The 'consumer data extractor' (hardware) team is teaming up with the 'consumer manipulator' (AI) team, and all free of any inconvenient 'dont be evil' policy.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, as a user of google's services and as an owner of google's hardware (pixel 5, nest hub 2). I'm probably cautiously optimistic, seeing how high quality yet unique/quirky their hardware has been. However Tensor/Samsung fabs have had their issues, but maybe factors may have been out of the hands of those in charge?
Hiroshi, who's been an Android lead since before it shipped, is no longer leading Android.
When Jony Ive and Scott Forstall and the other big Apple execs left, that was news. Hiroshi may not have Jony's profile, but it's still a major change in how Android is governed.
I hope ideas like "regulators break them up" never come true. I'll never understand why people crave the destruction of productive organizations. Android has been a stunning success. Valuable for consumers who enjoy the platform, profitable for the investors who bet on the platform and lucrative for the employees who work on the platform. The only people that seem to have a problem with Android are misguided ideologues who think that "big company == bad".
I don't think your understanding of this is complete. A break up doesn't destroy anything; on the contrary, it creates value. Where once there was a single monopolist, there are now two (or three or twelve) organizations that can proceed independently of each other, and be much more focused on their core product.
For example, maybe Google can keep the play store, but not Android. Android would become an independent entity, and can develop in ways that benefit all Android stakeholders instead of just Google. Maybe then Android will finally be able to focus on competing with iOS in ways that Google would never dare to (since Google's relationship with Apple is a bit sus)
A breakup can also be good for investors, because illegal monopolies are inefficient. Android could potentially be much more profitable on its own than under Google's umbrella, and the play store could be more profitable if they're actually forced to compete. This can lead to innovations which increase revenue, and which never would've happened under Google.
Google cannot learn that kind of lesson, the people who were in Google+ are probably long gone from Google for greener pastures most likely. Second, google is an amorphous giant with no other goals than increase market share, no wonder their products are terrible. But still, with all this in mind, we should remember that great things go come from google, it's just that they're not capable of capitalizing on them.
insightful comment. I'd like to think that Google will integrate AI in an at least mostly useful way, but it's clear that large scale reorgs like this around chasing a competitor can and do end badly.
Yawn. Get back to me when something of actual note gets launched.
Mobile OSes are now a boring, stable environment. All this noise about AI seems like an attempt to convince investors that some paradigm-shifting change is on the way. It isn't. A mildly better Google Assistant is on the way.
So the team that is in charge of the OS which is licensed to Hardware vendors in the world is the same team that's in charge to create competing Hardware?
I'd say that creates a huge conflict of interest.
That's one of the big reasons why Nokia Series60 didn't take off as a licensed OS: Whatever Samsung or LG or Lenovo wanted to build on that platform to differentiate, they had to involve Nokia during the development (who then developed the needed OS-feature in parallel to the Nokia product that will make use of it).
Google is either very secure that their grip on all these HW-vendors is strong enough forcing them to stay, or they are no longer part of Google's long-term strategy for Android.
Conflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe. There is no "conflict" unless you see it as one.
You can play chess against yourself. AlphaGo can, because it wasn't brainwashed about this notion. ChatGPT can debate against itself. You can too, if you don't see it as a conflict. Humans might find it hard, only because they were brainwashed from a child that they need to pick sides. Your neural net is capable of operating on both sides simultaneously if you let it.
The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
> Conflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe.
Lucky for us, we're discussing this in the context of humans building stuff for other humans to buy in a human society with human governments and markets, not in some metaphysical 'but what does meaning means' context.
> The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
You obviously didn't read the comment you're replying to. No one is challenging that.
Having the same TEAM in charge of the OS and in-house hardware is an entirely different story.
It's a conflict of interest because the person Samsung is talking to to have a feature implemented into the OS baseline may be the same person in charge of defining the competitive featureset for the next Google hardware.
Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature.
So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product.
And even if he isn't, for SAMSUNG just the potential of this situation to happen can be enough to NOT cooperate with this team and scale back communications with the Android team as a whole.
