Android is the most popular mobile OS on the planet, and Google has brought the OS to cars, watches, and televisions. And, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google will soon be bringing Android to yet another form factor: desktop and laptop computers. Re-architecting Android for a mouse and keyboard is going to require major changes to the smartphone operating system, but Android is actually much farther along that path today than most people realize.
It really is – but there’s a definitive oddness about it, though. In any event, Google has already confirmed it’s working on bringing multiwindow to Android, and if the company is really serious about putting Android on actual laptops and desktops, it’s going to have to be more than just the kind of My First Multitasking Windows 8’s Metro had (implemented 1:1 in iOS 9). It’s going to have to be the real deal, with windows that can be moved around, resized, stacked, etc. – all the kinds of things you’d expect from any other desktop operating system.
I think the biggest problem they’re going to run into is the black bar at the bottom of the screen, housing the back/home/windows button. Unless they can come up with a way to logically let the back button handle multiple activity stacks, I would suggest getting rid of the bar entirely, or just converting it into an all-out taskbar. They obviously can’t have that black bar on 23″ desktop displays or whatever.
Android 7 is going to be very interesting!
Replacing the task switch button with an icon for each active app in the bottom bar (e.g. a task bar) is Remix OS’s one truly good idea, and the main thing I’ve been missing since switching away from my Jide Remix tablet.
That combined with the honeycomb style combining of taskbar/navigation bar would be the perfect way to free up that wasted space at the bottom.
Google must have seen the amazing success Windows is having with their universal OS across devices strategy and wanted a piece of the action.
Android and iOS are now trying to upscale from mobile to Desktop as we can see from the iPad Pro with iOS9 and the Pixel C with Android M….they have a very long way to go with apps and navigation.
Microsoft is trying to scale down from Desktop to Mobile and they seem to be the furthest along with their unifying strategy. They got dinged for it in Windows 8, improved it in 8.1 where it wasn’t good enough, but with Windows 10 they seem to have a solid base and a lot of momentum going for them and then there is Continuum.
I don’t think Android is far enough. Giving the OS mouse and keyboard support is just like adding touch to Windows XP and calling it “Tablet Edition”…that isn’t good enough, not by a long shot.
Now does that actually mean Microsoft is going to win this war…Probably not, because it isn’t even clear yet if consumers and businesses want these upscaled/downscaled OS-ses. Microsoft bet big and it might pay of. But iOS and Android might just as easily catch up before this stuff catches on.
How so? They are absolutely nowhere on mobile. In fact they’re worse off than they were a couple years ago.
So we agree?
Android and iOS are TRYING to make their mobile OS into a Desktop, but they are not even close TECHNICALLY. They simply have 0% market share in the market they are trying to get into.
Microsoft actually merged their platforms already so they are TECHNICALLY there. Their marketshare isn’t great either, that is obvious but still they are furthest along unifying mobile and Desktop
Now, here’s a revolutionary idea, take a damn proper desktop OS and add support for seamlessly running Android apps in resizable windows. There is absolutely no sane reason in making Android pick up proper desktop features.
There’s a perfectly sane reason. Google is trying to do as IBM did with OS/2 and move everyone over to an OS they control… but, this time, they’re not tying it to only overpriced IBM hardware, so there’s a risk it will succeed in the long term.
Edited 2015-12-22 04:03 UTC
I can’t see a future for a desktop designed to be powered by Java apps. Jolla and Blackberry tried to combine mobile and desktop by adopting Qt toolkit, which to me is what anyone targeting a pseudo open mainstream OS should do. Qt is the best thing out there.
Jolla and Blackberry tried to combine mobile and desktop????? I am pretty sure both companies don’t do anything on the desktop.
Android only running Java apps? http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=qt+android
Have you ever tried to code for Android with Qt?
I did, and it was so fun I ended up replacing QML with Java code and the C++ part with C++11 libraries.
For the majority of Android APIs one needs to write their own JNI wrappers as Qt only provides a few of them, mostly in the commercial version. So no added value there.
Similarly QML doesn’t provide any Android widgets, rather an Android like theme, but then again it is easy in some cases to noticed they aren’t native Android ones.
Actually in terms of mobile support, last year Qt was still quite behind what Xamarin offers.
How do newer versions compare?
Yes, but there are also other kind of apps. Games, for example, almost always have a custom UI and widgets. It’s awesome to be able to develop your game natively on a desktop machine in C++/QML. However, if you want to write an app that looks like a native Android app, then Java would be the obvious choice.
I’m not sure why this is so important in the mobile world while we are used to web apps and services that look nothing like the platform you are using them on.
Edited 2015-12-22 22:26 UTC
Yes, we have several apps built with Qt on Android. Works great.
