Very nice. I am especially excited about these features:<p>> App Timer lets you set time limits on apps, and will nudge you when you’re close to your limit and then gray out the icon to remind you of your goal.<p>> Wind Down will switch on Night Light when it gets dark, and it will turn on Do Not Disturb and fade the screen to grayscale at your chosen bedtime to help you remember to get to sleep at the time you want.<p>I actually have a separate device for fun/addictive apps, and my phone's charging spot is not in the bedroom. But these kinds of features will help orders of magnitude more people than my very manual interventions ever will.<p>I'm glad Google is seeing themselves as on the side of the user here. Rather than enabling the "up and to the right" religion that has a lot of tech companies chasing DAU and UAM metrics by any means necessary.
Am I the only one who <i>doesn't</i> want a phone that arbitrarily changes behavior in opaque and uncontrollable ways? Machine learning is fine for hard tasks like voice recognition, but it really shouldn't be used for things that would otherwise be a few checkboxes. I know the trend nowadays is to assume that users are irredeemably stupid, but this? Seriously?<p>You can keep this update. I don't want it.
Lots of slick UI stuff, but no meaningful updates to things that are well overdue:
- Encryption of specific secrets for each app.
- Fine grained control of what information is shared with apps.
- Ability to selectively deny particular data (and have the app keep working, e.g by giving it an empty contacts list, fake phone ID, etc).
- Ad and js blocking capable browser.<p>Why should installing e.g. the facebook app, allow it to track my position at all times? Just freaky.
While I appreciate the concept of learning things like "common next steps" to make a device more usable, going by the history of devices like Google Home or the Google Assistant, I also wonder how much of this is going to depend on "give us all your usage history" settings and simply stop working with those settings disabled. The Google Assistant is already unusable without a pile of search history settings enabled; what will "smart" next actions and similar require?
Coming from iOS, with all the disclosures about how Android leaks to Facebook much more I expected to see permissions locked down a lot more.<p>There's a difference between "I want to put a location in my status update" to "I want to upload my location 24/7 to Facebook's servers so they can profile the crap out of me".<p>iOS makes this difference. Android doesn't.
The typography in Android P looks strange now with the addition of Product Sans alongside Roboto. The old graphic design rule of "never pair multiple sans serifs" is hardly absolute – different sans families can often be successfully paired as header and body, for example – but in this case, there are headings rendered in Product Sans with barely-smaller subheads in Roboto, which just looks jarring.
<i>Ten years ago, when we launched the first Android phone—the T-Mobile G1—it was with a simple but bold idea: to build a mobile platform that’s free and open to everyone.</i><p>To what quantitative fraction is Android still free and open (as in speech), and how much of it has been moved into closed-source containers?
If someone from google reads this, can you please consider removing the functionality that periodically drops the nav bar at the top down? Many people use the top of their screen as a bar to line up and read text. Your site is basically unreadable.
About 18 months ago I bought a Samsung S6 off of ebay new in a box for $250. Was actually my first "real" smart phone. I've liked it quite a bit but was disappointed at them taking 8+ months to bring android updates. I was thinking I might get Oreo this August or so. But then I just learned that they've (Sumsung) discontinued all S6 support. So now I guess I'm screwed.<p>I really liked the samsung health app and the built in heart monitor. And I use samsung pay. I don't think any other phone has this and I would like to stay with samsung. But as I sit here and type this on a desktop running Debian that I built in 2008... I really can't support a company that thinks their hardware is only good for 3 years before you need to throw it in the trash.<p>Any tips? I don't really want to root and load a rom (and plus that would make me loose samsung pay and wifi calling I think).
I thought Project Treble was supposed to make the updating process easier from an OEM point of view. If so I wish they supported the Nexus 5X and 6P for one more version.
I was skeptical of the new home button and app overview - (why fix something that already works pretty well?) - but it actually looks good and seems to actually improve the experience.
I used to be excited about product releases like this one.<p>But after years of bloated releases and devices that feel old and laggy after just one year of use, I’d rather welcome an Android version that prioritized UI fluidity over everything else.<p>I loved my Nexus 5, but the Nexus 5x was dead on arrival, to the point that my current setup (1 Android and 1 iPhone) will by just iPhones. I’ll definitely miss some features but I need my work horse to just work and not freeze when I try to press switch between apps.
> ML Kit offers developers on-device APIs for text recognition, face detection, image labeling and more<p>This is what I always thought Google should do. Operating systems have completely stagnated, but a truly new and differentiating set of features would be to deliver AI as a platform - not a Google-only feature but a set of open APIs that anybody can use or implement. I hope they continue down this track.