>It's a conflict of interest because the person Samsung is talking to to have a feature implemented into the OS baseline may be the same person in charge of defining the competitive featureset for the next Google hardware.
The person can run two threads in their brain, one that deals with Samsung and one that deals with the internal product.
> Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature.
So? You're talking about the person, which is just the host hardware. There can be multiple threads running on that hardware at the same time in containers.
> So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product.
They can both be successful at the same time. He can operate with an interest to optimize for an overall better world rather than interest to win over and kill Samsung. He can build a successful product AND help Samsung build a successful product at the same time.
>The person can run two threads in their brain, one that deals with Samsung and one that deals with the internal product.
There's a reason we don't make a police chief investigate their own misconduct.
"It's a perfectly OK thing to do. The person is just the host hardware. There can be multiple threads running on that hardware at the same time. They can run two threads in their brain, one that deals with investigating the case and a seperate one that might or might not did it".
"He didn't just declare himself innocent of misconduct and embezzelment out of self-interest. The independent investigating "thread" must have arrived to an impartial decision".
"In any case, it's not blatant misconduct, you only see it as such. There's no notion of misconduct in nature, it's a made up thing we invented".
If there's accusation of misconduct, there's a bug in the system so you isolate it and investigate it from the outside.
There's no investigation happening here, just two happy parties trying to create great products that can both be successful and be even happier. Lawyers can stay out of this happiness, inventing and injecting "conflicts" that never existed in the first place.
And in any case who (and by whom) is going to be assigned from outside to investigate any misconduct in this Google-other Android vendors case? Any misconduct of prioritizing their phones other third party hw in Android wouldn't be a crime, just a bad deal for the third party vendors.
Maybe confused? I'm not the person you quoted and replied to (that was dheera).
I'm the person disagreeing with dheera in this thread, and I expanded upon what you asked, adding (to further refute dheera) that there wouldn't be any investigation from the outside.
> The person can run two threads in their brain, one that deals with Samsung and one that deals with the internal product.
Great find! Does this also apply to a police officer investigating a crime where their spouse is a suspect? Or to a judge presiding over a court case involving themselves?
He may also "operate" with 50% of his bonus depending on Google Hardware doubling in market-share.
How much would you bet to win against me in a card-game if you have to show me all your cards and I show you none?
Rest assured, I will maintain the task to beat you in another container than all the details I need to beat you.
> So? You're talking about the person, which is just the host hardware. There can be multiple threads running on that hardware at the same time in containers.
Weren't the 2 teams already part of the same company? And OEMs do make custom modifications to Android before shipping their devices, so they don't have to share everything they intend to do with the Android team.
>Conflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe. There is no "conflict" unless you see it as one.
That could be said for anything in the moral and judicial sphere. "There's no theft, property is a human invention", "There's no rape, animals don't have that concept", and so on.
Conflict of interest has been a thing way before lawyers and HR types existed, they understood it and tried to prevent it at any point in history, from ancient Babylon to Rome, and from Amazon native tribes to imperial China.
It's of course also the explicitly expressed reasoning for why there are independent branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial in the US).
>I'm an optimistic engineer, believe in win-win situations, and don't see everything as a conflict.
The first priority for Android is competing against iPhone. Any self-dealing to get Pixel to have more of the Android pie would be far down the list, and probably counter-productive. It was already possible under the previous structure anyway.
Correct, and it's clear that this isn't an outdated strategy from Google, just in the current cycle we saw Circle to Search launch on both Galaxy and Pixel, and most of the new AI stuff that differentiates Pixel is now coming to Galaxy as well. This might be a headscratcher if you think Google is trying to make Pixel the dominant Android phone, but that's not it. Google wants Android to be the dominant phone OS, and despite it being massively popular globally, in the US the numbers are dire, with 50-60% overall going to Apple, and as high as 80-90% of young people choosing iPhone. I love Pixel, but it accounts for approximately 5% of the market in the US, with Samsung at 22%. Those stats about young people nearly universally picking iPhone is a bad sign for Android and a bad sign for competition in the phone market as a whole.
>as high as 80-90% of young people choosing iPhone
It's not really choosing, it's more like being handed over form parents or being force to due to iMessage network effect with teens in the US. Which teens wants to choose to be left out of group conversations?
