it. If WhatsApp doesn't just work, then it's at a severe disadvantage any way you look at it.
Coordinating the 10 people in my family group to not only install a new app, but choose it the next time they want to send a message (especially if they add a new person) is not to going to be easy (and in some cases might be impossible if some people refuse).
> You can't, WhatsApp will only let you send to numbers that also have WhatsApp installed.
That's my point. It's a very substandard experience for initial contact to SMS, which is ubiquitous.
> Ultimately WhatsApp has won in most of the world, so this clearly isn't that big of a problem.
Compared to SMS, WhatsApp is almost nothing. And given that maybe 2-3 people in my family group might have it installed, "won most of the world" is irrelevant for me, and probably most groups of any size or with people over 30, as there's likely to be a few people without it.
They really ought to have some sort of format for setting up APN properly based on URIs, which could then be put in QR codes on fresh SIM card packages.
I've had a bunch of cellular ISPs over the years, and I've noticed that cellular infrastructure providers have this capability, but MVNOs seemingly do not.
iOS user here who successfully convinced one of my group chats to migrate to Signal. Shaming people into buying an iPhone will never work, but downloading a free app just takes a few days of bugging. Once you get a few people to do it, the rest will fall in line.
Next step is to get my family to do it. My Dad constantly sends video's that get compressed to hell due to the SMS file size limit.
The take up amongst operators is really low. And it's unlikely that will change anytime soon as their focus is on the 5G rollout and not on re-platforming their messaging system.
Also the system is unencrypted so you would have to be crazy to use it in this environment.
There are about 800+ mobile phone operators around the world and based on reports about 50 or so have signed up. Not a great percentage after 10+ years.
And I think the lack of encryption is going to kill adoption in many parts of the world.
"But now Google is taking over: later this month, Android users in the UK and France will be able to opt in to RCS Chat services provided directly by Google instead of waiting for their carrier to support it."[1]
Sounds like we might get some movement on this soon, as Google is offering their own servers as a fall-back in the case that the network provider hasn't provided their own.
Live in the UK. Never received an RCS. Nor has anyone I know.
For all Google's bluster here it's not supported by the carriers, and only works on Google's own SMS app - not the AOSP or OEM ones - which only the tiniest proportion of the market uses as it's not the default on 90%+ of Android phones shipping today.
RCS is a federated protocol. Any app could use it if the network providers supplied a service for it. Google is providing a Google server fallback for if they don't.
There may not be a UK RCS market, but given it was just turned on a couple months ago and for a few countries, perhaps it's too soon to call it decided?
My point was specifically in response to Google's claim that RCS is a "gold" market for RCS where they have already completed the rollout. They haven't. They have the support of one carrier with roughly 20% market share, and about 3 - 5% of Android devices.
There isn't really any reason to surmise that is going to improve, and Google's boasting here is very silly. RCS is a dead end product in every non-US territory, and Google have no market levers to pull that can improve it's performance. They should give up on it and focus their efforts on the US bluntly.
> They have the support of one carrier with roughly 20% market share, and about 3 - 5% of Android devices.
According to Google (in the articles I read and shared here), whether the network provider supports it is irrelevant because they are supplying their own server in those cases, so it should just work. If you're in that region I'm interested to hear what you experience is if you have access to an Android phone and test.
Either the provider has to support it or the SMS app on the device has to (TBH the provider support also requires some level of integration with the SMS app but that level is more common).
Google has rolled out a provider independent implementation to it's own SMS app, but that SMS app has no marketshare.
My experience is that, without going and hunting out an app to install, my Samsung handset has no support. I have a number of test devices, some of which do have support and a few even have support by default, but those have no marketshare.
Probably because the spec started all the way back in 2008, and you could revise it yet again, even though almost nobody is currently supporting it, or you can get it out and improve the situation for many people, even though it's not perfect. I imagine pushing for an extension to support encryption might be a lot easier if there's actual uses to call for it.
Given that Google has started rolling it out with a fallback to Google servers if the network provider doesn't supply one, and Google has said they understand encryption is important and they will push for it, we might actually see some progress soon (on both the adoption and encryption fronts) if we're very lucky.
You can see references to that info in some of my other comments on this article, since I looked it up again today after mentioning it earlier.
> I imagine pushing for an extension to support encryption might be a lot easier if there's actual uses to call for it.
That's letting Google off the hook. Nobody knows better about the level of surveillance users are under. Encryption should be feature #1. For them to roll out an unencrypted service borders on malpractice. Luckily for them, software engineers aren't licensed.
> Google has started rolling it out with a fallback to Google servers
Even though Google may not be the most trustworthy company, I trust them far, far more than my ISP and cell company. If I could choose which back end I want to be on, I would choose Google's, especially if that meant messages would be end-to-end encrypted within that sphere.
Well, you're free to travel back in time to 2008 and propose it to the working group that was making the spec...
> If I could choose which back end I want to be on, I would choose Google's, especially if that meant messages would be end-to-end encrypted within that sphere.
I agree, but it appears the way the protocol is federated means that there isn't specifically one back end. Also, since it does some discovery with a "hidden" sms to the other end to ask if it supports RCS, I imagine end-to-end encryption might not be that hard to tack on...
> I can't wait for RCS messaging. I'm honestly wondering it Apple will support it, or try to segment the text messaging market even more.
I mean, RCS is practically dead (at least in the USA). But even if it does come it'll basically replace SMS with something slightly better. I don't see how it addresses the iMessage stuff. iMessage will likely still send much higher quality images and videos and RCS, AFAIK, can't do some the same features like showing who's typing.
RCS is cool but I don't think it's going to be a game changer in any way. I think it'll just be an incremental update, if it even comes to the USA.
Isn’t this because sms doesn’t send high quality photos/videos? With imessage you get full quality images, it’s very nice. It’s also encrypted.
>Not that we couldn't all just switch to some third party app (or hangouts even), and then we'd all have a comparable experience
Which one?
Whatsapp and messenger compress images, fairly significantly. Messenger is unencrypted by default. Whatsapp is encrypted, but you have to give facebooks your contacts, and metadata on the convos, which gives away a lot of info.
I use both, and whatsapp does have some better features (voice notes are better, as is search), but I prefer imessage for the image quality and encryption. I also trust apple better with the metadata.
>Man, in my extended family SMS text group, this comes up once every couple weeks. One of us will note they aren't getting a random message, or someone will send a video and the quality will be crap, and the iPhone users will all mention how if we all had iPhones, this wouldn't be a problem.
I don't understand why iMessages is so popular in US, and it is pretty much US and France ( SMS ) only AFAIK. It is like when the world was on ICQ, they had AIM. When the world moved to MSN, they still stuck to AIM.
And just like AIM, iMessages sucks. I tried it many times and the same problem persist. Some users in the group not getting message, message appeared not in timely order, sometimes random message from the past appear. Needs to Recreate group to solve user not getting message problem, which means all previous group messages are in different group. It is slow as compared to WhatsApp. Icons and Packs are far worst, it is as if Apple has never used WeChat, KakaoTalk, Line, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Telegram.
Then there is huge amount of SMS Notification and Receipt that gets muddles up in the list of conversation. It is a Giant pile of Mess.
Every year I read something about iMessages being popular ( in US ) and every year I tried with my group of friends. And the answer remain the same. And it is so god damn bad most of my friends now refuse to try it again.
iMessage pressure is real for me too. I was considering switching to an iPhone for a while but found air message and have been using it for a few weeks. It doesn't have all the features of iMessage, but core messaging works pretty well and I haven't felt a need to switch to an iPhone.
