The Chromebook team has been doing saint's work by building virtualization layers, to let a user run their own apps or OS & have it seem like sound card, GPU, all sorts of stuff including video decoder & encoder (as recently blogged at https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/06/06/a-ro... ) seem to just work, even though it's all going through deeply sandboxed containers running their own virtual hardware. It's incredibly ambitious mastery of the broadest technical ecosystem possible, and it rocks, is just awesome. (Alas I don't think anyone else has any idea how to reuse it, which sucks.)
It's a pity the Android team has such incredibly low ambitions here. Mirroring the screen? That's it? All these years latter & that's what you've got? If they were delivering a well baked decent desktop screen like DeX can, I could be more sympathetic, but it just looks like the whole NIH display subsystem & tech stack of Android is a terrible boat anchor, is constantly working against them & keeping them from getting anywhere at a reasonable speed. There's already an OK-ish tablet experience, but this boutique tech stack Android built for itself can't even begin to handle multiple displays or multiple modalities. Or the team just has a low bar for themselves here, is starting really low.
After it blew up, Google swore the ChromeOS on Android demonwas just that, a demo, not going to make it further. But if Android is going to keep setting the bar so low for it's ambitions, if everything will be so minimalist, maybe they should go the ChromeOS route & enable options. https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-running-on-pixel-...
Ideally Android should start trying to bring in best-of-breed standard infrastructure & stop DIY'ing their stack, should give up on SurfaceFlinger & start porting their stuff to respextable technology which won't encumber themselves, won't require constant effort just to keep the basics going, which will work well with others. ChromeOS has not just virtualized but has offloaded their NIH efforts & integrated in good pieces of the FreeDesktop world; this low-ambition non-delivery/partial delivery by Android feels like a strong sign that they are suffering & ought reevaluate whether they really need to recreate the entire stack on their own.
It's a pity the Android team has such incredibly low ambitions here. Mirroring the screen? That's it? All these years latter & that's what you've got? If they were delivering a well baked decent desktop screen like DeX can, I could be more sympathetic, but it just looks like the whole NIH display subsystem & tech stack of Android is a terrible boat anchor, is constantly working against them & keeping them from getting anywhere at a reasonable speed. There's already an OK-ish tablet experience, but this boutique tech stack Android built for itself can't even begin to handle multiple displays or multiple modalities. Or the team just has a low bar for themselves here, is starting really low.
After it blew up, Google swore the ChromeOS on Android demonwas just that, a demo, not going to make it further. But if Android is going to keep setting the bar so low for it's ambitions, if everything will be so minimalist, maybe they should go the ChromeOS route & enable options. https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-running-on-pixel-...
Ideally Android should start trying to bring in best-of-breed standard infrastructure & stop DIY'ing their stack, should give up on SurfaceFlinger & start porting their stuff to respextable technology which won't encumber themselves, won't require constant effort just to keep the basics going, which will work well with others. ChromeOS has not just virtualized but has offloaded their NIH efforts & integrated in good pieces of the FreeDesktop world; this low-ambition non-delivery/partial delivery by Android feels like a strong sign that they are suffering & ought reevaluate whether they really need to recreate the entire stack on their own.