As an adult you can give fewer fucks about normie conformism, bubble colors and people being petty over it, but as a teen it would be a death sentence for your social life. Hence why the regulatory bodies are starting to twist Apple's arm over it.
It's almost like everyone who comes in to say "people all just use Whatsapp" are going from anecdotal evidence, while the reality is Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram, Telegram, iMessage, SMS and Tiktok all have a share of that messaging pie-- these people just live in message app bubbles.
That's the situation NOW, but it can certainly change in the future. Work with Google as a hardware vendor, grow the Android market with them, and eventually they don't need you and cut you out. It happens.
Let's not fetch too far, this becomes a strawman argument.
They weren't compatible operating systems because applications compiled for one of them were unable to be executed on the other without heavy modifications.
At "underlying layers" the OS of a Tesla is compatible with that of a Nintendo Switch, and yet no one would say they have a compatible OS.
> It is like telling Samsung, Huawei or Xiomi aren't Android, because they use another GUI framework on top of AOSP.
No it's not, because they all use the same GUI framework as AOSP, hence they can run the same precompiled application.
"In terms of software, Satio uses the Symbian OS 9.4 operating system, which is created collaboratively under the stewardship of the Symbian Foundation as "Symbian^1".[4] It is Sony Ericsson's first non-UIQ Symbian device, after UIQ's development closed down earlier that year. It uses the PlayNow service, Sony Ericsson's mobile content platform, and is part of the company's new Entertainment Unlimited service.[5] In terms of connectivity, it is Wi-Fi-enabled and has a GPS chip for navigation and location-based services. It also supports full Flash for video playback.
They made a total of 2 devices with Symbian^1 (+1 refresh) before ultimately moving on to Android.
Symbian^1 was the attempt to harmonize the Symbian flavors into one open platform in order to compete, after Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and other contributed all IP into the Symbian Foundation.
Nokia called it "S60 5th Edition", for others it was "Symbian^1", and the first "common" Symbian OS.
So yes, I wasn't precise enough in the later comments, and you're correct.
I guess it makes them more like Apple, having a vertically integrated division for making phones. TFA says it might make other phone manufacturers struggle. Although I get the impression they are already struggling with the Open Handset Alliance terms from Google that they don't like. Maybe the best outcome is that AOSP gets multiple active forks supported by manufacturers, Google apps stop being distributed by default, and the phone software ecosystem gets more decentralized in general.
Forks supported by manufacturers don't work, because they only earn money when selling hardware. So they can't each operate a huge platform maintenance team on their own.
Also, the only glue that actually holds Android in place as a single platform is Google's CTS (compatibility test suite).
Without it being mandated for Googles Mobile Services (GMS) and its revenue-share, Android will stop being a single platform.
It will start drifting apart as soon as all vendors have to implement the next display/camera/sensor/form-factor support in the OS in parallel of each other...
It is unsurprising to see that RickO beat Hiroshi for the title of grand poobah of devices and platforms. Hiroshi always made the impression of a very smart guy. Rick always made the impression of a good politician. Politicians always win
The world needs a third party software and hardware stack that isn’t controlled by big tech walled garden monopolists / authoritarians. Not just for phones but laptops and computers too. As far as phones go, unfortunately the best alternative I’ve heard of is Graphene and the best phone for Graphene is the Pixel series. And I assume using it as a daily driver is problematic without access to various apps or maybe if websites block them or even carriers - not sure.
This is why my next tech purchase will be a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Wacom One 13" touch screen --- my testing with a Raspberry Pi 4 and Wacom One (gen 1, no touch) went well, so I'm hopeful that this will work as well.
At least it's a company which will allow alternative OSs.
I'm still quite annoyed that I set aside and stopped using my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 because I couldn't figure out how to get it to boot something other than Windows.
I recently got a new Pixel phone and Google's much hyped new AI features just seem so... gimmicky. One of the setup examples shows how you can circle a tent on the left side of a picture and move it more to the center. Neat, I guess? It's kind of a fun toy but I'm not sure what problem this is actually solving. I'm sure there are some usecases for this out there, but it's not a capability I have ever found myself wishing for.