Given that the installation guide[1] says you need "A computer running OS X 10.10 Yosemite or higher (and a place for it to stay)" I'm pretty sure they are just relaying your messages through an actual desktop iMessage instance, so probably. I imagine a lot of Android users don't have a computer running MacOS to do this though, so while a cool solution, it probably doesn't help the majority of people.
People forget that part of the point of different colors for iMessage vs SMS was to indicate that iMessage is encrypted and SMS isn't. It's also a handy marketing thing, but there is a technical justification for making a visible distinction.
AirMessage is basically a proxy that strips encryption for Android devices:
"AirMessage leverages the power of your Mac computer in order to route messages to and from Apple's iMessage servers. The server is to be installed on a computer at home, and will pass messages to and from your smartphone to allow the usage of iMessage and other installed services."
I don't think that's what's happening here. I think AirMessage is just functioning as an iMessage client by using the Messages app on the Mac as a proxy. It would be no different from sitting physically in front of the computer. You can only read the messages off the screen and you can only send messages through Message itself.
I would imagine that the AirMessage Android app is actually in communication with the AirMessage server on your Mac. It uses some automation (perhaps via something like https://github.com/shusain93/OSXMessageProxy) to talk the the Messages app. The connection is encrypted from there to the other side, as if you were sitting in front of your Mac. This happens in reverse the other way.
Hacky, and now you own the weak links in the E2E encryption chain. But a neat workaround, in a pinch.
I'm coming from the other side, I've been feeling more and more of a desire to go back to Android. I had a pretty gnarly experience where my cellular antenna stopped working and apple gave surprisingly poor customer support. I've had really annoying wifi issues on the latest iphone xs as well as the latest apple tv. Overall, I get the feeling that things in general are headed in the wrong direction and would love to get away from them. I'm pretty married to OS X for development but otherwise I would like to get away. The biggest thing holding me back from switching is messages and the integration between ios and os x. It seems so silly but that's where I'm at.
Also as a recent iOS user, I don't understand why. Other than live captions, sound amp and family link, most new features have been on iOS for a while, and will actually improve on iOS 13 (e.g. apps have to ask for location access each time, besides the current 3 options). Seems like they're trying to catch up to iOS.
Its more the massive privacy, security, longevity, and performance penalty you pay switching to Android that causes concern.
Android has some nifty features depending on device, but the core experience just isn’t there. (E.g. I figured chrome on Android has to be faster than Chrome on iOS - nope, my XR consistently beat a Pixel 3 side-by-side)
My iPhone 6S from 2015 is still in service and fast; I gave it to my mom when I upgraded and she’s very happy with it. It still gets updates.
I know, if anything that makes it more embarrassing for Android - Google controls that whole system and they're still not beating WKWebview on their flagship device.
Going between Android and iOS, that's one of the hardest aspects that I think gets overlooked - the browser is just slower and its noticeable. I pointed out the flagship device in this case, but its no better on the lower end devices.
It’s interesting to note the different behavior; Android/chrome is putting something on the screen first, while safari tends to finish rendering and show the completed result before chrome. Tends to vary a bit by site.
App startup is a bit slower on iPhone but note that the preferred way on iOS is to keep apps open and not manually close them. Manually closing apps isn’t really required on iOS except to declutter the task switcher. Supposedly faster startup times coming in iOS 13.
Holy shit I’m not crazy. I switched to iOS almost entirely for Safari. I’d been an Android user for so long I just thought that Chrome was just how the web was until someone handed me their iPhone.
Android still has far superior notifications, both on the control side and the display side. You also basically named half of the features in "other than" list. iOS is also just getting dark mode too so not "for a while". The only thing they've had for a while is better permission control.
That's ironic, this page makes me want to switch to iOS for my next phone.
Aside from the annoyingness of the page...
Too many things here are patched on top what ought to be core. Eg. Pausing annoying apps. IMO apps ought to default to off in the first place until you turn them on.
Very little detail about these new privacy controls. Sounds like Google-centric lipstick.
Dark theme is exciting; embarrassing it took so long.
You can be signed up for Messenger without being signed up for Facebook, I think. (Or, at least, you can deactivate a Facebook account and still use Messenger.)
Does deactivating Facebook mean anything on the user side? I remember trying to delete my FB account (Which in their parlance is a different thing) some years ago and it was an oblique nightmare
Minor nitpick, but the quality of compression for pictures/video sent over FB Messenger is atrocious compared to that of iMessage. Like, we aren't talking just technicalities, it is very visually obvious and jarring. Same when it comes to video chat, Discord and FaceTime have waaaaay better quality and reliability.
> But alas, iMessage pressure is real in my friend's group.
I've never had this from my friends. I read about this all the time and all I can think is, "Why would I be friends with people who care about that enough to peer pressure me into using an iPhone?"
Because there are some huge, genuinely great benefits to using it. No one really cares that much but, when the difference between the two experiences is as great as it currently is, it really affects the conversation.
For example, we don't really pressure friends to buy iPhones but we legitimately have a separate conversation group for just iOS users from the main SMS group chat so we can send images, video, or other media at full quality. Most of us are pretty tech savvy too so we're not really keen on using WhatsApp or Telegram or any of the other dirty data apps.
No, I mean "dirty data" as in all your data is collected and there's very little transparency regarding what those apps/companies are doing with your data. I haven't exhaustively tested all these apps but I have tested a few and know that Apple doesn't send any information or data from iMessage to their servers that isn't encrypted on-device. Unlike these other apps, Apple couldn't leak your data or usage from these apps because it's never collected in the first place.
Seriously. In the meantime, the rest of the world all uses WhatsApp. For group chat it's hard to beat. I use signal with family and some friends but getting people to switch is impossible. And allegedly it has group chat but it's not obvious how that works even to a techie like me. Asking people to switch phone platforms is ridiculous, especially people from poorer countries where an iPhone costs at least a couple months' salary. Lately I've also used keybase with another friend and it seems promising but the user base is almost nonexistent.
> With Android 10, you’re in control of your privacy.
With privacy being the latest buzzword in the tech industry and all this news about privacy blunders I keep seeing, For Google to market something like this for Android makes you wonder what other nefarious features that have been added to Android that they didn't tell you about.
In terms of privacy, Android 10 instead screams "Upgrade and lose control of your privacy".
Actually there are a number of new privacy-enhancing features in this release. Probably the most prominent is that it will help you choose which apps should be able to get location information in the background. Google obviously has a tricky relationship with privacy, but as far as I know Android 10 is strictly better in that regard.
Privacy enhancing towards 3rd party apps, maybe, but towards Google itself OTOH...
As someone trying to manage using an Android phone without Google's services (Play Store et al), they really castrated Android starting with version 8, when you needed the Play Store in order to reliably receive push notifications.
In fact, I'm passively looking for ways to downgrade my phone back to LineageOS 14/Android 7 because of this, but older releases of Lineage aren't easily readily available...
Entirely agree. We should educate people that privacy is not something a company can "add" to a product or to an ad like Apple and Google claim. Privacy is not just a "feature", this is whole culture, ideological and technological commitment (and sacrifices and extra challenges) you have to do (like at Purism, Mozilla, GNU, etc.) not some marketing buzzword strategy to put on ads to make more sells.
Privacy is not something you can claim, it is something you must prove through 100% full stack open source code and reproducible builds.
