Ancalagon

This article is dishonest by omission. It makes some fair points but the lack of honesty betrays the core point. 1) No mention of Project Treble. For those not aware, Project Treble is Google's development of a stable HAL between the vendor implementation (Qualcomm, Samsung/Exynos, Mediatek, Huawei/Kirin) and the system (Android). All devices launching on Android 8 or higher are required by Google to be able to boot a generic AOSP system image (GSI). Moving forward, this means that even if the chip maker obsoletes their drivers, it won't matter, because Android the OS will have a robust HAL that allows the new OS to talk to the old vendor implementation. As part of this, Google got the Linux Kernel LTS maintainer to agree to provide six (6) years of security patches to the kernel instead of the current two (2) year support. How can Google or any other manufacturer be expected to provide security updates to the Linux kernel when the Linux kernel maintainers themselves aren't? This is now fixed. Google couldn't provide long term security or update support in large part because of the Linux kernel, but now they can. 2) it's been discussed ad-nauseaum, but Apple OS updates and Google OS updates are very different. Google releases its core apps as store updates, not bundled with the OS, whereas Apple you need the new version to get the new core apps. While Android devices should run the latest software (see #1), an 'outdated' Android device is very different from an outdated iOS device. Are these excuses? No, not at all, they are/were very real problems inside of the Google ecosystem. But for someone writing an article on Google device obsolescence and completely leave out all that Google has been doing (and succeeding at) over the last year to fix the problems? Dishonest, very dishonest.

radarthekat said:

Ancalagon said:

This article is dishonest by omission. It makes some fair points but the lack of honesty betrays the core point. 1) No mention of Project Treble. For those not aware, Project Treble is Google's development of a stable HAL between the vendor implementation (Qualcomm, Samsung/Exynos, Mediatek, Huawei/Kirin) and the system (Android). All devices launching on Android 8 or higher are required by Google to be able to boot a generic AOSP system image (GSI). Moving forward, this means that even if the chip maker obsoletes their drivers, it won't matter, because Android the OS will have a robust HAL that allows the new OS to talk to the old vendor implementation. As part of this, Google got the Linux Kernel LTS maintainer to agree to provide six (6) years of security patches to the kernel instead of the current two (2) year support. How can Google or any other manufacturer be expected to provide security updates to the Linux kernel when the Linux kernel maintainers themselves aren't? This is now fixed. Google couldn't provide long term security or update support in large part because of the Linux kernel, but now they can. 2) it's been discussed ad-nauseaum, but Apple OS updates and Google OS updates are very different. Google releases its core apps as store updates, not bundled with the OS, whereas Apple you need the new version to get the new core apps. While Android devices should run the latest software (see #1), an 'outdated' Android device is very different from an outdated iOS device. Are these excuses? No, not at all, they are/were very real problems inside of the Google ecosystem. But for someone writing an article on Google device obsolescence and completely leave out all that Google has been doing (and succeeding at) over the last year to fix the problems? Dishonest, very dishonest.

Can you be sure a hardware abstraction layer will not reduce the efficiency of the stack?  Look back at Android’s disk encryption, forever switched off by default due to Google recognizing its drag on system performance.  iOS has been doing full disk encryption for how long, without even a setting to turn it off?  These two OSes are fundamentally different in their performance and support for their customer bases, with Google now creating a hardware abstraction layer to deal with 10 years of hack development.  Yeah, I’ll stick with iOS, thanks.

Where have you been? FDE has been mandatory on Android for the last 2.5 years, ever since version 6. It's really hard to have basic discussions with someone when you're 3 years behind on the actual facts. To that end, the Pixel 2 devices don't benchmark any more slowly than other devices running the same hardware and without the Treble HAL.

I'm not trying to convince anybody to switch. I'm telling you that your basic facts are wrong. We're not even at interpretation and commentary yet, we're at basic facts.