Meanwhile the rest of the phone is surprisingly buggy and annoying. Basic functionality I use every day is worse than on any other recent phone.
Google has never been a great product org, but this desperate need to be seen as one of the cool kids in AI is making things worse. Granted I think of phones/computers more as a tool than a toy and put much higher value on usability and reliability versus novelty; perhaps I'm outlier in that.
>I recently got a new Pixel phone and Google's much hyped new AI features just seem so... gimmicky
Not just that, but their biggest crime is that almost none of those fancy AI features Google paraded at the Pixel launch even actually run on-device but need to be sent to their cloud for processing, despite all the gloating about their new Tensor 3 chip's AI capabilities being the most important (since that chip sucks at CPU and GPU benchmarks compared to Apple and Qualcomm). Also, their Tensor 3 can't even run Google's smallest LLM. Absolutely embarrassing.
They REALLY need to unify the HW and SW development efforts to create a coherent and functional product, instead of designing them separately bazaar style then jerry rigging them together like some underfunded start-up making products for Kickstarter.
honestly, it seems like every phone has its broken quirks. I recently switched from iphone to android and there's still a random collection of everyday things I do that are simply... broken.
Maybe these devices have become so complicated they're simply too challenging to work out all of the edge cases out of. New features are easier.
>Maybe these devices have become so complicated they're simply too challenging to work out all of the edge cases out of. New features are easier.
With the amount of telemetry and data Google is collecting I doubt they can't catch edge cases, let alone recurrent bugs that impact multiple users.
I wanted to buy a Pixel on sale last week but I watched a 6 month long term review of the Pixel and the reviewer complained that every new update fixed some bugs but added it's own new bugs.
It's why I'm still gonna keep using a phone that stopped getting updates over a year ago: it's finally stable and no more new bugs are being introduced by updates, as my mind and muscle memory has already adapted to the old bugs.
Maybe I'm getting old but while 10 years ago I couldn't wait for new major updates to arrive on my phone, I feel like phone SW has peaked a few years ago and has been on a constant decline ever since, with new updates just adding useless crap that bugs you and changing things for the sake of change without improving them, and I would much rather have a phone that only updates security but nothing else. Basically I don't want my phone to be a Googler's playground and me being the beta-tester.
Not to mention all the Google shit on Android is just constantly harassing you. LOOK HERE, LOOK THERE, SET UP THIS, SET UP THAT, TURN THIS ON, TURN THAT ON, GIVE US FEEDBACK, SYNC NOW, SIGN IN TO GOOGLE, LET US SCAN YOUR PHONE FOR YOUR SAFETY, SIGN IN FOR SECURITY, SYNC YOUR PHOTOS, SYNC YOUR DRIVE, USE AI FOR THIS, HERES HOW YOU DO THIS THING BECAUSE ITS NOT OBVIOUS AND WE SUCK AT UI, GET UPDATES, WE DISABLED PERMISSIONS ON OLD APPS, WE DID THIS FOR YOU, WE DID THAT FOR YOU, POST PICTURES OF YOUR RECENT HOME DEPOT TRIP.
Jesus christ, I've had to dismiss at least 20 different popup things just in the Messages app since I reset my phone a few days ago. Just fuck off already!
And guess what. After resetting the phone, I still can only make a successful outgoing phone call 1 out of every 3 tries, and it will only work after a reboot. It worked fine after the reset for about a day. Now, again, it barely works as a phone.
Rodney Dangerfield was right. There is no fucking respect for the people using the phones. There is only respect for the stocks going up. Fuck you and give us money, that's what smartphones are all about.
Yesterday I ordered a Nokia flip phone. I'm done with iOS and Android. It has added nothing to my life except distractions and maintenance. I spent 3 days trying to get this piece of trash to work as a phone. Just a total waste of my life.
I can't stand all the "AI" junk, especially when things worked better in the past. My pet peeve: I used to be able to ask google maps while I was driving "What's the E.T.A.?" and it would respond with, you know, the answer. It's been broken for many years now and responds with nonsense.