> The MPEG group claims that twice as much information can be stored in a HEIF image as in a JPEG image of the same size, resulting in a better quality image. HEIF also supports animation, and is capable of storing more information than an animated GIF at a small fraction of the size.
I wonder how many of the features advertised here will make it onto the Android 10 release of other OEMs. In Android 9 for example, the ability to select text via OCR in the recent apps screen was limited to only the Pixel devices for some strange reason even though all Android devices had access to that feature prior to the release of Google Assistant via the Google app.
In a similar vein, Digital Wellbeing was officially limited to Pixel devices and Android One devices although it could be sideloaded onto other phones (where it ran perfectly fine) running Android 9+.
Most of them are choice of the OEMs - e.g. Samsung held back Digital Wellbeing on their S9 phone updates so it could market their own reimplementation on S10 series.
Everything marketed here is available to all OEMs - Pixel specific features are marketed on Pixel marketing pages.
... We're getting more and more into an age where mobile hardware doesn't matter anymore, because it's become so fungible. And Samsung will do very badly, because they're hardware is good, but their software sucks so bad.
It more comes down to the permanently installed crap software they bundle like it’s a 1998 emachine. And the lame Samsung account requirement. And Bixby. There’s that weird rewards program thing where you earn xp for using different features on the phone. The updates are slow. It feels more like spyware than standard google stuff. The whole thing is a pretty terrible experience.
I couldnt agree more, it has taken a lot of painful configuration to limit Samsung from butting I to every aspect of usage of my phone, and having damn near every update break that.
The bixby button is an endless pain, thankfully I found bxaction that helps stop it.
So, if some apps are bothering you, disable them? I routinely disable everything I won't use, and it's not only the vendor crap, but Google crap too.
It works perfectly fine without Samsung account. I couldn't be bothered to make one, and I'm not missing anything. If you do not have Samsung account, Bixby won't bother you either. Just because there was a step to make one in the OOBE, doesn't mean you have to make one, you can skip it.
Updates are there at the beginning of every month, I have no idea why you think they are slow (and for some reason, S8 updates are there day or two in advance to S10 updates... go figure). Samsung doesn't insist on using cloud services, unlike Google, where Google Photos nag the user to enable upload to cloud, even if the user never intends to do so. Google apps do not know the answer "no", Samsung (or Sony) apps do.
It's not just a question of design philosophy. Samsung software is often riddled with bugs, things don't work, features removed relative to stock android, forcing inferior version on us (like their keyboard...), then on top of it all the crapware, the fake android store, the lack of updates, etc. etc.
Samsung does either monthly updates for their newer models, or quarterly for the older. Galaxy S7 still receives security updates, for example.
It also has features, that will show in the next Android version. The dark mode, for example, has been there since they introduced Pie version. The only one feature that I noticed they removed, is the SIP client, which most users do not use anyway.
They do ship their keyboard, but you can still choose you own, the Android mechanism for that works. I also do not have any problem with it, it is on par with the Sony one, for example.
What I do appreciate though, is that their software doesn't push me into cloud services. Their gallery is perfectly fine with working just on device, without asking me to upload my photos somewhere, unlike Google Photos, which doesn't know the answer "No, thank you, don't bother me again". Samsung account is entirely optional, I still didn't create mine and it works perfectly well without it.
As the cherry on the top, the esthetic of OneUI is nicer than Google's. It makes somewhat softer impression, where Google apps are unnecessarily harsh.
I wouldn't be so sure to blame the OEM. Read this article [0]. Google dismissed a support ticket claiming that the OCR text selection feature was available only to Pixel devices released after 2017.
The Android Pie page [1] advertises the feature here as a standard Android feature under the system usability enhancements section.
This feature was actually available to all devices before the Google Assistant was released via a feature called Google Now on Tap.
OCR text selection is available via Google Lens. What I'm talking about specifically is the ability to select out text from app pages where text selection is not usually possible. For example, say an app had button text or an embedded image, it is not possible to select these unless the app developer made those selectable. In Pixel devices, it's possible to go to the recent apps menu, and select these unselectable texts via OCR. This feature was previously available to all devices via Google Now On Tap but has since been limited.
The way they show and demonstrate gestures, along with the UI at the bottom, strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures. That would save space, give people a bit more control over fullscreen apps, and provide a less "modal" UI where the same gestures always work even if the buttons aren't available (such as when playing fullscreen video).
Also, "Get security updates faster." is huge; this is effectively saying "no matter who makes your phone, you still get updates".
Deprecating "Device admin for enterprise" makes it much safer to access work resources from an otherwise personal Android device, without giving your IT department the ability to remote-wipe your entire device.
This is orders of magnitude better than the pill one, which not only felt unfinished, it didn't even actually get rid of the bottom bar, which seems like the whole point of gesture navigation...
> The way they show and demonstrate gestures, along with the UI at the bottom, strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures.
Yes, that's the case. When you're using gesture navigation the only visible UI left is the horizontal bar at them bottom. Apps adjusted for gesture navigation will also draw behind that line.
Gesture navigation is still an option which might not be enabled by default on all devices, but I strongly suggest trying it out. I used it quite some time with the latest release candidates of Android 10 and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back. Especially the back swipe is really nice.
Try smart launcher, and set up your own gestures. I haven't been a fan of gestures either historically, but smart launcher has converted me. Single finger up / down / left / right; double finger up / down / left / right; double tap on screen, and a couple of others.
I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu?
Then again I still miss having physical back and home buttons since I upgraded to a newer android phone. It would be nice if manufactures added more buttons to the side of the phone so the other fingers have something to do.
> I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu?
That's also discussed in the blog post I linked. tl;dr: Only a small subset of users (3-7%) uses a swipe gesture to open these menus (all others use the hamburger menu) and these users have to adapt now to do different kinds of swipes for opening the menu and invoking the back gesture.
After reading your comment, I went through my most commonly used apps and found that they all have a hamburger button in the top left corner that brings up the same menu as a swipe from left gesture. Somehow I never noticed those buttons before, leaving me feeling a bit spooked. How is it that something I look at dozens of times a day could go unnoticed for so long?
I had the inverse reaction: I discovered that all these apps support swiping from the left. At least the hamburger menu is visible - there is nothing really advertising the swipe gesture.
You can swipe at an angle (around 45° up or down) to open the menu, and straight out to go back. Not very intuitive/discoverable, but works pretty well once you get used to it
You don't need any "hack", right in System > Gestures > Navigation, all three options are openly available (100% gesture, 2-button + gesture, old 3-button style). I believe they intent on keeping it all available for sometime, if only for accessibility reasons.
Also, the charts show that it's either equal and better, and there's also the implicit fact that not showing buttons also means more screen space, so even if usability metric is the same, visually it's a win.
Android 10 lets you download and install certain security updates through Google Play as easily as an app. That is a first, and it should not be understated.
> strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures.
If that happens, that's an OS that is unacceptable to me. It's bad enough that physical buttons were eliminated in favor of the soft buttons. That bothers me to this day, but I learned to live with it.
Eliminating even the horrible soft buttons, though, would be a bridge too far in terms of reducing usability.
I hope the gestures are better than when they first came out with the "pill". I tried it for a week and it was an awful experience. Maybe it's because I use the double tap on app switcher to quickly get to last app a lot and the pill was really bad for that (slow and would switch to wrong app half the time).
Yes, it's much much better. That one was unfortunately in a half-way between gesture and buttons and felt very unfinished. This one is much smoother and easy to quick switch between apps. It feels a lot more natural, and the bottom buttons are actually gone, saving space.
