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."
my 0.000001 bitcoin (Score:3, Insightful)
When I am asked whether somebody should be moved from their current position, where I know they are doing a very good job to something else, which may seem to be more prestigious, I generally advise to increase their pay and keep them in their current job.
I am not saying anything...
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I am not saying anything...
Yes.
You did.
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Keep in mind that Sundar Pichai is the Chromeos guy. This is reason to fear.
Reason to fear how? (Score:2)
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Chrome OS, not Chrome the browser. Basically Google has two operating systems, Android and Chrome OS with a substantial overlap of functionality competing in with each other and on similar devices. It's incredibly divisive and silly and they should have merged the two efforts a long time ago.
This not actually accurate. ChromeOS devices are actually productized within Google. All android devices are more or less productized by the phone partner vendors off a frozen code cut of the Android source tree.
In both cases, there are vendor private parts of the source tree which don't get published and integrated until the devices ship, since the partners don't want some other partner being aware of the device they are building, and want to do their own announcements.
Both groups could learn a lot from
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Yeah, Google should have snatched up Steve Kondik.
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Keep in mind that Sundar Pichai is the Chromeos guy. This is reason to fear.
Also fear those Googlers who think it is OK to downmod critical comments. Down that slope lie the likes of Microsoft and Apple.
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Actually mod abuse is lead by Googlers and Android fanboys.
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When I am asked whether somebody should be moved from their current position, where I know they are doing a very good job to something else, which may seem to be more prestigious, I generally advise to increase their pay and keep them in their current job.
Erm, he wasn't removed. He stepping down. Bit of a difference there. He could just want a different job.
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The vast majority of executive moves are publicised as if they were the choice of the exec. An awful lot of them are actually pushed rather than jump.
As this guy was a founder of Android Inc, and nothing is being said about hat he's going to do next, it seems most likely he either jumped, or something has happened within Google that makes his position no longer acceptable.
It *could* be that he's moving on to some secret project in Google. But Google aren't as secretive as Apple. They'd probably say at least
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Medical/family/death issues are also possible. Or maybe he just wants to enjoy the fruits of his labor and roll around in his money for awhile.
Google X (Score:2)
There a quite a large number of reports that he (like Jeff Huber, who just stepped down as Senior VP of Geo and Commerce as those two units are being split up and merged with other units -- Geo with Search and Commerce with Advertising) is moving to Google's "X Lab", so "secret project at Google" seems likely.
Good. (Score:3)
Here's hoping Pichai works toward realizing the potential of Android, and phases out Chrome as an "operating system."
All maximized all the time (Score:2)
I use a Transformer Prime w/ keyboard dock as my primary laptop. Thanks to a great app ecosystem, it's more useful than a ($1300!) Chromebook.
Can a docked Transformer Prime display two things side-by-side yet? Android's policy of all maximized all the time is one of the things keeping me on my aging netbook.
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You better hope the plan isn't to make Android more Chrome like then.
Maybe the new guy will be less arrogant (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Sundar Pichai will be less of an arrogant idiot about certain things:
* Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.
* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
* MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
* Maps crashes all the time. Surely you know that. Fix it.
* Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest.
* Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted.
* Android is not a community project. Fix that.
Re:Maybe the new guy will be less arrogant (Score:4, Insightful)
The irony level of that post almost makes my head explode. Tough Love indeed!
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That's not irony.
A black fly in your Chardonnay - now that's irony. Oh, wait, no it's not.
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Is there any reason why Android couldn't be built on top of a different operating system? Does the fact that it's sitting on top of Linux matter?
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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.
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You can't take pictures with your camera while it is USB mode. Which is the problem. Your phone shouldn't suddenly become a brick just because you plugged it into a computer like your camera does.
There is a very real technical problem with USB mass storage. This was explained by Android engineers before as well.
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.
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Right, you can't disable caching for specific mounts or anything.
It is doable, it has been done by others, it is non-trivial, and not REALLY that important.
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Right, you can't disable caching for specific mounts or anything.
