Remember when android releases had groundbreaking new features and really cool dessert names?
Good time, good times.
I used to spend hours loading roms on my Nexus. Now I just spend hours removing Google from themselves
Me as well. 😄
Aww man, this hits close to home
I love how the title says finally, as if it has some super amazing improvements we've all been excited about for ages. But, like you said it's just a bigger, slower version of the same thing we already have.
New features include satellite support, loudness control, 16 KiB pages, upstreamed support for features like locking/hiding apps, OpenJDK 17, app archiving/unarchiving, making Health Connect actually usable on a system level, native storage for end-to-end encryption keys in the contact system, and finally being able to select the vibration pattern for notifications. A lot of small changes for the end user, some pretty large changes under the hood.
I remember going from Android 4.0 to Android 4.3 and seeing nothing change. Moving from Android 5 to Android 6 was also pretty minor. Even back when I updated Android 2.2 to 2.3 there was very little that actually changed on the OS level.
I do remember major changes, like everyone hating Android 4's interface, and then everyone hating Android 5's interface, and then everyone hating Android 7's interface, and then everyone hating Material You, and then everyone hating gesture controls.
Generally, the "nothing happens" updates seem to go down the best. I'm fine sticking with the Material You redesign for a few updates, change for change's sake is just programmer busywork.
16kb is probably the biggest under the hood change
What is 16kb?
They still have the dessert names, they just don't use them in their marketing. This one is called vanilla ice cream, android 14 was upside down cake or something iirc, 13 was tiramisu.
10-12 don't seem to have dessert names for some reason though. Those were just q, r, and s.
They did.
But yeah, the codenames are almost never mentioned.
That name seems to imply they're aware of how boring an update it is.
Yeah, I feel like most of the updates lately have been pretty boring. The last "big" change was material 3 I think, but even that was just some visual changes.
Yeah, there was that brief period, maybe 4-6 years where each release had at least something exciting. I guess they've just run out of genuinely useful/innovative stuff to add.
I mean, iOS is not doing better in that sense. They both are already mature systems and I think it would be great if they concentrate in polishing and perfecting what they already have (and hope AOSP doesn't fall into the AI crap) but I guess that's just me.
Oh yeah, I agree with all that!
I still wait for the day where smartphones become the only computer for most people.
dock it, (maybe cool it) and the available power is significant.
google is definitely taking steps there with their virtualization work and desktop mode, just slow.
Apple may be too, with their switch to ARM on desktop.
id hate to use a disposable, enshittified phone as my only computer.
Samsung has been doing this for a long time with DeX an it's awesome. However it won't really be a thing for most people until Apple does it.
Remember when they were still making features instead of taking them away to artificially limit us? Why does my phone have to snitch to my service provider that I'm using my hotspot instead of my phone? Why can't I use my wired headphones without a ridiculous hassle anymore? Why is there any price difference between 64gb and 128gb when I can buy a terabyte microSD from microcenter for $12? Surely they're not using the leverage of their market position to squeeze more money out of the entire population right?
i mean phones are mostly incremental now than they were in 2011 anyway and google has made a lot of inroads to bake major changes into the play store to avoid carrier issues, which is better anyway.
This is probably the least exciting Android "update" to date, for me at least. These are basically all just options that could've been added with regular updates. Charging to 80% is nice tho. Hate the new, Apple-like, default bluetooth setting (thank god that you can turn that off, although it doesn't look good for the future...)
It's been a long time since the last Android update that felt like a major update to a regular user... A very long time...
Agreed. Up to ~8 were good times. After that, meh.
It seems mostly to be about how to fuck things up these days.
i want android 16 to be "journey back to jellybean" :(
I hope to god they fix the gestures with 3rd party launchers bug.
Are you talking about the recent apps swipe up gesture?
Yeah that's the one, I've seen it explained like this, these are not my words but copy pasta from a Reddit thread I seen a while back
The recents menu, the one where you swipe up, hold, and get a card view of all your recent apps, used to be in a file called systemUI.apk. The systemUI holds files for lots of things. The bottom 3 buttons, the top bar icons the pull down shade, and tons of other things, as well as the recents list. All of the things in systemUI are accessible from pretty much any app, like 3rd party launchers. It’s a safe place for Android to hold things that any dev can have access too. The launchers would just invoke the function to show the recents with no lag at all, just like the stock launcher did.
Google, being Google, moved the recents list into the stock launcher.apk. Now, when a 3rd party launcher has to call the function to show the recents, it now has to use an api to invoke it from the stock launcher. Call api function. Function asks the stock launcher to show the recents. Stock launcher returns call to 3rd party launcher. Recents are then shown. Now there is a slight lag, because now there is a middle man. This is also why sometimes you get a blank screen for a millisecond and also why you cannot click another app immediately after returning to the home screen when closing an app, or from the recents list using a 3rd party launcher.
Before this, you could actually delete the stock launcher and use any launcher you wanted. Now, the stock launcher HAS to be installed in order to show the recents list. If the launcher has been dormant for a bit, the launcher then has to reload into memory in order to call that api method.
I think they should stop working on new features other than the occasional option and make these all about security updates
Why would they tell their people who aren't security people to just sit and do nothing?
I think they should stop making up new features and start giving us back all the features they've been taking away.
Can I set reminders with text input with Google assistant yet?
Yes, as you've always been able to.
I used to be able to but it just redirects me to search recently
Hmm, I just tried it to make sure.
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