Another one: I can't tell my phone to change it's name to what I want. Basic "AI" fail.
While I think Google needs a better clear vision in many cases, god help us that the people who have screwed up every hardware launch for a decade now get to run the OS too.
Treat yourself to multiple UI lockups, missing home buttons, stuck notifications in the middle of the screen, etc every single day if you disable animations.
> Under Rick Osterloh, a new platforms and devices team will be dedicated to bringing AI to your phone, your TV, and everything else that runs Android.
Who is asking for this? Why can't they just make their search engine work again?
You mean the thing that requires an internet connection or it doesn't work?
And probably will continue needing internet for the foreseeable future, regardless of how many mobile Tensor-chips they develop, because cloud data and compute power will always be orders of magnitude better than your phone?
That's the thing they need specialized mobile-hardware teams involved for?
Nah, I want them to first fix the basic shit I actually (would) use.
For example, when I'm driving and a timed phone alarm goes off for the Android phone in my pocket, I ask it to silence the alarm, yet instead rebukes me by falsely claiming no alarms are active right now.
It's fixed now that I checked, but for a while it would also secretly ignore the date that I already specified for a scheduled event while it was prompting me to clarify the time of day.
The comments here are trending towards "stop cramming 'AI' into everything". I am curious how the end-user consumer (versus 'AI' for enterprise/business) differ in experience and use. We are in the beginning of this AI-fication, and it seems deep learning models are doing really well and that DL can predictably scale [1.]; therefore, do we have to wait a bit for really life-changing AI for the end-user consumer?
I can see AI in enterprise/business being extremely useful in different industries, but at the same time, is the current 'AI' actually good/useful for the end-user consumer?
What for? The market share of Google’s hardware is minuscule, and other Android OEMs are unable to take advantage of Google stuff since they use their own chips.
Stepping past all the AI hype, as an engineer in what was Play/Android/Chrome, I'm excited about being closer to hardware. The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird and felt like it was an artifact of legacy decisions rather than the right way for things to work today.
> The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird
Was there a mechanism to communicate this weirdness to decision-makers? In a company that is in control of all of its teams, what is stopping a faster reorg?
Yes this was a well understood phenomenon. These sorts of things grow slowly over time though, and the orgs are large, so understandable why it took a while.
It was probably kept apart while Google was deciding if Pixel was going to survive and to not antagonize 3rd party Android phone OEMs. But all that is more locked-in now.
>The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird
Why? Having a separate division also has upsides, like keeping it away from terrible exec interference.
A lot of products we take for granted today succeeded because they were a sort of skunkworks project away form the reach of the mothership that's full of execs who would have tried to push their own agenda in the product or shut it down due to their lack of vision.
The original PlayStation, first Xbox, DirectX, Gameboy, etc.
I think there is value in having core android team that focused on AOSP separate from the product oriented pixel or apps teams.
And yes, in the end everyone end up using GMS (besides those who are banned, ie. Huawei). But still, it's better to have a separation that is imperfect, vs not having one at all
194 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadWhat a time to be alive!
"Google is combining …, and it's all about Blockchain"
Last I spoke to folks working there, these seem to happen every y-ending day.
It doesn't even happen annually.
A reorg of two teams of 10 people? Sure. Google is a ~180k person company.
Hiroshi, who's been an Android lead since before it shipped, is no longer leading Android.
When Jony Ive and Scott Forstall and the other big Apple execs left, that was news. Hiroshi may not have Jony's profile, but it's still a major change in how Android is governed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Lockheimer
I don't think your understanding of this is complete. A break up doesn't destroy anything; on the contrary, it creates value. Where once there was a single monopolist, there are now two (or three or twelve) organizations that can proceed independently of each other, and be much more focused on their core product.
For example, maybe Google can keep the play store, but not Android. Android would become an independent entity, and can develop in ways that benefit all Android stakeholders instead of just Google. Maybe then Android will finally be able to focus on competing with iOS in ways that Google would never dare to (since Google's relationship with Apple is a bit sus)
A breakup can also be good for investors, because illegal monopolies are inefficient. Android could potentially be much more profitable on its own than under Google's umbrella, and the play store could be more profitable if they're actually forced to compete. This can lead to innovations which increase revenue, and which never would've happened under Google.