I used to really dislike work profile, but I gotta say it has gotten much better over the past few versions. For one, it seems like they're implementing a way for Calendar to share between personal/work in a single view, which was a huge pet peeve. They also allow for custom keyboard on your personal profile in Q which is great.
I really miss the days phones came with covers for the USB ports. They were annoying as hell due to my lack of finger nails, but damn the port stayed spotless. Every phone I've had lately the usb port gets so full of dust and crap chargers stopped working properly unless I fucked around and balanced it just perfectly.
You can buy female dust covers on Amazon. I haven't really had issues. My biggest complaint was how susceptible USB micro was to breaking, but no problems with USB Type-C phones.
It's always nice to see how each Android release compares to iOS. Usually about 10% of the features while releasing to about .05% of the active phones. The vast majority of people won't see these features for another 3 years.
Hoping to be wrong, checked the data. It's been about a year for iOS 12 and Android Pie. According to the latest numbers, iOS 12 is at 84% [1] and Android Pie is at 27% [2].
I also don't think that waiting 3 years will push Pie percentage much higher. Android 6.0 is more popular than 8.0 and 7.0.
I don't envy Android devs... Can't imagine it's fun to develop apps when you have to target OSes released 4+ years ago because 21% of devices still run them. For iOS the "4+ years" number is way below 1%.
I guess I'm not impressed. - Edit: not a bad release
Live caption on device: Sounds great. Very useful if you are hearing impaired. If you just want captions for the words the are difficult to make out, some AI isn't going to help there. AI's are currently worse than I am at detecting words.
Smart reply: This looks useful. Not having to lose info as you create an appointment or less clicks copying and pasting directions. Yeah, great feature. Good job here.
Sound amplifier: Remember when everyone was up in arms because iPods could boost sound way too loud. (disregarding different source volumes and headphone sensitivity). So everyone limited the power output of their headphone jack. Well, now we've come full circle and we can blast our ear drums the way god intended, it just takes more button presses. This is like yeah, we took away a feature because of hysteria, now it's back.
Edit: Thanks for explaining this to me. This feature does indeed seem useful. Audio that is more clear, being able to hear what's around you, yeah this is great.
Gesture navigation: I hate this. Maybe some people like it. If you are one of those people, I'm happy for you.
Dark theme: I originally though this feature was dumb. Next we'll have gray theme, or blue theme. Battery savings just didn't seem that great. After using this for a while, I like dark theme, in an unexpected way. I find that the black colors are less stimulating and the phone is less of a distraction.
Digital wellbeing: I haven't found these features all that useful. Perhaps someone else makes use of them. I mostly see this as shaming for using the phone too much.
Focus mode: Remember that one android release that made it so you can easily block all notifications from an app. Well, later they made it so you can only easily block a category(can still block all just more presses). Then apps can create as many categories as they want(so you keep getting spammed). This time they didn't do the user friendly release, in order to focus you have to check each app you have installed. Completely backwards like they didn't really want to do this feature.
Family link: I'm not a parent, kids and phones sound like a nightmare to me. I hope this helps you parents. No opinion from me.
This is really quite cynical, particularly about sound amplifier. It should be very useful to the millions of people who are hearing impaired, but haven't gotten a hearing aid yet. (Most people tend to put this off for a while.)
There's some irony that some folks might have gotten hearing loss from headphones in the first place, but it sounds like a useful feature.
It will be useful to me, but there's already a volume button. Would be nice if that just worked, instead of it being nerfed.
The volume limitations only made sense if you never used headphones less sensitive than the oem ones and listened to source audio that was only at maximum volume all the time.
But Sound Amplifier isn't about making the phone's audio louder - its purpose is to amplify the sound in the room around you and filter background noise. I think you're misunderstanding the feature.
I haven't tried it, but it sounds like this would also be useful if you want to wear headphones to avoid bothering others but you still want to clearly hear what's going on around you.
I've had Family Link on my Pixel2 since 2018 (and my daughter's Moto X4). It has been very useful and is a great app. Strange to list it as a feature for Android 10, but maybe not a lot of people know about it?
Live caption sounds great to me since my wife's family is Russian and I don't speak it very well. We video chat with grandma often and I'm not really involved...
> Live caption on device: Sounds great. Very useful if you are hearing impaired
Many people use their phone in spaces where audio wouldn't be well received (and headphones weren't worn). Examples where I'd prefer captions over audio: when I'm commuting, in a loud space, at work, waiting in a doctor's office, anywhere where I don't want to silence all outside sounds with headphones, but would like to watch the video and read what's said.
With song lyrics and audio books, I'd like to hear and read.
Some of the features sound amazing "sound amplifier" sounds like a hearing aid like function. If it has a low audio delay and good function set to filter noise it could be revolutionary. I was looking for something like this in app form not too long ago.
I wonder how gesture navigation will work with some apps.
I wonder which features will make it into aosp/lineageos. I'm missing android smartlock in limeageos. If I could wish for a feature for android it would be "game mode" from oxygenos.
Too bad it the sound amplifier app only works with wired headphones, with Pixel 2 and above not having a headphone jack. So now that they got me to switch over to bluetooth headphones, I have to dig out the USB adapter and an older pair of wired headphones to try it out.
Not sure why some apps such as this hate bluetooth, since this app would be a perfect match with bluetooth earbuds.
Good thing that I won't buy a phone without a headphone jack.
I didn't even saw that piece of information. It's probably because of the delay thought, it can get very annoying if you add bluetooth delay to the processing delay. Let's see if we can find more information on that. Maybe it can even remove your own voice
I was bummed about it too at first but thinking about it more, having version numbers will make it more obvious if a device has outdated software to the normal consumer and might put pressure on manufacturers to update devices much faster
Sure, K comes before P in the alphabet, but figuring this (and the actual distance) out takes a lot more mental effort than comparing 4.4 with 9.
It also resolves the issue where you need to decide whether 7 is larger than Marshmallow - a question that would make people question your sanity if posed without context.
And to make it more confusing, each release had a separate codename used before the release, so you had Android K, Android Key Lime Pie, Android KitKat, Android 4.4, and API level 19, all meaning the same thing.
Now, if only we could get rid of the separate "API level" designator (or rather, turn it into an opaque enum, instead of using it everywhere)... because 28 should not be less than 10.
Glad to see a big push for security updates directly from Google here, any further details on how this will be implemented and if device manufacturers will screw it up?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
I suspect it's implemented using the new Playback Capture API (https://developer.android.com/preview/features/playback-capt...) which provides an opt-out, too.
7.1.1 in Settings > Google Play Store > Manage Android Preferences > About
None of the screenshots around the caption seem to use "true black", though!
So while the additional battery savings between "true black" and grey are within the margin of error, the battery benefits remain for both and the non-battery benefits remain for our eyes.
prefers-color-scheme recently landed in all major browsers: https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme
> and app you use support it
This is a prerequisite for that. You're not gonna manually turn on dark mode in every single app for much longer, your OS will support it as a setting and third-party apps (including browsers) will read that setting and adjust accordingly.
- Dark mode saves battery (for OLED displays). The discussion was on "true dark" Vs. grey. Not dark Vs. non-dark modes.
- Dark mode is useful in low light/dark rooms/night usage.
It isn't a gimmick and a lot of people like it. I happen to be one of them. I'd use it even without any battery savings.
White on True black UI has way too much contrast and is much more fatiguing than white on dark gray.
