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.
Available on Pixel devices and a number of third party devices.
From about a month ago:
HMD announced a new slate of Nokia phones Tuesday. To go along with the previously announced Nokia 6.1, we have the Nokia 5.1, Nokia 3.1, and Nokia 2.1. The highest-end phone here starts at $220, and the price goes down from there.
Every Nokia phone is worth paying attention to, because they are all part of Google's Android One program. This means they run stock Android and get monthly security updates. Nokia promises two years of major OS updates and three years of security updates for everything. It's really hard to find good, cheap smartphones, and with this lineup (depending on distribution), HMD seems to have the market locked up.
The 3.1 will be available in the US starting 2 July, and browsing around Dutch stores, it seems they'll make it to The Netherlands (and thus, I assume, the rest of Europe) in early July as well. These look like some incredibly solid, affordable, and properly update-friendly phones (because they run Android One). I might pick one of these up myself.
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.
There are indeed some small signs of hope, but the reality is that as long as Samsung isn't on board, it's effectively all for naught. I find this article far too positive when you look at the reality of Android updates, but at least there's some progress.
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.
This guide shows how to install LineageOS without GApps with the help of signature spoofing and microG, so that you can have Push Notifications, Location Services and the like, without needing to have Google Play Services installed (without Google-anything for that matter).
It was made possible by the hard work of creators, maintainers and community around LineageOS, microG, XPosedFramework, F-Droid, Yalp Store and many others.
Exactly what it says on the tin.
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.
The NVIDIA Shield TV is a device with a what I guess is a small, but very dedicated fanbase. I'm always tempted to buy one to see what all the fuss is about.
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.
On a modern flagship, I haven't experienced any animation issues on Android in years. I remain convinced that iOS users think Android scrolling is "laggy" because Android scrolling is different, not because it's actually any worse on a flagship, that is. I haven't touched a lower-spec Android phone in ages, so I don't know how bad the situation is on those phones.
We go through this every time a new version comes to Google's own phones while we wait for it to come to the rest. And the outcome is always the same - Pixel phones (and previous Nexus phones) look the way Google wants them to look and the rest of the phones look however the company that made them want them to look. That's because you can't see Android - it's simply software that supports the things you're looking at.
It's confusing. And tech bloggers (myself included) don't help ease the confusion very well when we write about the things we see on a software update for the Pixel. It's too difficult to try and break everything down every time we write something, and while we are good at a lot of things, we tend to shy away from "difficult". To compound it all, when we do try to break "Android" down, we usually make it worse. I'm going to try here because I'm feeling courageous and want to face "difficult" head on today. If I don't come back, tell my wife I love her.
Android is quite a complicated term, entity, and operating system.
We just got a look at the upcoming RED Hydrogen One smartphone at an event meant for "RED Pioneers" (read: superfans). It is, without a doubt, one of the most ambitious smartphones in years from a company not named Apple, Google, or Samsung. It's an Android phone with a 5.7-inch display and top-tier phone specs, but that description doesn't do justice to what RED is trying to accomplish here.
The company better known for high-end 4K cameras with names like "Weapon" and "Epic-w" isn't entering the smartphone game simply to sell you a better Android phone (though it does have both Verizon and AT&T signed on to support it). No, this phone is meant to be one piece of a modular system of cameras and other media creation equipment - the company claims it will be "the foundation of a future multi-dimensional media system".
I doubt this phone will ever have any mass-market success, but that's not really the point anyway. I like that RED is trying something new, something different, and takes it to the extreme with this industrial design. The module system here is different from previous failed attempts at doing so in that it's designed to tie in with RED's popular and expensive camera's and lenses from other big camera brands, instead of trying to appeal to the mass market.
This might actually work out.
Among all the new additions to Android P including new navigation gestures, Slices API, and new biometrics API, there are some other changes which may also be impactful in a more subtle way. One of these is the removal of App Not Responding (ANR) dialogue boxes for foreground apps. The ANR dialogue appears when something is preventing the main UI thread from responding. When this happens in Android Oreo or below, the ANR dialogue is shown to the user to let them know. Now, in Android P, the application will just crash without any kind of notification for the user.