But the current generative craze with "AI generated backgrounds" is a dead end.
Give me better AI autocomplete, AI image correction, AI noise cancellation...
We have all those, some of it we've had a long time, we just didn't call it AI.
Mobile OSes are now a boring, stable environment. All this noise about AI seems like an attempt to convince investors that some paradigm-shifting change is on the way. It isn't. A mildly better Google Assistant is on the way.
I'd say that creates a huge conflict of interest.
That's one of the big reasons why Nokia Series60 didn't take off as a licensed OS: Whatever Samsung or LG or Lenovo wanted to build on that platform to differentiate, they had to involve Nokia during the development (who then developed the needed OS-feature in parallel to the Nokia product that will make use of it).
Google is either very secure that their grip on all these HW-vendors is strong enough forcing them to stay, or they are no longer part of Google's long-term strategy for Android.
You can play chess against yourself. AlphaGo can, because it wasn't brainwashed about this notion. ChatGPT can debate against itself. You can too, if you don't see it as a conflict. Humans might find it hard, only because they were brainwashed from a child that they need to pick sides. Your neural net is capable of operating on both sides simultaneously if you let it.
The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
Lucky for us, we're discussing this in the context of humans building stuff for other humans to buy in a human society with human governments and markets, not in some metaphysical 'but what does meaning means' context.
You obviously didn't read the comment you're replying to. No one is challenging that.
Having the same TEAM in charge of the OS and in-house hardware is an entirely different story.
It's a conflict of interest because the person Samsung is talking to to have a feature implemented into the OS baseline may be the same person in charge of defining the competitive featureset for the next Google hardware.
Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature.
So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product.
And even if he isn't, for SAMSUNG just the potential of this situation to happen can be enough to NOT cooperate with this team and scale back communications with the Android team as a whole.
The person can run two threads in their brain, one that deals with Samsung and one that deals with the internal product.
> Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature.
So? You're talking about the person, which is just the host hardware. There can be multiple threads running on that hardware at the same time in containers.
> So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product.
They can both be successful at the same time. He can operate with an interest to optimize for an overall better world rather than interest to win over and kill Samsung. He can build a successful product AND help Samsung build a successful product at the same time.
There's a reason we don't make a police chief investigate their own misconduct.
"It's a perfectly OK thing to do. The person is just the host hardware. There can be multiple threads running on that hardware at the same time. They can run two threads in their brain, one that deals with investigating the case and a seperate one that might or might not did it".
"He didn't just declare himself innocent of misconduct and embezzelment out of self-interest. The independent investigating "thread" must have arrived to an impartial decision".
"In any case, it's not blatant misconduct, you only see it as such. There's no notion of misconduct in nature, it's a made up thing we invented".
There's no investigation happening here, just two happy parties trying to create great products that can both be successful and be even happier. Lawyers can stay out of this happiness, inventing and injecting "conflicts" that never existed in the first place.
Why should the investigation be from the outside?
And in any case who (and by whom) is going to be assigned from outside to investigate any misconduct in this Google-other Android vendors case? Any misconduct of prioritizing their phones other third party hw in Android wouldn't be a crime, just a bad deal for the third party vendors.
I'm the person disagreeing with dheera in this thread, and I expanded upon what you asked, adding (to further refute dheera) that there wouldn't be any investigation from the outside.
Great find! Does this also apply to a police officer investigating a crime where their spouse is a suspect? Or to a judge presiding over a court case involving themselves?
How much would you bet to win against me in a card-game if you have to show me all your cards and I show you none?
Rest assured, I will maintain the task to beat you in another container than all the details I need to beat you.
> So? You're talking about the person, which is just the host hardware. There can be multiple threads running on that hardware at the same time in containers.
...what?
That could be said for anything in the moral and judicial sphere. "There's no theft, property is a human invention", "There's no rape, animals don't have that concept", and so on.
Conflict of interest, on the other hand, was invented by some lawyer and HR types just to make life harder for the rest of us.
I'm an optimistic engineer, believe in win-win situations, and don't see everything as a conflict.