Pure black doesn't feel like I'm looking at a box light and makes transitions between text and media much more consistent. I end up futzing with the brightness for mixed media (like embedded videos or images) far more when using a gray dark theme, since the true brightness will be much more intense for "media white" than "text white", and the perceived brightness between them will be even higher than that.
Dark themes used to be about practicality and health. Current gray dark themes seem to be born from poor contrast ratio LCD limitations and justification for the aesthetics around the old Holo theme. As someone that has religiously converted their most common sites to dark themes with custom CSS (a few hundred as of now), gray on gray themes feel foggy and I only use light-but-still-dark gray backgrounds on sites that change frequently so I can see if there's a new text element that needs to be styled.
(But, I'm probably in the minority. I also drop font sizes to reasonable levels, delete rounded corners on elements, and remove the miles of whitespace from sites unwilling to accept that a two paragraph "story" isn't worthy of the engagement metrics they get by wasting the reader's time scrolling.)
https://9to5google.com/2019/09/03/gmail-dark-mode-android-te...
Probably not far off.
I use Signal because I don't want Google reading my messages.
(The app of course also has a choice of encrypting the payload - it's free form after all.)
push notifications services can merely send instructions, and the visual notification can be an object formed completely client side.
They show up on all apps that provide messaging.
I don't want Google reading my Signal messages on their devices or mine.
Palm -> meego -> xda mad scientists -> iOS -> Android
Given that Palm UI people now work for Android, this was bound to happen.
I wish android hardware was better supported for the long haul. I would even go as far as saying i would pay yearly for android maintenance than to pitch my phone for a OS update. My phone has plenty of power....at least we have XDA forums.
Android 10 will be deployed to 1st gen Pixels today too.
Also 2 years ago i paid $700 for the phone. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, so i should pitch it to get another expensive phone? There is android 9 on the XDA forums for my phone.
Off topic, but i find it commical that my 17 and 18 years old kids yell at me because my 14 year old car gets about 27 miles to the gallon and pollutes so much, but every year they beg me to buy them a new phone so they can junk their old ones......
https://www.androidauthority.com/nokia-7-1-specs-909661/
2. You DON'T want this update right now anyway. At this point it is just a tech demo for Pixel people and far from stable. 6 to 9 months from now it will be good enough as a daily driver.
https://www.blog.google/products/android/evolving-android-br...
With my "green bubble" friends, we usually use Telegram or Signal or Keybase instead.
I'd love to see a standardized IM/Text protocol instead of 1000 fragmented platforms. I've got on the order of 10 chat apps on my phone right now, all used in different contexts.
Apple could easily open the protocol, but they won't. They also won't use any of the other ones so as long as you'll be using iOS, you'll be in the iMessage garden and everyone else will be in another garden.
[1] https://matrix.org/
I'm hoping that's what RCS[1] will be (ids? And that's why I referenced it above). It's supposed to by the successor to SMS, but it's been around for quite a while and not adopted, so I'm not sure what's going on with it.
Edit: It looks like as of a couple months ago it's live in the UK and France, and just those two countries.[2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
2: https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/rcs-hands-on-not-quite-ime...
Whatsapp really seems to be missing the boat with tweens and teens - that’s cant be good for their future.
Lots of people don't care at all. The only time I hear about this whole "green bubble bad" thing is online. In real life, I have never once encountered this sentiment. (I'm not saying this sentiment doesn't exist IRL, I'm saying that it's not universal.)
I've never had anyone SERIOUSLY be mad about me being the green bubble, but when you're doing large group text coordination and someone drops me in, then starts doing tapbacks and sending rich media, I get some shit. And it gets thrown out as a joke in general conversation all the time. "Oh, he's a GREEN bubble..."
I'm sure that correct, but how common iPhones are, even amongst your age group, greatly depends on where in the US you are. In my area, iPhones are not nearly as common as they are in other areas, and there is generally little peer pressure in the grade/high schools to have them. Having a smartphone generally is expected, but few people care about whether or not it's an iPhone.
Or even worse: I just simply got excluded from group chats. That was the saddest one because when hanging out in person, a friend will mention a conversation from the group chat and I wouldn't know what's going on and they would just awkwardly pretend it didn't happen. Or say they'd add me to the group and never actually do it.
iMessage FOMO is a real thing and the social pressure (in the US at least) is insane.
This isn't a US-wide thing. This is about the priorities of a certain subculture, nothing more. Your friends just happen to be embedded in that subculture. My condolences.
https://rocketbots.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/AppMap_5a9b...
(Whatsapp, WeChat, and KakaoTalk respectively.)
It's the default form of mobile communication here.
I started using hangouts, WhatsApp, signal, FB, and just yesterday line for a single person. This is really not a good excuse. People should be more important than tech.
None of these are an alternative to iMessage. They all either are missing key features or require you to deal with unencrypted communications or relayed encryption.
Regarding the key - you have to trust the app it doesn't share it with the app authors. That's regardless of who/how implements the encryption. And it's true for iMessage as well.
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that, according to the security white paper released by Apple, that the key is generated on-device in the Secure Enclave and that Apple never has access to it. The Enclave itself also doesn't have network access so there's no way for that to be transmitted anywhere by any other means except for physical access, which is also limited in the hardware.
Man, in my extended family SMS text group, this comes up once every couple weeks. One of us will note they aren't getting a random message, or someone will send a video and the quality will be crap, and the iPhone users will all mention how if we all had iPhones, this wouldn't be a problem.
Cue a few of is getting kind of triggered because it's only Apple's co-opting of SMS on their phones that those people think that's really an Android problem and not some slick marketing on Apple's end to get their users to tell other people how their SMS texting is so much better. Not that we couldn't all just switch to some third party app (or hangouts even), and then we'd all have a comparable experience, but that's entirely lost on most of them, and not worth griping about after the first or second time or you come across as that weird relative that can't just do the easy thing[1]).
I can't wait for RCS messaging. I'm honestly wondering it Apple will support it, or try to segment the text messaging market even more.
1: As if buying a $750 phone is the "easy thing".
Edit: Changed $1000 to $750, since that's the lowest cost I could find for a 1 year old phone, and I don't think buying multiple year old hardware is something you can expect out of someone else, even if it might be my preferred strategy).
iOS = 1 ecosystem.
Android = infinite ecosystems with no cohesion.
One has native capability and consistent user experience which is now better for social interaction. The other has people rationalizing how a non-native app can be used which also wouldn't solve the aforementioned problem of receiving a random type of message, because nobody wants that experience, they want the rich experience that is native to iOS.
The android native experiences described even in OP's blog post won't be available for AGES on most people's devices, and even in that age they won't be reliable features because of custom OS' and devices won't be allowed to support it, based on the preference of those distributors.
iOS users aren't confused about that shitshow, iOS users know that it doesn't matter why, there is simply no consensus to fixing it on android, no path to consensus on fixing on android, and a group of hopeful technology enthusiasts that missed the memo on how android cohesion will never get better.
Telling someone to buy an iPhone because of this is pretentious. Telling them to buy an iPhone that may be worse performance wise than their current phone is way worse.
I don’t think the reply was suggesting you get a new phone specifically. They were responding to your claim that iPhone is on face not a good value.
IMO a reasonable compromise is WhatsApp. Rich features like iMessage's but portable and lots of people already use it.
I have never had a Facebook account and I've always been wary of them. I think it's fair to be concerned about privacy w/WhatsApp but I'm torn because it's a very practical solution.