Congrats, you just went from "plug-n-play" to "just edit /etc/fstab, duh"
Side note, you can only disable caching if the file system supports it, and not all do.
It is doable, it has been done by others,
Who has done this? I've only ever encountered a single device that had concurrent block level access and it was a microSD card combined with an NFC chip. And it was very painful to get that to work on Linux, and had to be done in the app with O_DIRECT to get it to somewhat work. The kernel was not happy with it. Nor was Windows, which matters a whole
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There are MANY technical reasons why an android devices cant present itself as USB mass storage. The two MAIN ones are:
- USB Mass Storage (USM) is a block level service which would NEED to be formatted in some form of FAT. Since Android is Linux based, the file system internally is ext4 on recent devices. No windows machine out of the box can mount ext4. (see below for implications on Nexus devices)
IT is extremely difficult, and dangerous to "Simulate" FAT where the device is not internally FAT.
- When a sto
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Cached applications in Android (Score:5, Insightful)
Using the home button does not end the app, it's still running in the background using memory.
So I close Firefox on my GNU/Linux laptop. When I open it again, it hardly accesses the disk at all; that's because Firefox is still present in the disk cache using memory. Likewise, in Android, when the user switches away from a particular application's activity, Android keeps the application in a "cached" state until another process needs the RAM, assuming that the user is likely to return to the application. It's like the early controversy over SuperFetch in Windows Vista and Windows 7: What use is RAM if you're not using it? Or are you assuming that a device can cut power to half the RAM?
Also on my 'grinds my gears' list are apps that reactivate themselves after being force stopped.
Including applications associated with background services that other applications use, or applications that receive notifications as part of doing their job?
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Android keeps the application in a "cached" state until another process needs the RAM, assuming that the user is likely to return to the application.
But it's not in a cached state, is it? It's in a running in the background state. Often slowing the device down.
Blocked (Score:2)
[An Android application with no visible activity and no running service is] not in a cached state, is it? It's in a running in the background state. Often slowing the device down.
The process still exists in RAM, but it's blocked [wikipedia.org] until it receives an intent to start an activity or service, and the scheduler skips it. You're right that some poorly engineered applications keep a service open longer than necessary, such as a music player that keeps its audio decoder service decoding silence instead of shutting off at the end of a song, but that's by no means limited to Android.
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such as a music player that keeps its audio decoder service decoding silence instead of shutting off at the end of a song, but that's by no means limited to Android.
Nice try. You pick an unlikely and fringe case of wasted background processing that is also feasible on iOS. A much more likely, and indeed common case is an Android app that is repeatedly polling some web service. But you didn't use that, or one of the other common scenarios, because you know full well it can't happen with iOS. iOS uses a notifications system in order to perform this kind of operations for a background task, without the background task having to be woken up.
It's one of the big benefits of
Not using push? File a bug (Score:2)
A much more likely, and indeed common case is an Android app that is repeatedly polling some web service.
This is also solvable: file a bug report on the developer's issue tracker requesting a switch to GCM, so that the application can receive a push notification from Google that the web service has new information to pass.
Android tends to slow down, and reduce battery life over time as more apps are left running in the background. iOS doesn't.
Android also has a tool to tell the user what application is causing the device to wake up and drain its battery. For me, "Screen" is the biggest culprit by far, taking a two-thirds supermajority of juice on my Nexus 7. From there, if the user thinks an application is misbehaving, it's just t
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This is also solvable: file a bug report on the developer's issue tracker requesting a switch to GCM
You can ask, but you won't necessarily get. There's an awful lot of Android apps out there that are doing the wrong thing.
In any case, I don't see how that outweighs several application categories being absent from the App Store for reasons other than battery use.
What, EVERY time Android comes out worse, you go back to that old saw? The pros and cons of a single curated store are well known.
Unresponsive to bug reports? One star (Score:2)
You can ask [for proper push notification support], but you won't necessarily get.
Likewise, developers can ask for a review with three or more stars, but they won't necessarily get.
EVERY time Android comes out worse, you go back to that old saw?
