Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP

23 days ago by time2lose to c/linux

Android 17 QPR1 is the first release since Android Honeycomb (3.x) adding new APIs for app developers without a release to the Android Open Source Project. The new APIs are currently exclusive to the Pixel OS and aren't available to other Android OEMs. https://developer.android.com/sdk/api_diff/37.1/changes
usernameunnecessary 75 points 23 days ago

I've said this many times and it's always on my mind. Google is a terrible steward for Android. We need alternatives that are viable and don't came with huge dealbreakers.

path: 0 25908237, hotness: undefined, score: 75, children: 15
rockSlayer 20 points 23 days ago

Hopefully Graphene is developing a hard fork of AOSP with Motorola, so they don't have to be reliant on Google

path: 0 25908237 25908450, hotness: undefined, score: 20, children: 14
lemmyng 12 points 23 days ago

That's why I was so gutted that DivestOS shut down. It was such a good alternative to GrapheneOS and was usable on phones other than Pixel.

I guess CalyxOS is the next best thing nowadays, since it can be used on some Motorola phones, Fairphones and the ShiftPhone 8:

https://calyxos.org/install/

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25908573, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 0
vimmiewimmie 1 point 22 days ago

Though, I recently found out Motorola has license plate reading cameras and supposedly works with ICE. Which is gd gutting to hear.

https://wpde.com/...

https://www.motorolasolutions.com/...

https://callmc.com/...

Edit: From a reply below, this may be a different company? Looking into it now.

Edit: Looks like the cellphone company, Motorola Mobility LLC, is currently wholly owned by the, now Chinese company, Lenovo. So, certainly appears to be different organizations. Glass someone caught me on that.

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25928533, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 6
traxex 3 points 22 days ago

Wrong Motorola. There are two different companies.

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25928533 25928916, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2
vimmiewimmie 1 point 22 days ago

Oh shit. Fr? I'm totally uninformed. I'll look this up but any quick pointers to help?

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25928533 25928916 25929197, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
rockSlayer 1 point 22 days ago

Fuck. Guess I need to seriously reconsider

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25928533 25928662, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 2
vimmiewimmie 1 point 22 days ago

Apparently, it may be a different company. Checking on that.

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25928533 25928662 25929224, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
vimmiewimmie 1 point 22 days ago

Looks like the cellphone company, Motorola Mobility LLC, is currently wholly owned by the, now Chinese company, Lenovo.

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25928533 25928662 25929454, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
keisatsu 1 point 23 days ago

don't hope too much, they have admitted they are vibing it

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25908478, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 5
wilmo 20 points 23 days ago

They specifically aren't vibing it though.

As they say it's useful to find vulnerabilities which is true.

And as far as code they said:

Frontier models are very good at finding bugs but it requires an experienced developer to babysit it and extract the useful portion of the output. Important bugs are often found but mixed in with a bunch of low quality output.

Which is the opposite of vibe coding.

It's fair to dislike any LLM usage. But it can have value. But it's often coming from unethical entities like OpenAI and Anthropic etc

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25908478 25911180, hotness: undefined, score: 20, children: 1
rowinxavier 2 points 23 days ago

I think this is the distinction of uses I canost get behind. If you find an attack using any tool, whether that be a CVE, a script kiddy, or an LLM, then you can go on to understand how the vulnerability works and patch it. This leaves the understanding part to the programmer, but not the arduous task of trying to find problems. If you use vibecoding to do the actual fixing you never have the understanding of how the code works and therefore what the changes will actually do.

LLMs can be useful in a lot of ways, but they should never replace thinking and understanding. Just like you do need to memorise some things but not others, there are cognitive tasks you don't have to do all the time but others you really have to in order to actually be a good programmer. If you outsource thinking you stop doing it and get weaker at it. If you outsource meaningless tasks or use systems to reduce the need for them that is actually useful for freeing up your mind for tasks which cannot be automated.

So in my view using these tools to find bugs in code can be useful. Knowing that if a bug is found it may not be disclosed to you by the tool because the provider of the tool wants to keep some bugs hidden is something people should consider, I mean that is exactly what the NSA has been going for decades with zero day exploits in various operating systems and platforms, why would they not do so now?

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25908478 25911180 25917342, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
trevor 5 points 23 days ago

Where?

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25908478 25909657, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
keisatsu 2 points 23 days ago

Their mastodon profile is talking at length about it.

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25908478 25909657 25909811, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
lambalicious -1 points 23 days ago

Shit, well that pretty much seals the deal on no Motophene for me. As if the Epstein Class price tag was not doing enough as a disincentive.

path: 0 25908237 25908450 25908478 25911722, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 0
trevor 40 points 23 days ago

Yet, the GrapheneOS devs will continue to insist that Linux isn't viable because of "security". Well, how useful is AOSP going to continue being with Google holding it hostage?? It sure seems to me that spending effort to make mobile Linux more secure and usable would be a much better long-term strategy than to keep developing for a dying, hostile ecosystem.

path: 0 25909748, hotness: undefined, score: 40, children: 16
iturnedintoanewt 22 points 23 days ago

The way i understand it, what Google did in Android is no joke, and definitely very hard to implement on a small team that basically works on just fine tuning your existing code. Birthing all this onto Linux is quite an undertaking, and it would need hardware partnership agreements.

path: 0 25909748 25910374, hotness: undefined, score: 22, children: 12
theparadox 11 points 23 days ago

what Google did in Android

Like almost everything Google has done, android was bought by Google. Admittedly, it's been quite a while since then and I couldn't tell you how much can be attributed to the original team vs Google's input.

path: 0 25909748 25910374 25912550, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 11
trevor 10 points 23 days ago

Yes, and the biggest thing Android has going for it in terms of security is the fact that everything runs under a strict sandbox and permission model.