I prefer WhatsApp (where it's Facebook that has access to all the metadata like who speaks to whom, but not the message contents), or Signal (which is also end-to-end encrypted and doesn't have the "Facebook" problem).
You can opt-in to at least be informed of new key exchanges, so at least I can tell myself that I took some precautions. But if I'm honest I know that it's not very effective.
And even if they did, the client helpfully sent old messages encrypted with the new key. Even when you are notified, you're notified after the fact.
The WhatsApp client never requests or even informs the user that this event took place. Though it is possible to change the config opt-in to get informed whether this occurred, it is not possible to deny the request for old messages.
https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right...
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/987372998935105539
Signal is definitely the more secure choice, but Whatsapp is still king of the network effect at least in my neck of the woods.
If they all are just as bad, is there something coming up on the near horizon thats worth the wait?
I don't get whats so confusing about that. The cited article is over 3 years old, from a site whose parent company's founder got sued out of existence for leaking private sex tapes.[1]
Is that what we consider the standard bearer for technical opinions on apps?
Or do you belong to some kind of voting ring that downvotes opinions on apps they don't like?
[1] Gawker to Pay Hulk Hogan $31 Million to Settle Sex Tape Lawsuit
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/nick-denton-announ...
[2] Gawker.com to shut down next week
https://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/08/gawkercom-to-sh...
That said, I use it a lot less now that I know that it is neither self-hostable, nor really open to third-party clients.
I would like to get rid of Android at some point, and I am tired of relying on third parties not to discontinue their products.
Nowadays, I use Matrix. There are a few downsides (the python server implementation makes the biggest public server quite slow, E2E isn't turned on by default yer -- though it should be at some point, and the clients' UX is generally rough around the edges).
And yeah, whatsapp is king of the network effect, though messenger would take the crown in my circles. That said, by deliberately staying out of these services, and providing my reasons, people ask me for alternatives they could use.
One thing that I like about Matrix is its compatibility with multiple bridges, which lets me connect with people on networks such as IRC, Discord, Telegram, etc. (depending on bridge availability). There is no public whatsapp bridge due to their TOS, and I haven't decided to give them my social graph just yet (though they probably have it already, thanks to having access to my friends'address books). I'd really like to see an officially-endorsed Matrix bridge.
If people really want to contact me, they can still phone me, write me an SMS, e-mail or a letter. Many still bother, but I get it's a tough call for simple acquaintances.
I still feel it's worth it holding to your principles. That's what they are for, and small numbers make the big numbers in the long run.
Probably 99%+ of conversation on Telegram are visible to the Telegram company.
https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
Signal is just as non-free as WhatsApp.
My one wish is for the server codebase to be open sourced but given that Telegram is in the midst of a backend architectural change to the Telegram Open Network, I forgive them this, for now.
Every alternative is riddled with issues: WhatsApp is controlled by Facebook who let's face it may as well be the face of evil for Silicon Valley today; Signal is controlled by a power-tripping maniac who refuses to work with the open source commons on releasing to package repos like F-Droid, the app itself also has major deliverability issues; Wire would be good if they just sorted their notifications on mobile out but I've been waiting for that day for a few years now; Matrix is slow to deliver messages among networks larger than a handful.
There's your overview.
I trust Apple a whole helluva lot more than Facebook or Google. I'll happily take iMessage + Signal over WhatsAp, Hangouts, or SMS any day.
Yeah, having thought about it when this comes up, there's a very real trade-off between what people are willing to use because they've heard of it or might actually have it, whether that app/service will stay around or keep similar features in the future, and whether it's associated with a large org that may farm the data for personal information about you in some way (even if that's just your location).
Something like Signal seems good, but I imagine it may be a pain to get some of my extended family to adopt it (or to make sure things send using it).
WhatsApp would be good in that people have heard of it, and if they have Facebook it's probably easy for them to integrate with, but people are much more likely to have relative's phone numbers than service profile links, meaning they might opt to not use it in many cases.
Really, it needs to be ubiquitous on phones for it really to be a viable replacement that will be used 9 out of 10 times. That leaves RCS as an upgrade to SMS, but who knows if we'll ever get that. I know people complain about how it doesn't actually raise limits enough, but going from SMS to a limit fo 105 MB for videos and more features (even if not on parity with current systems) is a huge step, and I think the only one likely to achieve even close to the same deployment as SMS, and then only if Apple supports it too (assuming US networks actually get on board).
Coordinating the 10 people in my family group to not only install a new app, but choose it the next time they want to send a message (especially if they add a new person) is not to going to be easy (and in some cases might be impossible if some people refuse).
You can't, WhatsApp will only let you send to numbers that also have WhatsApp installed.
There's an "invite friends" sharesheet that will send a signup URL, but that's it.
> If WhatsApp doesn't just work, then it's at a severe disadvantage any way you look at it.
Ultimately WhatsApp has won in most of the world, so this clearly isn't that big of a problem.
That's my point. It's a very substandard experience for initial contact to SMS, which is ubiquitous.
> Ultimately WhatsApp has won in most of the world, so this clearly isn't that big of a problem.
Compared to SMS, WhatsApp is almost nothing. And given that maybe 2-3 people in my family group might have it installed, "won most of the world" is irrelevant for me, and probably most groups of any size or with people over 30, as there's likely to be a few people without it.
For better or for worse.
Next step is to get my family to do it. My Dad constantly sends video's that get compressed to hell due to the SMS file size limit.
The take up amongst operators is really low. And it's unlikely that will change anytime soon as their focus is on the 5G rollout and not on re-platforming their messaging system.
Also the system is unencrypted so you would have to be crazy to use it in this environment.
1: https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/rcs-hands-on-not-quite-ime...
There are about 800+ mobile phone operators around the world and based on reports about 50 or so have signed up. Not a great percentage after 10+ years.
And I think the lack of encryption is going to kill adoption in many parts of the world.
Sounds like we might get some movement on this soon, as Google is offering their own servers as a fall-back in the case that the network provider hasn't provided their own.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681573/google-rcs-chat-...
For all Google's bluster here it's not supported by the carriers, and only works on Google's own SMS app - not the AOSP or OEM ones - which only the tiniest proportion of the market uses as it's not the default on 90%+ of Android phones shipping today.
There is no UK RCS market.
There may not be a UK RCS market, but given it was just turned on a couple months ago and for a few countries, perhaps it's too soon to call it decided?
There isn't really any reason to surmise that is going to improve, and Google's boasting here is very silly. RCS is a dead end product in every non-US territory, and Google have no market levers to pull that can improve it's performance. They should give up on it and focus their efforts on the US bluntly.
According to Google (in the articles I read and shared here), whether the network provider supports it is irrelevant because they are supplying their own server in those cases, so it should just work. If you're in that region I'm interested to hear what you experience is if you have access to an Android phone and test.
Google has rolled out a provider independent implementation to it's own SMS app, but that SMS app has no marketshare.
My experience is that, without going and hunting out an app to install, my Samsung handset has no support. I have a number of test devices, some of which do have support and a few even have support by default, but those have no marketshare.
Given that Google has started rolling it out with a fallback to Google servers if the network provider doesn't supply one, and Google has said they understand encryption is important and they will push for it, we might actually see some progress soon (on both the adoption and encryption fronts) if we're very lucky.
You can see references to that info in some of my other comments on this article, since I looked it up again today after mentioning it earlier.