“Android P Beta is available today on Google Pixel. And thanks to work on Project Treble, an effort we introduced last year to make OS upgrades easier for partners, a number of our partners are making Android P Beta available today on their own devices, including Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6, and Essential PH‑1.”<p>Yay! Project Treble is paying off already :) Personally hoping to see Huawei bringing its recent flagships to P-land very soon, fingers crossed. Has Google finally cut off a few heads from the fragmentation hydra? Time will tell but this is a positive indicator!
I wish they will use all of these new AI capabilities to fix the share UI (<a href="https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/05/google-please-fix-androids-slow-bloated-share-ui/" rel="nofollow">https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/05/google-please-fix-a...</a>)<p>Personally, I always use the same app when sharing URLs (Send to Instapaper). Yet, it always shows me default actions I never used (send via Twitter DM, Print, etc.) and takes like 5 seconds to have the UI usable.
I'm tired of the throw away culture of Android device manufacturers. With the exception of Google Pixel and the Samsung top models, where you get up to 3 Years (security) updates, you can throw your Android device away after 2 years, sometimes only after a year. The hardware is usually still fine after this time, but you won't get no more updates and will have an insecure device.
Looks like Project Treble actually helps with faster updates - The beta is available on 11 devices from different OEMs. Essential said they were able to put out the beta for their hardware in less than a month's time. I did not want to put it on mine though after reading the known issues.
I'm almost tempted to try out the beta on my daily driver Pixel.
Seems like a stupid decision though.<p>Is there an easy way to manage this from a worktation? Completely backup my current state and restore it afterwords?
Android P has some interesting security features, too, especially the HSM thing, which I assume Google will use in Pixel 3. Maybe Samsung, too, because they have Knox and they target the enterprise market. But it would be nice if more manufacturers would use that, too.<p>Also I've been waiting for a long time for client-side encrypted backups.<p><a href="https://developer.android.com/preview/features/security" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/preview/features/security</a>
I'm amazed and simultaneously shocked by current state of technology and it's use.<p>28.6 MB in 8 gifs on the site. But i had not noticed that because site fully loaded in 7 seconds.
Thought that all new Android One devices should get upcoming updates like the Pixel devices but they don't get Android P Beta (except the Nokia one).
All I care about is to know if they fixed the horrible direct share issue that makes the share sheet unusable for couple of seconds everytime I share something.<p><a href="https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/05/google-please-fix-androids-slow-bloated-share-ui/" rel="nofollow">https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/05/google-please-fix-a...</a>
I love how it starts with:<p>"Technology should help you with your life, not distract you from it. "<p>and then<p>"A new Dashboard, for instance, shows you how you’re spending time on your device, including time spent in apps, how many times you’ve unlocked your phone, and how many notifications you’ve received."<p>Who cares? What am I supposed to do with this information? (Apart from Google, of course.)
...<i>Say you connect your headphones to your device, Android will surface an action to resume your favorite Spotify playlist</i>...<p>...<i>but what if we could surface part of the app itself</i>...<p>What is it with the repeated usage of 'surface' here, instead of the more obvious and common word 'show'? Is it something to do with Android API naming, or something else?
This looks awful. I've come to realize that any feature with "smart" anywhere in the name, is something I want disabled.<p>Smart quotes? Only exist to fuck up copypasta code and SQL statements.<p>Smart spell check? There's a field of internet hilarity about how bad this is.<p>Smart restore? Best way to lose my data and fuck up my install.<p>Smart assistant? I've yet to meet even one person who uses GAssistant/Siri/Cortana for anything more complex than "schedule a meeting" or "set an alarm."<p>Smart handwriting recognition? Refuses to detect the word "fuck". And my handwriting was perfectly legible anyway.<p>I want my software to be TOOLS. Predictable, ideally interoperable and chainable, but above all: simple. The best pieces of Ux make technology feel like a simple tool. Cut/paste. Messaging conversation-style, with a simple "send" button. Grep.<p>I find my best note taking software is a text editor, with all formatting turned off. I use ad blockers to disable as many recommendation engines as I can. I use duckduckgo because it just answers my query, without trying to tailor the answers to what the machine (or the advertiser) thinks I want. To mee, simple tools that behave consistently are infinitely preferable to the game of "guess how the computer is misunderstanding the request." Maybe I'm a curmudgeon.<p>I work with ML/AI, and there are great benefits in lots of applications. Just not in second guessing what people want to do. Even other PEOPLE are terrible at that.<p>Please don't make me dance around the quirks of your "smart" AI. I promise, I am smarter. I have better context. I know what I want to do. Just get out of the fucking way and let me do it in the simplest, most direct way.