You could absolutely build a cohesive, secure Linux system using Flatpak to acheive something similar. It will still have rough edges and holes, but if GOS devs put in the same amount of effort into making Linux secure as they have with AOSP, we could get it to where it needs to be.

path: 0 25909748 25910374 25912550 25915349, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 7
Quexotic 2 points 23 days ago

Again, agreed, but hindsight is 20/20. I'm not sure if when they started in 2016, they would've believed that by this time, things would be going so badly. That said, I suppose we all really should have assumed they'd be enshittified as soon as google removed "Don't be evil" from their policy in 2018.

path: 0 25909748 25910374 25912550 25915349 25915920, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2
boonhet 1 point 22 days ago

Yes. But for usability, the biggest thing Android has going for it is nothing technical, it's a ridiculous amount of apps to do literally anything you want and billions of existing users, which means more bugs are found and fixed. The mainline kernel Linux phone ecosystem does not have this and it's a bit of a hurdle.

path: 0 25909748 25910374 25912550 25915349 25929812, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 3
halm 3 points 22 days ago

Yes, corporations buy up small businesses and startups. In this case all they got seems to be the Android name and an idea to make a phone OS? AFAICT the project was neither open source or based on the Linux kernel until Google took over.

I'm not trying to whitewash Google here, they did that pretty well themselves in open sourcing Android development. That's given them a 20+ years alibi to be complete arseholes in pretty much any other part of their business — and now they're clamping down on Android, too.

path: 0 25909748 25910374 25912550 25920794, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2
billwashere 5 points 21 days ago

Google has done good things. Google has also done shitty things. To me the problem is the good things aren’t frequent enough and the bad things seem to be the default recently.

path: 0 25909748 25910374 25912550 25920794 25937293, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
hyperio 6 points 22 days ago

Android is not the problem here. In fact I love Android very much. What I don't like is Google.

AOSP and Google need to be seperated. While Linux mobile would be nice, phones work differently than PCs and I don't think Linux will just "work" like it does on desktop. There's a reason why it's so far behind. Popularity and viability. I just don't think it's worth it.

Android is amazing. It's secure, great, snappy and it's still very open. However I do NOT trust Google that they will not fuck up the freedom aspect of it in the near future.

path: 0 25909748 25918352, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 1
HereIAm 2 points 21 days ago

Okay, as I'm sure you know, Android is built on Linux, so saying something like Linux wouldn't work on phones is quite an odd statement. And Linux on PC's wasn't always "it just work". It's taken a long time and hard work to get it to where it is. And it's "just" code, there's no reason whatsoever that with a lot of sweat and elbow grease it can be a good user experience (see Sailfish OS). The desire and need for a non-Android OS has been quite low until recently.

I do agree that moving AOSP stewardship to someone else would be for the best and the easiest option for everyone involved (except Google I guess).

path: 0 25909748 25918352 25936714, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
Quexotic 3 points 23 days ago

Agreed. It's time to have a truly open source OS. I didn't know that they had that opinion, but it doesn't surprise me. They seem extremely... determined is probably the nicest way I can put it.

I used to be enthusiastic about graphene, but between this and a few other things, I'm not sure pursuing using graphene is really worthy of my time, if only because of the devs' attitudes, or at least the attitude of whoever is doing their communications.

path: 0 25909748 25915849, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
sem 15 points 23 days ago

I didn't realize we were getting so close to the future

path: 0 25908816, hotness: undefined, score: 15, children: 0
daniskarma 3 points 21 days ago

Google have been years seeing how far they can push linux GPL.

At this rate android will end up being closed source.

path: 0 25937489, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 1
ZILtoid1991 1 point 21 days ago

I have an even worse feeling about the LLM code in the kernel...

Considering that the big AI vendors do deals in behind the scene, Google is going to ask for same favors to try and retroactively relicense LLM slop code.

path: 0 25937489 25938108, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
ColeSloth 2 points 23 days ago

Starting to read this title had me in completely the wrong headspace and trying to recall any android 3 at all. Furthest back I could remember was 8er.

path: 0 25916258, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 4
Goodlucksil 5 points 22 days ago

Android 3 did exist, but it was only released on tablets around 2011-12

path: 0 25916258 25919541, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 3
ColeSloth 2 points 22 days ago

Dragon ball, man. I was thinking dragon ball.

path: 0 25916258 25919541 25922354, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2
Goodlucksil 2 points 22 days ago

Oh yeah, those Androids. I haven't seen Dragon Ball so I didn't make the connection.

path: 0 25916258 25919541 25922354 25922405, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1
ColeSloth 1 point 22 days ago

Yeah. I've actually been using Android since v1.xx

path: 0 25916258 25919541 25922354 25922405 25926644, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
linux
linux

@lemmy.world

login for more options
19487
1747
3503

Welcome to c/linux!

Welcome to our thriving Linux community! Whether you're a seasoned Linux enthusiast or just starting your journey, we're excited to have you here. Explore, learn, and collaborate with like-minded individuals who share a passion for open-source software and the endless possibilities it offers. Together, let's dive into the world of Linux and embrace the power of freedom, customization, and innovation. Enjoy your stay and feel free to join the vibrant discussions that await you!

Rules:

  1. Stay on topic: Posts and discussions should be related to Linux, open source software, and related technologies.

  2. Be respectful: Treat fellow community members with respect and courtesy.

  3. Quality over quantity: Share informative and thought-provoking content.

  4. No spam or self-promotion: Avoid excessive self-promotion or spamming.

  5. No NSFW adult content

  6. Follow general lemmy guidelines.

go to feed...