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Google Begins Rolling Out Android Pie To Select Handsets (venturebeat.com) 65

Posted by msmash from the it's-here dept.
Google on Monday announced that the 'P' in Android P stands for Android Pie, succeeding Android Oreo. It also pushed the source code of the latest version to the Android Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The latest version of Google's mobile operating system, Android 9.0 Pie, is also starting to roll out today as an over-the-air update to Pixel phones, the company said. From a report: If you don't have a Pixel phone, you won't be getting Android Pie for a while (if at all). During the beta testing phase, Android P was made available on the Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6, and Essential PH-1. [...] Google wants you to know that Android Pie includes a "heaping helping of artificial intelligence baked in to make your phone smarter, simpler, and more tailored to you."

Android Pie offers of a slew of new features including built-in support for display cutouts (read: notches), a tweaked Quick Settings panel, a notification drawer with rounded corners, messages in notifications when replying inline, smart replies in notifications, a consistent UI for fingerprint authentication, privacy enhancements to limit what apps can do in the background, Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness features (courtesy of Google DeepMind), App Actions for predicting what the user will do next, App Slices for surfacing an app's user interface inside the Google app's search results and inside Google Assistant, a BiometricPrompt API for a system-managed dialog to prompt the user for any supported type of biometric authentication, and multi-camera APIs that let you access streams simultaneously from two or more physical cameras.
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Google Begins Rolling Out Android Pie To Select Handsets More

Google Begins Rolling Out Android Pie To Select Handsets

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  • Wrong version number for pie. (Score:4, Funny)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Monday August 06, 2018 @01:16PM (#57079414)
    It should be version 3.14 not 9.0.
  • Who came up with a naming convention that steps on an entire line of android OS's set up for the raspberry pi? What a mess for no reason.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Plus the word "pie" can have negative connotations

      Only if you're afraid of vaginas.

      Are you afraid of vaginas?

  • This version naming scheme seems quite finite.
    But I bet people at Google discussed that already.
    • I can't wait for Android Left Bracket!

    • That's sort of a "cross that bridge when you come to it" problem. If Android is still a thing in 10 years I'm sure they can figure it out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        That's sort of a "cross that bridge when you come to it" problem. If Android is still a thing in 10 years I'm sure they can figure it out.

        Which is actually quite a reasonable thing to do, when you think about it. There aren't many platforms that have lived as long as iOS and Android. Even when iOS came it, it wiped out several platforms like Symbian, PalmOS, and WIndows Mobile. So there's room for a disruption that basically will kill iOS and Android as we know it today, so planning for what happens is prem

    • I am guessing that they just switch to the Chrome name by that point....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by erlando ( 88533 )
      I'm just looking forward to "Android Quiche"
  • Anyone else think that this is just terrible.
    Looks like it was designed first and only.

    Also doesn't seem to be any new useful features.
    Power save? You can do that by not installing every shit app out there.
    Emojis? Who cares but children.

    Good thing my phone isn't supported. Didnt want this shit.

  • Finally, courage to use the number 9 (Score:3)

    by BLToday ( 1777712 ) on Monday August 06, 2018 @02:14PM (#57079776)

    I’m glad they didn’t skip the number 9 like Windows and Blackberry OS. Let’s see if Google is brave enough to go to 11. MacOS has been on 10 for almost 2 decades. Windows 10 is the “last Windows”. Blackberry OS will never have a version 11.

  • Damn the comments here are all crazy contrary and dismissive. I know Android may not be all we would want but it's a new release. It will have some nice new features and UI enhancements....

  • First test of Project Treble (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Monday August 06, 2018 @02:27PM (#57079838) Journal

    The summary says:

    If you don't have a Pixel phone, you won't be getting Android Pie for a while (if at all).

    ... but there's reason to think that should be significantly less true than with previous releases. Android Oreo included Project Treble, which defined a hard boundary between the system and device-specific components that didn't previously exist. This only applied to new devices launched with Oreo, but on those ones it should be possible for device makers to simply drop a Pie system image on them and expect it to work. This should make O -> P upgrades smoother and faster than any previous pair of releases.

    Of course, the devil is in the details. There is a tremendous amount variety in the Android world, and OEMs have traditionally had almost unlimited ability to modify the system as long as the app-level APIs continued to function correctly (as validated by the Compliance Test Suite). So Treble represents a sea change and there will undoubtedly be lessons to be learned and problems to fix. Also, OEMs who like to customize the system heavily will want to port all of their customizations to Pie, and that will take time, in proportion to the amount of customization they do. Devices that ship stock Android, or close to it, however, should be easy to upgrade.