It's of course also the explicitly expressed reasoning for why there are independent branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial in the US).
>I'm an optimistic engineer, believe in win-win situations, and don't see everything as a conflict.
Yes, it's called naivety :)
It's not really choosing, it's more like being handed over form parents or being force to due to iMessage network effect with teens in the US. Which teens wants to choose to be left out of group conversations?
As an adult you can give fewer fucks about normie conformism, bubble colors and people being petty over it, but as a teen it would be a death sentence for your social life. Hence why the regulatory bodies are starting to twist Apple's arm over it.
No wonder teens these days have extremely high rates of anxiety & depression.
Same is true for any demography as well. Maybe add some Instagram for the younger groups.
(Sony) Ericsson used UIQ, a pen-based OS built on top of the core of Symbian foundation.
Nokia developed Series60, a key-based OS built on top of a Symbian core.
They were not compatible operating systems, and most of all Ericsson didn't license it from Nokia.
They weren't compatible at UI widgets level, but were at the underlying layers.
It is like telling Samsung, Huawei or Xiomi aren't Android, because they use another GUI framework on top of AOSP.
And as many Android developers are painfully aware, that isn't the only customisations to AOSP standard behaviours.
They weren't compatible operating systems because applications compiled for one of them were unable to be executed on the other without heavy modifications.
At "underlying layers" the OS of a Tesla is compatible with that of a Nintendo Switch, and yet no one would say they have a compatible OS.
> It is like telling Samsung, Huawei or Xiomi aren't Android, because they use another GUI framework on top of AOSP.
No it's not, because they all use the same GUI framework as AOSP, hence they can run the same precompiled application.
Sony Ericsson Satio
"In terms of software, Satio uses the Symbian OS 9.4 operating system, which is created collaboratively under the stewardship of the Symbian Foundation as "Symbian^1".[4] It is Sony Ericsson's first non-UIQ Symbian device, after UIQ's development closed down earlier that year. It uses the PlayNow service, Sony Ericsson's mobile content platform, and is part of the company's new Entertainment Unlimited service.[5] In terms of connectivity, it is Wi-Fi-enabled and has a GPS chip for navigation and location-based services. It also supports full Flash for video playback.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_Satio
They made a total of 2 devices with Symbian^1 (+1 refresh) before ultimately moving on to Android.
Symbian^1 was the attempt to harmonize the Symbian flavors into one open platform in order to compete, after Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and other contributed all IP into the Symbian Foundation.
Nokia called it "S60 5th Edition", for others it was "Symbian^1", and the first "common" Symbian OS.
So yes, I wasn't precise enough in the later comments, and you're correct.
Also, the only glue that actually holds Android in place as a single platform is Google's CTS (compatibility test suite).
Without it being mandated for Googles Mobile Services (GMS) and its revenue-share, Android will stop being a single platform.
It will start drifting apart as soon as all vendors have to implement the next display/camera/sensor/form-factor support in the OS in parallel of each other...
That said, I believe I can live with:
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/561/is-the-b...
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=340024
If someone would make a decent tablet with opensource underpinnings and Wacom EMR, I'd be glad to consider it.
Broadcom Pi.
It's called Broadcom Pi.
The fruit names are just a naked attempt at BigTech-laundering.
I'm still quite annoyed that I set aside and stopped using my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 because I couldn't figure out how to get it to boot something other than Windows.
Meanwhile the rest of the phone is surprisingly buggy and annoying. Basic functionality I use every day is worse than on any other recent phone.
Google has never been a great product org, but this desperate need to be seen as one of the cool kids in AI is making things worse. Granted I think of phones/computers more as a tool than a toy and put much higher value on usability and reliability versus novelty; perhaps I'm outlier in that.
Not just that, but their biggest crime is that almost none of those fancy AI features Google paraded at the Pixel launch even actually run on-device but need to be sent to their cloud for processing, despite all the gloating about their new Tensor 3 chip's AI capabilities being the most important (since that chip sucks at CPU and GPU benchmarks compared to Apple and Qualcomm). Also, their Tensor 3 can't even run Google's smallest LLM. Absolutely embarrassing.