That's letting Google off the hook. Nobody knows better about the level of surveillance users are under. Encryption should be feature #1. For them to roll out an unencrypted service borders on malpractice. Luckily for them, software engineers aren't licensed.
> Google has started rolling it out with a fallback to Google servers
Even though Google may not be the most trustworthy company, I trust them far, far more than my ISP and cell company. If I could choose which back end I want to be on, I would choose Google's, especially if that meant messages would be end-to-end encrypted within that sphere.
Well, you're free to travel back in time to 2008 and propose it to the working group that was making the spec...
> If I could choose which back end I want to be on, I would choose Google's, especially if that meant messages would be end-to-end encrypted within that sphere.
I agree, but it appears the way the protocol is federated means that there isn't specifically one back end. Also, since it does some discovery with a "hidden" sms to the other end to ask if it supports RCS, I imagine end-to-end encryption might not be that hard to tack on...
SMS is also unencrypted so I don't see how it would be any different.
I mean, RCS is practically dead (at least in the USA). But even if it does come it'll basically replace SMS with something slightly better. I don't see how it addresses the iMessage stuff. iMessage will likely still send much higher quality images and videos and RCS, AFAIK, can't do some the same features like showing who's typing.
RCS is cool but I don't think it's going to be a game changer in any way. I think it'll just be an incremental update, if it even comes to the USA.
Isn’t this because sms doesn’t send high quality photos/videos? With imessage you get full quality images, it’s very nice. It’s also encrypted.
>Not that we couldn't all just switch to some third party app (or hangouts even), and then we'd all have a comparable experience
Which one?
Whatsapp and messenger compress images, fairly significantly. Messenger is unencrypted by default. Whatsapp is encrypted, but you have to give facebooks your contacts, and metadata on the convos, which gives away a lot of info.
I use both, and whatsapp does have some better features (voice notes are better, as is search), but I prefer imessage for the image quality and encryption. I also trust apple better with the metadata.
I don't understand why iMessages is so popular in US, and it is pretty much US and France ( SMS ) only AFAIK. It is like when the world was on ICQ, they had AIM. When the world moved to MSN, they still stuck to AIM.
And just like AIM, iMessages sucks. I tried it many times and the same problem persist. Some users in the group not getting message, message appeared not in timely order, sometimes random message from the past appear. Needs to Recreate group to solve user not getting message problem, which means all previous group messages are in different group. It is slow as compared to WhatsApp. Icons and Packs are far worst, it is as if Apple has never used WeChat, KakaoTalk, Line, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Telegram.
Then there is huge amount of SMS Notification and Receipt that gets muddles up in the list of conversation. It is a Giant pile of Mess.
Every year I read something about iMessages being popular ( in US ) and every year I tried with my group of friends. And the answer remain the same. And it is so god damn bad most of my friends now refuse to try it again.
Edit: And iMessages does't always Sync on my Mac.
https://airmessage.org/
1: https://airmessage.org/guide/
People forget that part of the point of different colors for iMessage vs SMS was to indicate that iMessage is encrypted and SMS isn't. It's also a handy marketing thing, but there is a technical justification for making a visible distinction.
AirMessage is basically a proxy that strips encryption for Android devices:
"AirMessage leverages the power of your Mac computer in order to route messages to and from Apple's iMessage servers. The server is to be installed on a computer at home, and will pass messages to and from your smartphone to allow the usage of iMessage and other installed services."
I would imagine that the AirMessage Android app is actually in communication with the AirMessage server on your Mac. It uses some automation (perhaps via something like https://github.com/shusain93/OSXMessageProxy) to talk the the Messages app. The connection is encrypted from there to the other side, as if you were sitting in front of your Mac. This happens in reverse the other way.
Hacky, and now you own the weak links in the E2E encryption chain. But a neat workaround, in a pinch.
Pressure Apple users to switch to a company that isn't as harmful to Capitalism?
Android has some nifty features depending on device, but the core experience just isn’t there. (E.g. I figured chrome on Android has to be faster than Chrome on iOS - nope, my XR consistently beat a Pixel 3 side-by-side)
My iPhone 6S from 2015 is still in service and fast; I gave it to my mom when I upgraded and she’s very happy with it. It still gets updates.
Going between Android and iOS, that's one of the hardest aspects that I think gets overlooked - the browser is just slower and its noticeable. I pointed out the flagship device in this case, but its no better on the lower end devices.
You can see in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=83dDLf3Zhx4
It’s interesting to note the different behavior; Android/chrome is putting something on the screen first, while safari tends to finish rendering and show the completed result before chrome. Tends to vary a bit by site.
App startup is a bit slower on iPhone but note that the preferred way on iOS is to keep apps open and not manually close them. Manually closing apps isn’t really required on iOS except to declutter the task switcher. Supposedly faster startup times coming in iOS 13.
A: foo
B: liked "foo"
but I just use either Messenger, Wechat, or Snapchat. The only time I open my SMS app is to view 2FA Codes.
Aside from the annoyingness of the page... Too many things here are patched on top what ought to be core. Eg. Pausing annoying apps. IMO apps ought to default to off in the first place until you turn them on.
Very little detail about these new privacy controls. Sounds like Google-centric lipstick.
Dark theme is exciting; embarrassing it took so long.
Hopefully I'm proven wrong...
I don't want Facebook having any level of access to under-13 minors' devices.
I've never had this from my friends. I read about this all the time and all I can think is, "Why would I be friends with people who care about that enough to peer pressure me into using an iPhone?"
For example, we don't really pressure friends to buy iPhones but we legitimately have a separate conversation group for just iOS users from the main SMS group chat so we can send images, video, or other media at full quality. Most of us are pretty tech savvy too so we're not really keen on using WhatsApp or Telegram or any of the other dirty data apps.
Most of the features and a boat-load of data and privacy concerns to go along with it.
With privacy being the latest buzzword in the tech industry and all this news about privacy blunders I keep seeing, For Google to market something like this for Android makes you wonder what other nefarious features that have been added to Android that they didn't tell you about.
In terms of privacy, Android 10 instead screams "Upgrade and lose control of your privacy".
As someone trying to manage using an Android phone without Google's services (Play Store et al), they really castrated Android starting with version 8, when you needed the Play Store in order to reliably receive push notifications.
In fact, I'm passively looking for ways to downgrade my phone back to LineageOS 14/Android 7 because of this, but older releases of Lineage aren't easily readily available...
Privacy is not something you can claim, it is something you must prove through 100% full stack open source code and reproducible builds.
> Support for new file format (.heic) to save still images.
What is the advantage of .heic images?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_F...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...
https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/
P.S. AVIF-related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16803250
It also supports animated gif style short video loops.
In a similar vein, Digital Wellbeing was officially limited to Pixel devices and Android One devices although it could be sideloaded onto other phones (where it ran perfectly fine) running Android 9+.
Everything marketed here is available to all OEMs - Pixel specific features are marketed on Pixel marketing pages.
I find it quite ugly from design point of view, loaded with an amount of blinding white colour.
I used to hate Touchwiz.
The bixby button is an endless pain, thankfully I found bxaction that helps stop it.
It works perfectly fine without Samsung account. I couldn't be bothered to make one, and I'm not missing anything. If you do not have Samsung account, Bixby won't bother you either. Just because there was a step to make one in the OOBE, doesn't mean you have to make one, you can skip it.
Updates are there at the beginning of every month, I have no idea why you think they are slow (and for some reason, S8 updates are there day or two in advance to S10 updates... go figure). Samsung doesn't insist on using cloud services, unlike Google, where Google Photos nag the user to enable upload to cloud, even if the user never intends to do so. Google apps do not know the answer "no", Samsung (or Sony) apps do.
