Andy Rubin Steps Down As Chief of Google Android 156
Nerval's Lobster writes "Andy Rubin is stepping down as head of Google's Android division, according to the company. 'Having exceeded even the crazy ambitious goals we dreamed of for Android — and with a really strong leadership team in place — Andy's decided it's time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google,' Google CEO Larry Page wrote in a March 13 note on Google's official blog. 'Going forward, Sundar Pichai will lead Android, in addition to his existing work with Chrome and Apps.' If Rubin had any other reasons for departing, the blog posting left them unexplained. Android has been activated on 750 million devices around the world, according to Google, on top of some 25 billion apps downloaded from the Google Play storefront. It remains to be seen whether 'start a new chapter at Google' is some sort of polite corporate euphemism for Rubin's eventual departure from the company, or if he really is taking over another project or division. Page suggested in his blog posting that Pichai 'will do a tremendous job doubling down on Android as we work to push the ecosystem forward,' which doesn't offer a lot about the operating system's future direction: Pichai does have direct control over three core platforms, raising the possibility that Google could try and exploit further crossovers between the three. But what form that will take is anyone's guess."
Quit, landscape, MTP, Linux, root (Score:5, Informative)
Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.
Home button. Or are you referring to applications that hold services open?
Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
Android 4.2 fixed that on my Nexus 7 tablet.
MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
True, I had trouble copying files between my Nexus 7 tablet and my Xubuntu laptop. But other than MTP, what royalty-free protocol for transferring files is compatible with a Windows host without having to download drivers, become an administrator, and install them? FAT over MSC, the solution used in Android 2.x, was found not to be royalty-free; Microsoft has been winning lawsuits with its FAT patents.
Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest.
AOSP is a Linux distribution, but it is not GNU/Linux [gnu.org]. If GNU/Linux had been marketed as RMS had suggested, there would have been no dishonesty.
Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? All popular Android devices, except for early AT&T devices (many of which have since been updated) and certain Nook products, have the "Unknown sources" switch, and Nexus devices can be reformatted to rootable using commands like fastboot oem unlock.
Android is not a community project.
In what way?
Re:Quit, landscape, MTP, Linux, root (Score:5, Informative)
The move away from using USB mass storage has nothing to do with FAT patents; you can't have the Android device and the USB host access the block storage at the same time with USB mass storage, and you can with MTP.
Re:Quit, landscape, MTP, Linux, root (Score:5, Informative)
The Android team can write a interface layer so that the contents of the device appear as a mass storage device. It wouldn't be the same thing as direct hardware access to the file storage, but it's certainly possible without introducing a new filesystem format.
No you can't, because the host OS does this thing called "caching". That is simply not technically doable. And just to be clear, USB mass storage exposes a block level device - not a file system or anything like that. USB mass storage simply does not allow concurrent access to the underlying storage, it just doesn't. Flat out impossible.