Android Archive

Google's major Wear OS revamp is out today, and soon it will arrive on most devices released in the past year and a half (although Ars has already spent a week with a pre-release version of the OS). In the face of relentless competition from the Apple Watch Series 4 and Samsung Galaxy Watch, Google's most obvious change in the new Wear OS is a new UI for most of the main screens. There's not much in the way of new functionality or features, but everything is laid out better.

Less than a year ago, I posted a serie of articles "Leaving Apple & Google..." to announce that I was planning to create a smartphone OS. A new OS that would:

• be free from Google (no Google services, no Google search, no Google Play store, etc.)
• be far more respectful of user’s data privacy
• be attractive enough so that Mom and Dad, children and friends would enjoy using it even if they aren't technophiles or geeks

Today we release a first beta of what we have done so far to make the initial vision a reality.

It's been two and a half years since Qualcomm last released a major new smartwatch chip, and in the time since, Android smartwatches have languished. But in the coming months, they could finally start seeing some meaningful improvements: Qualcomm is releasing a new processor for watches, called the Snapdragon Wear 3100, that's meant to extend battery life, enhance always-on displays, and offer more versatility when it comes to sports devices and fitness sensors.

Samsung has now confirmed that the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 edge+ will no longer receive monthly security updates. It's not surprising as the Galaxy S6 has already dropped off the list of devices receiving monthly security updates earlier this year. The aforementioned devices will not be receiving security patches regularly every month going forward.

Google has just publicly disclosed that it discovered an extremely serious vulnerability in Epic's first Fortnite installer for Android that allowed any app on your phone to download and install anything in the background, including apps with full permissions granted, without the user's knowledge. Google's security team first disclosed the vulnerability privately to Epic Games on August 15, and has since released the information publicly following confirmation from Epic that the vulnerability was patched.

In short, this was exactly the kind of exploit that Android Central, and others, had feared would occur with this sort of installation system.

Back in March, a trusted source revealed to us that a Palm-branded Android smartphone was slated to launch on Verizon in the second half of 2018. We haven't heard anything since then, but a Palm device with model name 'PVG100' has just rolled through both the FCC and Wi-Fi Alliance.

As is commonplace with these filings, much of the information and all photos are obscured at the request of the manufacturer. However, there's still a bit of information that can be gleaned. The FCC page is barren aside from the model name and some operating frequencies, but the Wi-Fi Alliance PDF reveals that the PVG100 will run Android 8.1 Oreo. Interestingly, the only frequency band listed is 2.4GHz, meaning that the PVG100 will not have 5GHz. Without 5GHz support, it's unlikely that this device will wind up being very upmarket.

With the last version of the Android P Developer Preview released, we're quickly heading toward the final build of another major Android version. And for Android P - aka version 9.0 - battery life is a major focus. The Adaptive Battery feature will dole out background access to only the apps you use, a new auto brightness scheme has been devised, and the Android team has made changes to how background work runs on the CPU. All together, battery life should be batter (err, better) than ever.

To get a bit more detail about how all this works, we sat down with a pair of Android engineers: Benjamin Poiesz, group product manager for the Android Framework, and Tim Murray, a senior staff software engineer for Android. And over the course of our second fireside Android chat, we learned a bit more about Android P overall and some specific things about how Google goes about diagnosing and tracking battery life across the range of the OS' install base.

As someone who spends a lot of time with smartphones, I often get asked, "Hey Ron, what Android phone should I buy?" The high-end answer is usually easy: buy a Pixel phone. But not everyone is willing to shell out $650+ for a smartphone, especially the types of casual users that ask for advice. Beyond the flagship smartphones, things get more difficult within the Android ecosystem. Motorola under Google used to be great at building a non-flagship phone, but since the company was sold to Lenovo (which gutted the update program), it has been tough to find a decent phone that isn't super expensive.

Enter HMD's Nokia phones, an entire lineup of cheap smartphones ranging from $100 to $400. HMD recently launched the second generation of its lineup, with phones like the Nokia 2.1, 3.1, and 5.1. We recently spent time with the highest end phone in this series that happens to be one of the few HMD devices for sale in the US: the Nokia 6.1. And for $269, you get a pretty spectacular-sounding package of a Snapdragon 630, a 5.5-inch 1080p screen, stock Android 8.1, fast updates, and a metal body.

Making the Android Emulator faster is one of the top priorities for the Android Studio team. Over the last few releases, we have launched quick boot & emulator snapshots for quickly starting and resuming emulator sessions in under 2 seconds. Up until now, our emulator experience has almost universally worked on macOS and Linux computers. But for users of Microsoft Windows or the Microsoft Hyper-V platform, our hardware accelerated speed enhancements for the Android Emulator only worked with computers with Intel processors. Support for AMD processors and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor are two long-standing user requests from the Android developer community that we are happy to address with this Android Emulator update.

Today we're rolling out Beta 3 of Android P, our next milestone in this year's Android P developer preview. With the developer APIs already finalized in the previous update, Beta 3 now takes us very close to what you'll see in the final version of Android P, due later this summer.

With the launch of Android 8.0 last year, Google released Project Treble into the world. Treble was one of Android's biggest engineering projects ever, modularizing the Android operating system away from the hardware and greatly reducing the amount of work needed to update a device. The goal here is nothing short of fixing Android's continual fragmentation problem, and now, six months later, it seems like the plan is actually working.

In the past, device makers have focused on safeguarding these keys by storing the keys in secure locations and severely restricting the number of people who have access to them. That's good, but it leaves those people open to attack by coercion or social engineering. That's risky for the employees personally, and we believe it creates too much risk for user data.

To mitigate these risks, Google Pixel 2 devices implement insider attack resistance in the tamper-resistant hardware security module that guards the encryption keys for user data. This helps prevent an attacker who manages to produce properly signed malicious firmware from installing it on the security module in a lost or stolen device without the user's cooperation. Specifically, it is not possible to upgrade the firmware that checks the user's password unless you present the correct user password. There is a way to "force" an upgrade, for example when a returned device is refurbished for resale, but forcing it wipes the secrets used to decrypt the user's data, effectively destroying it.

Big news for those of you who have NVIDIA Shield TV - which, by the way, is the only Android TV box you should consider right now. The Android 8.0 Oreo update (which brings it up to the latest major version of Android) is available starting today.

This'll bring along a major update to the user interface. You'll get new sections along the left side of the screen, with your favorite apps (customizable, of course), play next (where what you've been watching and playing recently will appear) and channels (which is what apps are now called, sort of).

In addition, Amazon Prime Video will get a major refresh, Plex Media Service is improved, and a whole bunch more.

Instead, the problem with the gestures in the current iteration of the Android P beta is one that is sadly familiar to Android users: jank. That's the technical term (no really) that Google itself uses to describe the behavior of the System UI on this beta. "Jank" is usually translated as weird jitters, effects, and scrolling behavior.

I trust that much of that will be resolved in later iterations of the software, but I'm frankly terrified that the subtler issues won't be. I'm speaking about the basic feel of moving elements around on the screen. It needs to be as close to perfect as possible - as good as it is on the iPhone X in my opinion - otherwise that sense of "jank" is going to permeate everything.