    Should. Over the next few months we'll start to find out how successful Treble was in achieving its goals, and how much more work remains to be done. The relatively large number of devices that ran the preview releases is a very positive sign, but time will tell.

    • It's already proving to be working - the beta releases were on a whole bunch of phones from other manufacturers. It's already had an effect, we'll see how quickly that turns into live production pushes but we're well ahead of where we were in previous releases.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So that will get you to all of 12% of Android phones. https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/
        You need to go back to 3 year old OS to capture 2/3rds of the potential market, 4 years to capture 4/5th of the potential market. What a mess.

        • So that will get you to all of 12% of Android phones. https://developer.android.com/... [android.com] You need to go back to 3 year old OS to capture 2/3rds of the potential market, 4 years to capture 4/5th of the potential market. What a mess.

          The problem can't be fixed retroactively. It required a deep refactoring of the lower layers of the system and imposition of compliance testing at those layers. There is no way to get OEMs to go do all of that work for old devices. But if it works well, then 3-4 years from now, when the old Android upgrade process (which is largely driven by device obsolescence) would have led to the S release being only on a tiny number of devices, it will be on approximately 2/3 of them. A couple of years after that and

    • Seems like Google did a great work with project Treble but the cynic in me thinks many manufacturers won't take advantage of it as a way to make obsolete their "old" phones.
      Hardware progress isn't as dramatic as it was just a few years ago and if a device gets fast updates and for a long time it's one less reason to buy a new phone. I would reward manufacturers that gave such great support for their phones but I'm not sure many are willing to do that. I hope time will prove me wrong

  • Whenever I see "AI", I think of Clippy and spellcheckers that mangle what I type.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Max_W ( 812974 )
      I also think of spam suggestions with the following question "Was it useful?". But when I really am to do something I have to spend have an hour to find a significant option buried in the layers of "AI" stuff.
  • I just picked up an Android phone this weekend to see if it was usable for me, and I'm shocked that the current version of Android still has a truly terrible interface. It's so bad, that I'm going to continue using my Windows Phone until it physically breaks. Is there a reason that Android (and iOS) have to have interfaces that are from 1995? Am I missing something? All of the Android phones that I've seen all have the identical interface.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jetkust ( 596906 )

      Is there a reason that Android (and iOS) have to have interfaces that are from 1995? Am I missing something?

      The phone has a small screen. The options of how the interface can be is pretty limited. What is so great about Windows phone that is missing from Android/iOS?

      All of the Android phones that I've seen all have the identical interface.

      Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DogDude ( 805747 )
        What is so great about Windows phone that is missing from Android/iOS?

        It looks very good. It's easy to find things. The home screen shows all kinds of information at a glance. Most part of the phone look and act the same (email, phone, messaging, calendaring, etc.) It's just a very good UI, all over.
        • So the UI is very consistent. That's a good thing.
          I've toyed with some Windows Phone devices and I found the UI nice but didn't think it was better than those of Android or iOS. Maybe I used it too little time.
          What I don't get is the "home screen shows all kinds of information at a glance". Android can also do that via widgets. Most apps have them

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DogDude ( 805747 )
            The customizeable tiles that people hate so much on Windows 10, work really good on the phone. They all match, and you can make them different sizes, group them together, and almost all of the built-in apps all display info right on the tiles. I can see the sender and subject of emails as they come in, info about my next calendar appointments, phone and text messages, etc. all right on the main page, without touching anything. It's pretty darned good. In Android, you can kinda' sorta' do that, but not r

  • If you got an Android 8.1 phone, I think (?) that you're extremely likely to get updates as it's apparently much easier for the manufacturers to port all the code in, or something like that.

    It's one of the few, significantly positive concepts from Google in a while.

    I still think they should have a feature and bug total freeze for a solid, 3 to 6 months and do anything and everything humanly possible to make it run, as fast and lean as possible. iOS has several simple 'tricks' which make it feel faster, ev

    • Google have included many optimizations in the last few versions. Since the M version (I think) they've been working on battery usage. Most versions also include compiler and runtime optimizations in the changes list.
      Maybe Android it's not as efficient as iOS but Google have put a big deal of work into optimizing it.

  • In other news, Oreo's share among Android installations is just under 13%.

  • Several hours. Absolutely unacceptable. This version fragmentation has to stop!

  • A bunch of useless crap that doesn't do a damn fucking thing to make the user experience any better, just a bunch more baked-in spyware.

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