Today, Google is releasing Android 13 for Google Pixel smartphones, following months of developer previews and beta releases. It’s an update that polishes a lot of the changes that Android 12 brought to the table, while also introducing a ton of small, helpful features across the board that aims to improve privacy, security, and usability. Alongside the update, the company has also announced that Android 13’s source code is now available in AOSP.
It’ll be a while before Android 13 lands in most of our hands.
And quite frankly very few people care anymore if it does. I personally have stopped tracking new features because, after Android 9, it’s mostly “features” that make the UI uglier.
I remember when Android 5.0 came out. It was major with all it had. I remember when 6.0 introduced Doze and that was awesome. But, I was also realistic that not every release would have tons of new user facing features. IMO, it’s just not realistic to expect every OS to be able to crank out a ton of user facing features all the time.
BUT, what does tend to happen with each release is lots of changes for security, performance, and less user visible things. That alone I think is well worth the upgrades each year.
Though, one caveat: I don’t like vendor lock in, and don’t completely trust big tech. So I tend to wait on GrapheneOS to update to the latest… I still get the benefits w/o all the creepy big tech tracking et al.
I know it’s not the trendy way for things to go, but wouldn’t it be great if the work went to optimise what was already there? What I mean by that is work on extending battery life or similar for existing users. Or making the phone actually feel faster in day to day use…. Mobile phone development now suffers from the same “problem” as most software, hardware is perpetually advancing to the point where you almost don’t need to consider how much memory or CPU it uses. More will be available soon enough. It would be the most “green” thing Google could do. Extend the life of your current device.
Adurbe,
I’d prefer battery life over thinner phones. But keep in mind that longer battery life means fewer recharge cycles, which means the device would have a longer lifetime and they’d get fewer sales in the long run. The incentive is for battery life to be good enough but not too good as to prolong product lifecycle. Manufacturers are absolutely thinking about this but unfortunately their interests don’t align with consumers.
You are so right about that, we definitely saw this with personal computers and now phones. Even at school the going mantra was not to do too much optimization because hardware keeps getting better and our time is better put elsewhere. We’ve got at least a generation of software developers who live by that. I’ve always tried to achieve a more optimal balance in my code but frankly it’s not appreciated by clients and employers who favor cheap over almost all other qualities. It bugs me so much but that’s the way it is.
Well, as a hardware manufacturer, google only has about 3% of the market share, so I assume you mean extend the life of all phones that license android? Android itself is only part of the picture so how do you envision that working? They already have android restrictions that kill background applications (often breaking legit applications in the process), so I’m curious what more they should do?
Hypothetically they might offload all background tasks to run completely on a remote server interacting locally only to send events. I admit a generic API for this would have very interesting possibilities for app developers. But if google designed it it would very likely be locked to google services, which I’d have to vehemently protest. I personally couldn’t condone any server based solution unless it is completely open source and vendor neutral, things that google traditionally gets a failing grade for.
I was more going for the logic that if someone can keep their phone longer, it stays out of landfill and doesn’t require the manufacture of a new device every contract cycle.
Adurbe,
Sure, and I agree with your logic. It’s just that with capitalistic enterprises, profits > environment. There’s almost no end in which they, left to their vices, won’t sell out the environment for the financial gains of a few. It’s basically the plot of “the lorax”, except for real.
100% agree. Google spent that time on Android Studio in the last year or two & it was awesome. Doing so for Android OS would be great to me.
But, performance can also come down to app performance. I’ve done enough code reviews to know that some developers “get it” on performance and plenty more have *no clue*. For instance, I’ve seen way too many instances where devs didn’t know about SQLite transaction overhead & did batch inserts/updates as separate transactions. It’s one nice thing about the Room library that you can hand it a `List` and it’ll do the batched transaction for you.
I’m still figuring out Jetpack Compose, but I can see that being a boon for performance. It may well be the way for performant apps is at an API level to workaround devs who don’t understand how to do it. It makes me very sad that it’s coming to that! BUT, it may take that.
I mean, I only care about the new tech stack in updates that will be useful in the future like the wideband addition here, bluetooth standards, etc.
I don’t understand the “Ugly ” complaints that have pretty much always followed Android. its fine. Really. I don’t complain about the color of my desk calculator or my tool set in the garage. If its easily usable, then the colors don’t matter that much to me, and I Imagine a large number of people.
> because, after Android 9, it’s mostly “features” that make the UI uglier.
Who really actually cares about the UI. Sane people don’t unless it is really bad and 99% of apps do not follow it anyway. (and hey it’s a mobile platform it’s mostly full screen so there is no UI as such).
11 improved things a lot. 12 regresssed. And updates and 13 have improved it. Or course people with phone that do not get many updates iand no incremental ones may feel different.
I have upgraded to 13 on my 2 phones, where as my shitty samsungh work phone is stucjk on 11 probably forever. (Still was an imprevement over 10).
A couple of years back all this made sense. As each new Android version did bring some novelty and general improvements. But then i guess at some point it got done. Great mobile phone for reasonable amount of money that you can run just about any application on it. To browse the internet while preserving a good battery life. Now Android updates are more or less about things like “reinventing” or better “NIH”. Increasing resources consumption for no clear benefit. For each new version to make it harder to prevent gathering of data. A few years back you bought the mobile phone and on first boot could opt-out of anything. Some options being opt-in. Good luck with that today. Google engineers are literary producing new versions of Android based on “improvements” in regards on how hard it is to opt-out of Google gathering data. Turning on a mobile phone for the first time in 2022. If it would be like that at the beginning. Google would never succeed. People just wouldn’t agree to it and the device would end up in trash. The screen size of new models is just ridiculous. Nothing mobile about it anymore. We are going backwards.