Anybody who wants to take advantage of the pros of iOS but also run a forbidden application would need to either carry two devices or buy a second computer to run Xcode and pay $99 per year to join the developer program. And if the concern is saving battery charge for making an urgent phone call, that's all the more reason to carry a tablet and a feature phone.
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Anybody who wants to take advantage of the pros of iOS but also run a forbidden application would need to either carry two devices or buy a second computer to run Xcode and pay $99 per year to join the developer program.
Or jailbreak it. But most people don't have a problem. They don't want roulette - Russian or chat.
And if the concern is saving battery charge for making an urgent phone call, that's all the more reason to carry a tablet and a feature phone.
No, the concern is running out of battery. Period.
Everyone wants something different (Score:2)
They don't want roulette - Russian or chat.
A lot of people who don't want chat roulette and don't want Russian roulette want wardriving. And a lot of people who don't want any of those three want short-term video rentals. Or a launcher that adapts to a particular disability. Or emulators to play classic games that they own a copy of on floppy or CD but whose publisher has since gone out of business. Or a web browser supporting upload of media types other than pictures and video to a web page. Or a web browser supporting any of several other feature
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"A lot of people who don't want chat roulette and don't want Russian roulette want wardriving. "
A lot? Here's a dose of reality: Nearly no-one even knows what it is.
And there's no restriction on short term video rental. And it is in fact available. You didn't understand the outdated app guidelines list you read.
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Here's a dose of reality: Nearly no-one even knows what [wardriving] is.
People don't know wardriving by the name wardriving, but they would probably understand "having the ability to take notes about a Wi-Fi hotspot that your device discovers".
And there's no restriction on short term video rental. And it is in fact available.
When did Apple change IAP to allow subscriptions shorter than 30 days?
You didn't understand the outdated app guidelines list you read.
I want to start understanding. What updated app guidelines should I be looking at instead? I tried clicking through the link found on this page [apple.com], but it asked me to "Sign in with your Apple ID".
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Android kills closed apps automatically (Score:2)
[On] my Samsung Galaxy s3 [...] I also encountered "not enough memory" message when starting up app that takes a lot of memory. Killing running apps was solution.
I haven't seen that happen on my Nexus 7 tablet. Android is supposed to automatically kill applications that have no visible activities or running services. Perhaps Samsung screwed something up with TouchWiz. One more reason to stick with mostly stock Android (Nexus or CM), I guess.
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Using the home button does not end the app, it's still running in the background using memory. I think OP might have meant "exit" to mean an easy way to exit the app that also 'force stops' it.
Hi,
That's what the back button does.
Judging from the OP's woefully inaccurate and froth laden post I doubt he wants a solution, or even has used Android.
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That's what the back button does.
You're kidding? The back button is used to navigate the hierarchy within the app, then (on some apps) quits right out of the app, right back to the home screen? Like if a DOS app that quit of you pressed ESC too many times? Or a web browser that quit if you pressed back when you've already got back to your home-page on the web.
If that's what you mean, that sounds really shit.
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Why would you want apps to be force closed? Just so you don't see them in the recent apps list? There's a good reason for Android to only pause apps and not close them:
1. When an app is no lon
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Just swipe the app to the right in the list of all running apps and voila, app stopped.
So I look in settings under "apps" and "running". I see Google maps running (one app, one process started by the app). Now I press the "running apps" button and, my goodness, no Google Maps in the list of running apps, nothing to swipe. Ahem.
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The proble
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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.
How about a nice Samba server? Windows, Linux and Mac all support them. You can even copy media file over Wifi.
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Which lawsuits did Microsoft ever win? There were a lot of settlements, involving a whole suite of unidentified patents that might have included the remaining valid VFAT patent (which expires in a couple of months time), but did any of the cases ever get to court?
Microsoft v. TomTom as well as a German case (Score:2)
Which lawsuits did Microsoft ever win?
Microsoft v. TomTom was taken to U.S. court and the International Trade Commission but was settled. A separate case in Germany [swpat.org] resulted in a win for Microsoft at the German Supreme Court.