They REALLY need to unify the HW and SW development efforts to create a coherent and functional product, instead of designing them separately bazaar style then jerry rigging them together like some underfunded start-up making products for Kickstarter.
So sad but this continues to be the case for Google's incursion into AI. Why do they still keep Pichar around?
Would it be nice? Sure, but I much prefer useful features now that could run on device later on if it adds value.
Maybe these devices have become so complicated they're simply too challenging to work out all of the edge cases out of. New features are easier.
With the amount of telemetry and data Google is collecting I doubt they can't catch edge cases, let alone recurrent bugs that impact multiple users.
I wanted to buy a Pixel on sale last week but I watched a 6 month long term review of the Pixel and the reviewer complained that every new update fixed some bugs but added it's own new bugs.
It's why I'm still gonna keep using a phone that stopped getting updates over a year ago: it's finally stable and no more new bugs are being introduced by updates, as my mind and muscle memory has already adapted to the old bugs.
Maybe I'm getting old but while 10 years ago I couldn't wait for new major updates to arrive on my phone, I feel like phone SW has peaked a few years ago and has been on a constant decline ever since, with new updates just adding useless crap that bugs you and changing things for the sake of change without improving them, and I would much rather have a phone that only updates security but nothing else. Basically I don't want my phone to be a Googler's playground and me being the beta-tester.
Jesus christ, I've had to dismiss at least 20 different popup things just in the Messages app since I reset my phone a few days ago. Just fuck off already!
And guess what. After resetting the phone, I still can only make a successful outgoing phone call 1 out of every 3 tries, and it will only work after a reboot. It worked fine after the reset for about a day. Now, again, it barely works as a phone.
Rodney Dangerfield was right. There is no fucking respect for the people using the phones. There is only respect for the stocks going up. Fuck you and give us money, that's what smartphones are all about.
Yesterday I ordered a Nokia flip phone. I'm done with iOS and Android. It has added nothing to my life except distractions and maintenance. I spent 3 days trying to get this piece of trash to work as a phone. Just a total waste of my life.
Which phone? Pixel?
Another one: I can't tell my phone to change it's name to what I want. Basic "AI" fail.
Are they really making major contributions? Seems like Mobile OS are basically stagnant.
On a completely stock Pixel phone.
Making UIs progressively worse beyond levels you though imaginable, like Reddit or GNOME -- that's art.
Who is asking for this? Why can't they just make their search engine work again?
Anyone who regularly uses Siri or "Hey, Google".
And probably will continue needing internet for the foreseeable future, regardless of how many mobile Tensor-chips they develop, because cloud data and compute power will always be orders of magnitude better than your phone?
That's the thing they need specialized mobile-hardware teams involved for?
The AI? Or the phone?
For example, when I'm driving and a timed phone alarm goes off for the Android phone in my pocket, I ask it to silence the alarm, yet instead rebukes me by falsely claiming no alarms are active right now.
It's fixed now that I checked, but for a while it would also secretly ignore the date that I already specified for a scheduled event while it was prompting me to clarify the time of day.
Share and enjoy!
I can see AI in enterprise/business being extremely useful in different industries, but at the same time, is the current 'AI' actually good/useful for the end-user consumer?
[1.] https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.00409
Was there a mechanism to communicate this weirdness to decision-makers? In a company that is in control of all of its teams, what is stopping a faster reorg?
- moats
- "if we do this, XYZ is going to leave"
- weak leadership
- comfort zone
- too many managers risking being spotted as obviously redundant as a result of a reorg :)
What else?
Why? Having a separate division also has upsides, like keeping it away from terrible exec interference.
A lot of products we take for granted today succeeded because they were a sort of skunkworks project away form the reach of the mothership that's full of execs who would have tried to push their own agenda in the product or shut it down due to their lack of vision.
The original PlayStation, first Xbox, DirectX, Gameboy, etc.
Google sold just 10 million pixel phones last year. That’s not even 10% of Samsung.
And yes, in the end everyone end up using GMS (besides those who are banned, ie. Huawei). But still, it's better to have a separation that is imperfect, vs not having one at all