It also has features, that will show in the next Android version. The dark mode, for example, has been there since they introduced Pie version. The only one feature that I noticed they removed, is the SIP client, which most users do not use anyway.
They do ship their keyboard, but you can still choose you own, the Android mechanism for that works. I also do not have any problem with it, it is on par with the Sony one, for example.
What I do appreciate though, is that their software doesn't push me into cloud services. Their gallery is perfectly fine with working just on device, without asking me to upload my photos somewhere, unlike Google Photos, which doesn't know the answer "No, thank you, don't bother me again". Samsung account is entirely optional, I still didn't create mine and it works perfectly well without it.
As the cherry on the top, the esthetic of OneUI is nicer than Google's. It makes somewhat softer impression, where Google apps are unnecessarily harsh.
The Android Pie page [1] advertises the feature here as a standard Android feature under the system usability enhancements section.
This feature was actually available to all devices before the Google Assistant was released via a feature called Google Now on Tap.
[0] https://9to5google.com/2018/07/05/text-selection-android-p-o...
[1] https://www.android.com/versions/pie-9-0/
Also, "Get security updates faster." is huge; this is effectively saying "no matter who makes your phone, you still get updates".
Deprecating "Device admin for enterprise" makes it much safer to access work resources from an otherwise personal Android device, without giving your IT department the ability to remote-wipe your entire device.
edit: to be clear, I now have the option for traditional 3 buttons, 2 buttons (pill), and no buttons (all gestures).
Yes, that's the case. When you're using gesture navigation the only visible UI left is the horizontal bar at them bottom. Apps adjusted for gesture navigation will also draw behind that line.
Gesture navigation is still an option which might not be enabled by default on all devices, but I strongly suggest trying it out. I used it quite some time with the latest release candidates of Android 10 and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back. Especially the back swipe is really nice.
How the final implementation came to be is covered by an excellent blog post from Google: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/08/gesture-na...
Your mileage may vary. I've never learned to get along well with gestures, although I did give them a solid try.
Then again I still miss having physical back and home buttons since I upgraded to a newer android phone. It would be nice if manufactures added more buttons to the side of the phone so the other fingers have something to do.
That's also discussed in the blog post I linked. tl;dr: Only a small subset of users (3-7%) uses a swipe gesture to open these menus (all others use the hamburger menu) and these users have to adapt now to do different kinds of swipes for opening the menu and invoking the back gesture.
I hope there remain ways to hack the buttons back (in 9.x there was):
Also, the charts show that it's either equal and better, and there's also the implicit fact that not showing buttons also means more screen space, so even if usability metric is the same, visually it's a win.
I have been hearing this for years.
https://www.xda-developers.com/how-project-treble-revolution...
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-q-apex-biggest-thing-...
Android 10 lets you download and install certain security updates through Google Play as easily as an app. That is a first, and it should not be understated.
If that happens, that's an OS that is unacceptable to me. It's bad enough that physical buttons were eliminated in favor of the soft buttons. That bothers me to this day, but I learned to live with it.
Eliminating even the horrible soft buttons, though, would be a bridge too far in terms of reducing usability.
They say this with literally every release of Android ever. It's just posturing, I'll believe it when I see it.
If moisture or debris is detected in your USB port, a notification will be sent to you and accessories will not function."
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
I really miss the days phones came with covers for the USB ports. They were annoying as hell due to my lack of finger nails, but damn the port stayed spotless. Every phone I've had lately the usb port gets so full of dust and crap chargers stopped working properly unless I fucked around and balanced it just perfectly.
I hope the update still lets me charge..
I also don't think that waiting 3 years will push Pie percentage much higher. Android 6.0 is more popular than 8.0 and 7.0.
I don't envy Android devs... Can't imagine it's fun to develop apps when you have to target OSes released 4+ years ago because 21% of devices still run them. For iOS the "4+ years" number is way below 1%.
[1] https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi...
Only 5% are on earlier than ios 11.
Live caption on device: Sounds great. Very useful if you are hearing impaired. If you just want captions for the words the are difficult to make out, some AI isn't going to help there. AI's are currently worse than I am at detecting words.
Smart reply: This looks useful. Not having to lose info as you create an appointment or less clicks copying and pasting directions. Yeah, great feature. Good job here.
Sound amplifier: Remember when everyone was up in arms because iPods could boost sound way too loud. (disregarding different source volumes and headphone sensitivity). So everyone limited the power output of their headphone jack. Well, now we've come full circle and we can blast our ear drums the way god intended, it just takes more button presses. This is like yeah, we took away a feature because of hysteria, now it's back.
Edit: Thanks for explaining this to me. This feature does indeed seem useful. Audio that is more clear, being able to hear what's around you, yeah this is great.
Gesture navigation: I hate this. Maybe some people like it. If you are one of those people, I'm happy for you.
Dark theme: I originally though this feature was dumb. Next we'll have gray theme, or blue theme. Battery savings just didn't seem that great. After using this for a while, I like dark theme, in an unexpected way. I find that the black colors are less stimulating and the phone is less of a distraction.
Digital wellbeing: I haven't found these features all that useful. Perhaps someone else makes use of them. I mostly see this as shaming for using the phone too much.
Focus mode: Remember that one android release that made it so you can easily block all notifications from an app. Well, later they made it so you can only easily block a category(can still block all just more presses). Then apps can create as many categories as they want(so you keep getting spammed). This time they didn't do the user friendly release, in order to focus you have to check each app you have installed. Completely backwards like they didn't really want to do this feature.
Family link: I'm not a parent, kids and phones sound like a nightmare to me. I hope this helps you parents. No opinion from me.
There's some irony that some folks might have gotten hearing loss from headphones in the first place, but it sounds like a useful feature.
The volume limitations only made sense if you never used headphones less sensitive than the oem ones and listened to source audio that was only at maximum volume all the time.
I haven't tried it, but it sounds like this would also be useful if you want to wear headphones to avoid bothering others but you still want to clearly hear what's going on around you.
Live caption sounds great to me since my wife's family is Russian and I don't speak it very well. We video chat with grandma often and I'm not really involved...
Many people use their phone in spaces where audio wouldn't be well received (and headphones weren't worn). Examples where I'd prefer captions over audio: when I'm commuting, in a loud space, at work, waiting in a doctor's office, anywhere where I don't want to silence all outside sounds with headphones, but would like to watch the video and read what's said.
With song lyrics and audio books, I'd like to hear and read.
I wonder how gesture navigation will work with some apps.
I wonder which features will make it into aosp/lineageos. I'm missing android smartlock in limeageos. If I could wish for a feature for android it would be "game mode" from oxygenos.
Not sure why some apps such as this hate bluetooth, since this app would be a perfect match with bluetooth earbuds.
Sure, K comes before P in the alphabet, but figuring this (and the actual distance) out takes a lot more mental effort than comparing 4.4 with 9.
It also resolves the issue where you need to decide whether 7 is larger than Marshmallow - a question that would make people question your sanity if posed without context.
And to make it more confusing, each release had a separate codename used before the release, so you had Android K, Android Key Lime Pie, Android KitKat, Android 4.4, and API level 19, all meaning the same thing.
Now, if only we could get rid of the separate "API level" designator (or rather, turn it into an opaque enum, instead of using it everywhere)... because 28 should not be less than 10.