You know how some people will insist that iOS applications are more stable than Android applications? That's because on iOS, when applications crash, they just... Vanish. No dialog, no notification, nothing. Android will now be adopting the same behaviour, which, while less informative, does remove a silly dialog that you couldn't really do anything useful with anyway.
Good move. Dialogs you can't take any actions with are useless.
I bring this up because when Google introduced its new pill-shaped gesture area on Android P's first public beta, it was immediately apparent that Google was not aiming to recreate the simplicity, or even the convenience, of its decade-old three-button navigation scheme. Swiping up does not, in fact, go to the home screen but to the multitasking menu. Swiping up again, and only from that in-between state, reaches the app drawer. Indeed, reaching the home screen requires tapping the pill, something that's not at all obvious from its shape, or from precedent set by Apple and the rest of the industry.
I don't have a Pixel or one of the other supported devices to test the new navigation scheme on, but it only makes sense that people are weary whenever big changes to core parts of a UI like these are made. People were up in arms over the removal of the home button on the iPhone X, but it took me less than hour to get used to, and Android P will be no different.
Updates are easily the biggest problem facing the Android ecosystem, and Google is working hard to fix that. Project Treble has proven that it's capable of making updates easier, and now Google is stepping up requirements for OEMs when it comes to security patches.
Every little step in this department is a welcome one. It's not yet clear what, exactly, the requirements entail, but hopefully, it's a strict and hard requirement to publish every monthly security update.
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. Today, that idea is thriving - billions of people around the world rely on their Android phone every day.
To make Android smarter and easier to use than ever, today we're unveiling a beta version of Android P, the next release of Android.
There's tons of new features, mostly about Android trying to anticipate what you want to do next. Android P takes Android's already pretty good inter-application communication a step further, by exposing actions and even parts of applications outside of the applications themselves, with App Actions and Slices.
App Actions, for instance, help you get to your next task more quickly by predicting what you want to do next. Say you connect your headphones to your device, Android will surface an action to resume your favorite Spotify playlist. Actions show up throughout Android in places like the Launcher, Smart Text Selection, the Play Store, the Google Search app and the Assistant.
Actions are a simple but powerful way for helping you get what you need quickly; but what if we could surface part of the app itself, right when you need it most? Slices do just that, giving you an even deeper look into your favorite apps. If you search for "Lyft" in Google Search, you can see an interactive Slice that gives you the price and time for a trip to work, and it’s interactive so you can quickly order the ride.
Other than that, Android P also brings gesture navigation to Android, to deal with phones with smaller bezels. Furthermore, Google put a lot of emphasis on what it calls "digital wellbeing", which aims to make you more aware of how and how often you use your phone. For instance, a feature called Wind Down will make the screen go black and white at a chosen time, encouraging you to put the phone down and go to sleep, and Dashboard gives you detailed information about how you use your phone.
The beta version of Android P is available starting today, for Pixel phones and a variety of other phones.
Now that iOS and Android are approaching technical maturity, new updates to these operating systems no longer feel revolutionary. The new stuff we get every year is boiling down to smarter notification handling, under-the-hood upgrades, screen notch adaptations, and “borrowing†good ideas from one another. As Google prepares to take the wraps off its next big iteration, Android P, at Google I/O 2018, I have an idea for an alliterative theme: make it Android P for Privacy.
Fully agreed with Vlad Savov. Sadly, the lack of encryption in Google's new chat feature doesn't bode well.
We're taking this leak with a grain of salt: it's either a perfectly executed set of Photoshopped images (along with very accurate timestamps) or the real deal. Supposing that it's real, Gabriel Bryne, whom I can't find anything tangible about, has somehow managed to get his hands on the Android P DP2 beta and installed it on his Pixel. He then did what any sensible man with a super secret Android release would do and took a bunch of screenshots and images of the interface.