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In the Tom Tom case, the case was settled without a decision from the court on which patents (if any) Tom Tom were in violation of. In the German case, Microsoft successfully overturned on appeal an anulment of their patent. This is different from deciding that the implementation in Android (or any other system) is in violation of this patent (which will expire in the US in 17 days from now, and in Europe in another year).
FAT32 cap (Score:2)
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Is posting FUD on slashdot officially part of your job title at Microsoft, or did you just drink too much kool-aid today? 32GB is an artificial limit newly introduced in Windows 7 in an attempt to force people onto exFAT for removable devices before the last of the VFAT patents expire. FAT32 supports up to 2TB.
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32GB is an artificial limit
I agree. It's artificial, but it exists, so it must be worked around.
newly introduced in Windows 7
I disagree. I thought Microsoft introduced the limit in Windows XP. This forum post [tomshardware.com], for example, predates the release of Windows Vista.
in an attempt to force people onto exFAT
What will force people onto exFAT is the fact that SDXC cards come preformatted to exFAT, and other devices that use SDXC cards will expect exFAT.
Or even a Samba client (Score:2)
The other option I see is running a samba server on the phone.
I ended up running a file manager with a Samba client on my Nexus 7 and running a Samba server on my laptop.
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* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
Not a problem since 4.1.2
MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
I have to admit, I had nothing but grief because of MTP. It works with my Windows 7 laptop, but not with any other of my computers. And even when it works, it works poorly.
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* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
Not a problem since 4.1.2
probably referring to nexus phones, including the new n4, which do not rotate the home screen.
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Indeed - I made the (wrong) assumption we've been talking about the Nexus 7. A huge number of my friends has it, and so do I. My bad for ass-u-ming.
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* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
Not a problem since 4.1.2
Not correct. For some addle-brained reason, Google still locks the homescreen to portrait on the Nexus 4. Which I tend to use in landscape mode about 80% of the time. It's just stupid, and may I say it, embarrassing if that hipster chick over there happens to look at my screen when it's sideways.
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I'd settle for docs that don't read like they were written by the people who wrote the code, and any attention at all paid to their bugtracker.
Getting rid of the goddamn stupid always-on-screen home and back buttons would be great, too. They're a usability nightmare. Go back to physical buttons, or some solution that doesn't cause so many accidental presses while also wasting screen real estate.
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Not to mention, provide an actual full screen mode for games. I don't know how many times I've drained a ball in pinball because I got a home screen instead of a flip.
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My phone's running 2.3, but it's got touch-sensitive areas under the glass to represent the system buttons, and I hit 'em by accident all the damn time. Add some extra and very much undesirable challenge to Fruit Ninja.
Hell, I occasionally manage to hit the button on my iPad Mini and back out of the book I'm reading or whatever, so I can imagine how much more frustrating a Nexus 7 would be. We've got several 4.x devices where I work, and as far as complaints about the OS from a user's perspective, those b
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*There is a standard way to exit...it's called the home button. Really.
*There could be an option to unlock the homescreen orientation, but only you and a hand-full of people would probably notice. Really.
*MTP sucks...I'll give you that, though the monolithic data partition was the right thing to do. Something like Airdroid is probably the way to go. It's fast enough for most things over wifi, and if you use USB tethering with it, you can tranfer gigabytes in minutes. QtADB isn't bad either.
*I thin
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*I think I've only seen maps crash once. Ever. Honest.
I have a friend with an Android phone that he used for satnav. He's given me a lift in his car 3 times. I've seen it crash more than 3 times...
The average experience lies somewhere between our two anecdotes.
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Should I tackle your brand of lunacy?
So you want them all to work the same way and look the same way?
Which Nexus? My Nexus 7 isn't locked in portrait. Not since 4.2.1
It's done this way to provide a standard for all devices to be treated the same way regardless of software suite.
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The AOSP is a sorry excuse for a "community project." No forward looking development happens there, it's just a dumping ground for when Google is done developing the next revision internally, taking input exclusively from its OHA partners.
