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Exclusive: Google will develop the Android OS fully in private, and here's why (www.androidauthority.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Ok peace love and fuck google but serious replies only

Why do we devs need Android?

Most apps I build just display shit. They show prompts to the user to guide them through what I want them too.

I can't remember ever needing to implement some high frequency data processing onboard and even so. Webassembly and PWAs are getting better pretty dang fast (isn't figma a 100% wasm-pwa?) so if I actually needed those I could have those.

The last remnants of what a program could do on bare metal is like LLMs and visual processing. I'd also rather have those in a standalone app but soon we're gonna get some sort of WebNPU standard and (well) I might as well process images in webassembly (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ

Like imo browsers are becoming virtual machines with (what amounts to) an undefinably infinite app store.

When I freelance as an app developer I always encourage my clients to go the PWA route and then I wrap a PWA runner for the app stores because they only want to be on the app stores for marketing purposes and bc users are used to it.

Because that's all that these OSs are, just UI's wrapping a browser (in my humble opinion).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

PWA rant incoming.

The context of your question reminds me of why I had to leave app development -- it's a race to the technological bottom. It's a real damn shame that PWAs work so well because it points to distribution and consumer reach to be the real limiting factors in writing a great application rather than infrastructure and code. It shouldn't have to be this way, but it is because we don't want to write an app for every platform separately. However, when we do this, we lose something and that is the vision for how the OS developer intended for applications to operate and interact with the rest of the system. It's a gap-filling technology that makes up for the lack of consistency between platforms that just never sat very well with me. It's something that shouldn't need to exist, but it does to fill an important role that could be designed out of an ideal system.

Rant over. Think I will label this as a rant at the beginning of the comment before wasting readers' time.

We need Android because at some point an app needs to interact with the real system. This could be through a library or some kind of native plugin. Sure, we could accept it's proprietary all the way down in the system, but that would be a dark world to live in, indeed. We could live without it, but we should care.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

You need android because that's what the majority of smartphones on this planet run.