Some interesting possibilities for Android P, which will probably be demoed later today during the Google I/O keynote.
Android Things is Google's managed OS that enables you to build and maintain Internet of Things devices at scale. We provide a robust platform that does the heavy lifting with certified hardware, rich developer APIs, and secure managed software updates using Google's back-end infrastructure, so you can focus on building your product.
After a developer preview with over 100,000 SDK downloads, we're releasing Android Things 1.0 to developers today with long-term support for production devices. Developer feedback and engagement has been critical in our journey towards 1.0, and we are grateful to the over 10,000 developers who have provided us feedback through the issue tracker, at workshop events, and through our Google+ community.
Google is promising three years of security updates, straight from Google itself.
A years-old privacy flaw will finally be coming to an end on Android. It's an issue you've probably never heard of, but one that you should absolutely be concerned about. Currently, apps on Android can gain full access to the network activity on your device - even without asking for any sensitive permissions. These apps can't detect the content of your network calls, but they can sniff any outgoing or incoming connection via TCP/UDP to determine if you are connecting to a certain server. For instance, an app can detect when another app on your device connects to a financial institution’s server. Don’t believe me? Just download one of the many netstat apps on the Play Store and see for yourself.
I had no idea this was an issue at all. Good to see it fixed, and since it'll probably be part of a monthly security update, it'll propagate to most Android devices.
Sharing from one app to another has been a mainstay of Android for years and years. It was one of the features that first drew me to Android: no more copying and pasting, no more having to open Twitter or WhatsApp to send a picture I just saw in my Gallery. Apps could talk to each other and the experience felt more cohesive and seamless.
But with time, the Share UI in Android has languished, stuck with the same features and same problems. It switched from a vertical list to a horizontal one, it added direct share in Android 6.0 and app pinning in Android 7.0, yet these felt like putting lipstick on a pig: the Share UI remains slow, bloated, convoluted, and if you pay close attention to it, one of the most inconsistent experiences on Android to date. Android P, like Oreo before it, appears to bring no improvements to the Share interface, but that's a big oversight in our opinion. It's high time Google gave it the attention it deserved and fixed its many issues.
The share sheet on Android is, indeed, a mess. It's odd how such an important aspect of one of Android's major strong points - inter-application communication - is being left to rot.
I’ve been a professional Free Software developer in the GNU/Linux area for 14 years now, and a hobbyist developer and user for much longer. For some reason that never extended much to the smartphone world, beyond running LineageOS on my older phones (my current Sony Xperia is still under warranty and I’m fine with the officially supported Android), and various stabs at using the Ubuntu phone (RIP!).
On a few long weekends this year it got a hold of me, and I had a look over the Google fence to see how Free Software is doing on Android and how to reduce my dependency on Google Play Services and Google apps. Less because I would actually severely distrust Google, as they have a lot of business and goodwill to lose if they ever majorly screw up; but more because of simple curiosity and for learning new things. I want to note down my experience here for sharing and discussing.
I started experimenting on my old Nexus 4 by completely blanking it and installing current LineageOS 14.1 without the Google apps. This provides a nice testing ground that is completely free of any proprietary Google stuff. From that I can apply good solutions on my "production" Xperia.
One of those topics not particularly suited for most smartphone users, but among OSNews readers, there are sure to be quite a few people who are interested in this.
All those little features add up: The phone is fun and easy to use. And so far, there's no serious downside. I mentioned it above; the experience is simultaneously high-end luxury yet while staying informed and in control of the device. I believe this is a very difficult mix to get right. IMO, Apple's been drifting away from the keep-the-user-in-control value.
Maybe this sounds naive, but I'm completely surprised by how the product stands on its own. It's not in the shadow of iOS, not playing catch-up with Apple. I'm continuously seeing common problems solved in new ways.
I'm sure we can have a civil, informed, and respectful discussion about this. To facilitate such, I'm going for a walk. With my iPhone 10, AirPods, and Apple Watch.