I don't foresee this changing. Google likes the control too much.
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https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/q/status:merged,n,z [googlesource.com]
Looks like there is a steady stream of work being done in AOSP to me.
If you think nothing happens in AOSP it's simply because you've never looked and you've accepted someone else's FUD at face value.
Also it's not about control, it's about actually getting shit done. The recent Wayland vs. Mir thing is a perfect example. Wayland was a good thing, but nobody is adopting it because the community is refusing to give up the old broken X11 for something
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What you see there is very, very small compared to what appears with each release from Google. I'll also be amazed to see any commits or patches accepted from those that don't work at Google.
Suffice it to say, you can't build and run a beta of 4.3 or whatever. All of that is kept behind closed doors until their
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Err, no. The Wayland protocol went 1.0 months back and the reference implementation, Weston, isn't ready for production use yet. Mir is the result of Canonical being full of shit.
You say no, but then proceed to not actually dispute what I said.
Yes, sometimes it takes a while to create a well designed protocol, rather than rolling your own and having to revise it again and again like Google did with SurfaceFlinger.
Shipping something is *waaaaay* more important, a point that is ironically lost on the GNU/Linux community. Ironic because Linux itself was the imperfect thing that shipped first and has steadily improved, whereas Hurd was focused on doing things "proper"
Or hell, they could have used X11. It may have useless bits that will never see use on a mobile device but it's no slowpoke. Nope. NIH.
Nope, X11 doesn't support a hwcomposer - something that is critical to mobile performance.
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* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
Which Nexus? My Nexus 7 isn't locked in portrait. Not since 4.2.1
Nexus 4. By the way you don't strengthen your points at all by sounding like an ass.
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So you want them all to work the same way and look the same way?
As far as quitting behaviour/interface? Of course! Duh!
Which Nexus? My Nexus 7 isn't locked in portrait.
As established elsewhere, phone, not tablet. Nexus 4 not 7.
Not on any of the 5 android devices I've owned since my G1. Perhaps it's user error.
Really? Blaming crashes on the user? You're an apologist. I've seen my friends Android crash whilst navigating more times than I've actually been in his car. He has to restart the phone to get it working again.
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Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.
no, they don't. if you use android for more than 10s you understand that you just switch to whatever app you want, and let the OS manage the lifecycle of the application. go back to windows if you feel you need to exit an application.
MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
works fine on all devices i've ever used. much better than mounting and unmounting UMS ... and accessible from two devices at once.
Maps crashes all the time. Surely you know that. Fix it.
i can't recall maps ever crashing.
Android is not a community project. Fix that.
what's wrong with it now?
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no, they don't. if you use android for more than 10s you understand that you just switch to whatever app you want, and let the OS manage the lifecycle of the application. go back to windows if you feel you need to exit an application.
It's a problem if the app in the background is using up cycles, polling the internet or doing other undesirable things.
i can't recall maps ever crashing.
Then you are a-typical. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen a lot to other people. It does.
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Task Managers don't actually kill apps, by the way. Android neutered the APIs that they were using in like Gingerbread. And that doesn't stop notifications anyway.
Oh, and you can disallow notifications per app: http://www.droid-life.com/2012/11/29/how-to-disable-android-application-notifications-beginners-guide/ [droid-life.com]
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What? You've been able to disable notifications on a per app basis since 4.1.
Manage Apps -> Select App -> Uncheck Show Notifications
Example: http://cdn.ausdroid.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Disable-Notifications.png [ausdroid.net]
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Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.
Most apps can be killed by opening the apps task manager and just swiping them away. It doesn't work for background services which are doing stuff like streaming or downloading so in those cases the app itself has to have an explicit action. Most apps do not need an explicit action.
MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
I expect this was forced by Microsoft going after people using FAT32 in their devices. Devices which don't have an external SD can use some other FS present a facade onto it via MTP. I do think it's a bit shit though, especially
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XDA is mostly a script kiddie haven, where the GPL is violated regularly and people do things without thinking much about it. Cyanogenmod is a great project, but that does not make Android a community project, which it is not.
