
Android: The word Google didn't say during the Pixel 3 event - telotortium
https://9to5google.com/2018/10/11/the-dirty-word-android-dead-made-by-google/
======
xrd
I'm using the Chromebook Pixelbook as my primary development device. I love it
ergonomically: great keyboard, love the ability to flip the keyboard behind
and use as a touchscreen.

ChromeOS could be really big, and it makes sense as a brand to switch again
from Android for the reason.

But, the fact that I lose access to the sound services almost _every single
time_ I use the machine is crazy.

The response from Google is not encouraging.

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!top...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/?noredirect=true#!topic/chromebook-
central/Va6NLP09NJM)

Basically:

 _Reboot_

Or, _just wipe all your data!_

If they really expect people to use these as their primary machines or even as
just a browsing device, you MUST have sound working 100% of the time.

Mine is setup as a developer machine so it could be that I'm bleeding edge.
But I'm loathe to switch back, lose all my data, just to see if that fixes
things.

~~~
ericcholis
I'm in the market for a new development machine, and wholly afraid of the new
Macbooks. What do develop on the Pixelbook? Are you using Linux or Cloud IDEs?

~~~
leetcrew
i recommend you get the xps 13 or 15. once you swap out the killer wifi card
for an intel solution, you have a solid machine that's ready to run your
favorite distro out of the box. or you can get the developer addition that
actually has dell support for ubuntu. idk why you would prefer the pixelbook
to this unless you really like chromeOS.

~~~
voltagex_
This is the annoying thing - I've got the 9350 and I had to swap the Broadcom
card for an Intel card to get any kind of stability in Windows.

Well known error: [https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-
Only/bcm...](https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-
Only/bcmpciedhd63-sys-Blue-Screen-Dell-XPS-13-QHD/td-p/4677205)

At one point, the crashes even managed to corrupt my filesystem. What I will
say is that it's _super_ easy to swap out the wifi and M.2 SSD - took 2
screwdrivers and about 10 minutes. I _may_ have lost Miracast but does anyone
actually use that?

~~~
PascLeRasc
YMMV but a former coworker had a 2016 XPS 13" and swapped out the wifi card
for some Intel one and Miracast still worked for him.

------
xg15
I'm just as surprised that in this whole article the word "Fuchsia" appeared
exactly a single time (and that occurrence was in parentheses).

Couldn't the primary reason be just that? They are currently maintaining three
distinct OS stacks - Android, Chrome OS and now Fuchsia - and there have been
numerous messages in the past that they would likely to unify them.

So my guess is they either want to de-emphasize Android to not have the OS
fragmentation leak into marketing or they really plan to drop Android even as
a technical foundation at some point.

~~~
pjmlp
They are just as dysfunctional as Microsoft with their WinDev vs DevTools
political issues.

It is not only the multiple OSes, also the developer stacks.

Android, Web/PWAs, Flutter, with each one presenting themselves as the
solution for delivering software on Gooogle's platforms.

~~~
snodnipper
Totally agree. There is massive confusion in the space...the tooling appears
hard to maintain and often unloved. There is a whole push to get Android devs
using Kotlin...I'd love to know the stats on actual usage. Personally, I see
Kotlin as movement rather than progress.

At some point I think it would make sense to have a clean break. Personally,
I'd love to see something like rust encouraged (possibly with JS frontend to
ensure huge adoption). Probably never going to happen...so with that said,
we'll probably end up with dart...suitable for writing macros around machine
learning code.

~~~
dangets
There was a recent blog post following KotlinConf 2018, saying 27% of top 1000
google play apps use Kotlin. [https://android-
developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/kotlin-mom...](https://android-
developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/kotlin-momentum-for-android-and-beyond.html)

------
legostormtroopr
The word Google didn't say is "Android".

This title has been edited, but its still unclear what word wasn't said.
#stopclickbait

------
adrianmonk
One possible interpretation is that someone simply decided the presentation
should keep things simple and avoid confusing people by mentioning more than
one brand.

This is a pretty common strategy in communication: pick one main idea you want
to get across, and stick to that only. If you throw in everything that you can
think of but the kitchen sink, the distraction does more harm than good.

Following that reasoning, Pixel is the brand of those specific phones, so that
is the brand you mention on that occasion.

------
jrs95
Is this because of Fuschia? Maybe, but after Google released a phone with both
a notch and a chin, I have absolutely no faith in their ability to succeed in
bringing that OS to market.

------
rapnie
I hear no one talking about possible privacy issues when using a ChromeBook
for your work. Is that a non-issue (i.e well addressed)?

------
lawrenceyan
I assume since Fuschia will be replacing Android soon as the all-in-one OS of
Google, that they're sidelining the Android name.

------
rainygold
Is Fuchsia considered to be Unix?

~~~
diebir
Any OS w/o a POSIX interface is probably a non-starter at this point. Anything
POSIX is arguably UNIX. This said, who cares about the kernel? Android is not
about the kernel. There are 100x more difficult problems up the stack than the
kernel. My guess nothing will happen there. It has been too hard to get
Android where it is.

~~~
wtracy
My pet theory is that Google intends to eventually port the existing userspace
for chromeos and Android to the Fuschia kernel.

As long as your apps run inside Chrome's runtime, or interact with the Android
APIs instead of the low level POSIX APIs, they'll never know the difference.
(And we all know that Android's existing POSIX support is minimalistic, to say
the least.)

------
glenrivard
Just makes sense. They will move to Fuchsia and is starting the process of
moving away from the "Android" brand.

We have seen it already with Wear OS and other places.

~~~
jaytaylor
Thanks, I hadn't yet heard of Fuchsia.

More info for any others who are interested:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia)

~~~
codetrotter
I’d heard of it but didn’t know it was open source.

Is Fuchsia in a state where you can boot it in a VM?

Wikipedia mentioned how to develop applications for it with Dart. Did anyone
try developing applications for it?

In a talk [1] by Sam Altman I saw on the YC channel on YouTube, Sam said that
an advantage that startups have over big corp is that the latter are not able
to “turn their battleship around” as fast, developing software for new
platforms. Hmmm... (pondering).

[1]: I think it was this one:
[https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc](https://youtu.be/0lJKucu6HJc)

~~~
hurricaneSlider
One of the writers at ARS got it to work:
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-
os-o...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-on-the-
pixelbook-it-works-it-actually-works/)