Google would actually have to be open with future Android development for it to truly be a community project, but they are loathe to do that. It wouldn't give their OHA partners the
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Android has one, it's called the back button.
Pressing the home button pauses the application, pressing back tells Android to close it.
Applications that have a back or exit button only demonstrate the laziness of the developer who just ported over the UI from IOS wholesale and didn't care that Android doesn't have a deficiency in closing applications.
How? I actually like it
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* Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest.
Making this statement is intellectually dishonest. Android uses the Linux Kernel in the same way that Debian uses the Linux kernel.
Debian calls it "Debian GNU/Linux", as you know. That is intellectually honest. You are intellectually dishonest as is evident by this blatant and self serving falacy you have posted. I might go on to say that you disgust me, but you already know that. It doesn't seem to bother you a bit.
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Applications that have a back or exit button only demonstrate the laziness of the developer who just ported over the UI from IOS wholesale and didn't care that Android doesn't have a deficiency in closing applications.
Bullshit. iOS apps do not close when you hit a back button. Not ever. You don't know what you are talking about. The one way to get out of iOS apps is the home button. Always.
Don't blame you Android app inconsistency on another platform that doesn't even have that problem.
I've got a Nexus S and Nexus 4, no maps instability on it what so ever. Either this is a problem with your setup or you've made it up.
Blaming it on the user, and saying he might be a liar. You're an extreme apologist. Android maps DOES crash for many people. It would be polite to educate yourself with a web search before calling people liars.
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"* Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really."
What's wrong with your home button?
"* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really."
I don't understand this. Are you complaining the lock screen doesn't change orientation? why does that matter? on Android slide to unlock works in any direction.
If you're talking about the home screen in general then locking and unlocking it is an option. Just turn it back off?
"* Maps crashes all the time. Surely you know that. Fix it."
Don't think it'
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"Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest."
Has anyone at Google actually ever said it's not?
A lie by omission is still a lie.
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"Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest."
Has anyone at Google actually ever said it's not?
A lie by omission is still a lie.
And yes, many Googlers have made the claim that Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. Whereas any textbook on operating systems makes it plain that Linux is in fact an operating system. Or visit Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] to understand this simple fact.
Google's stance with regard to Linux is self serving intellectual dishonesty all the way, pure and simple.
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Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really.
I agree. That is not "their" philosophy though. Ah well.
Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really.
Um, which Nexus? Regardless, of the two that I have owned, that was simply an option that you could set. Portrait/Landscape were both available. Install a different launcher if you are really unhappy.
MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
No idea. I always use USB mass storage. I have no idea what MTP buys me and what I am missing by not using it.
Maps crashes all the time. Surely you know that. Fix it.
Maps crashes all the time for you. For me, it is rock solid and has never once crashed. Perhaps you should be submitting bug reports? I would even
Show me a working ROM of Android/kFreeBSD (Score:2)
There is no reason that Android couldn't be built on top of any other kernel like FreeBSD, XNU etc...
Other than that nobody has yet bothered to do it. Show me a working ROM of Android/kFreeBSD working on a Nexus device, and I'll agree that Android is kernel-independent in the same way Debian is becoming [debian.org].
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"Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest" Pedantic.
For you, maybe. For a kernel developer, not so much.
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Actually, I meant to say that MTP looks good on a powerpoint slide.
With the Galaxy S IV set to be unveiled tomorrow.. (Score:2)
Are Google burying the news of Andy Rubin's departure?
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Are Google burying the news of Andy Rubin's departure?
Rubin isn't leaving Google, he's moving to another project.
Re:I am not hopeful (Score:4, Insightful)
And may well be why Rubin is moving out of Android; he may well be moving to a position in Google where he can create new things, rather than managing a relatively mature product.
Seems appropriate, for someone whose job is managing.
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In other news, white smoke has been observed rising from Google HQ.
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Am I the only one that thinks that Android still seems like an amateurish hack?
No you're not. Android is the Windows of the mobile world.
(And funnily enough, Windows Phone isn't!)