Yes it’s not as easy as native, that should be obvious, but it is a hell of a lot faster than writing the same app twice in Java and ObjectiveC.
No, I haven’t. I just responded to an obvious QT fanboy with some facts, not with any personal knowledge.
Android already runs my Qt apps so I don’t mind. If they ever force me to use Java only then it would be a different thing.
freedom to choose is good. I personally don’t like qt, having worked with it for many years, and turning into another win32 type thing for android would suck.
Apps are virtualized. When you just run the apps in resizable Windows (hello Bluestack) they cannot communicate with each other, so you cannot upload a picture to FaceBook (without adding FaceBook-code into every app). So you also need to add some more core-parts of Android that will allow you to “Share” things between apps. And currently apps run either in the foreground (active) or in the background (suspended). If you can have multiple apps on screen you want multiple active apps. So again, just running Android apps in a window is not enough, you need SOME desktop features.
“with windows that can be moved around, resized, stacked, etc.”
Honestly, I’d rather see them experiment with a tiling window management system. It would be nice to finally see one done thoughtfully, in contrast the half-baked implementation that Windows 8 has.
Yeap, right, there are 1000s tiling window managers on Linux, such like Awesome. I’m fed up with stacking, moving, looking for my window in the the task bar. I prefer by far a system that show stuff instead to hide them. It wouldn’t be such a big deal for Android developers since the Activities are already screens that can be stacked.
Exactly, I was baffled when Microsoft didn’t even try anything remotly usable when they had the chance. It would have made Modern UI so much better.
Let’s hope Google won’t screw this up…
The “bottom bar” i.e. navigation bar is what makes Android suck ass. For years I’ve been waiting for a mainstrean mobile OS that would ditch the broken idea of a fixed bar and instead be based on global edge swipes like in BB10 or Sailfish, but sadly all these alternate OSes seem more or less dead in the water.
Even more horrible an idea was moving the navigation bar from physical buttons to a virtual onscreen bar that eats up a huge portion of the valuable display area. Google has been going back-and-forth with trying to make the navigation bar more dynamic and then discouraging it completely.
In fact, Google is still running in circles with its interface designs, as is proven by the latest Gmail app that features yet another different implementation of the hamburger menu, something that isn’t found anywhere else.
Edited 2015-12-22 08:02 UTC
If the keep on trying then sooner or later some mud will stick.
The next question will be how much instrumentation they put in it to snoop on the users activities. all in the aim of improving the user experience naturally.
now if there was absolutely none, zilch etc then I might give it a dabble. But the the only UI is tiled then forget it. A week with OOTB Windows 8.1 drove me mad.
Until then my PC environment is either OSX(Laptop) or CentOS (Desktop).
Once the UI concept of “full screen borderless” apps on “mobile” transitions to apps being displayed in rectangles with borders, resize controls then, somewhat ironically, Android will have completed its transition “back” to a much more conventional Linux distro… albeit with the funky java layer to run “Android” apps.
Why is this so revolutionary? As mobile arm processors become more powerful we’re just trickling back to the interface paradigm we’re all used to.
The underlying kernel/operating system for both Android (i.e. Linux) and iOS (Darwin) came from desktop and now they’re just returning home. Also,the xposed framework coupled with floating notifications has had windowed/resizable apps on Android since at least 4.2 JellyBean. I can already run gentoo on my tablet and phone ( https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Android/tarball ). This is not *instead* of Android… or *in addtion to* Android. It’s just the gentoo userland using the kernel and services supplied by Android, as if it were just any other Linux.
Really… the more things change the more they just stay the same.
Edited 2015-12-22 16:02 UTC
I’m not very interested in android. Especially if it still has the required java portions for doing anything GUI related. I think chromeos is a better system for resource management, etc
I’d prefer KDE Plasma 5 any time to Android.
So which OEMs bother to offer it with comparable hardware?
PCs so far didn’t suffer the fate of mobile hardware nightmare, so you don’t need to make hardware compatible – it already is.
I’m talking about the desktop of course. Mobile scene is just sick.
Edited 2015-12-22 20:31 UTC
Ugh, desktop Java. They must be stopped.
I would say hopefully, they get rid of Java in Android 7, but they won’t.
They should also get rid of Bionic. It makes Android horrible, together with Java.
It’s only Java as far as the language (and yeah, I wish they’d switch to really anything else). But at runtime it’s using ART (used to use Dalvik) which has nothing at all to do with the vaunted Java runtime we all know and loathe.
ART actually recompiles all the DEX (Dalvik byte code) down to machine code when you install an app. Pretty neat.
Also, 2016 is the year of desktop Linux!
Edited 2015-12-23 18:44 UTC
In a multi window desktop app environment, the best option for the back button is to attach it to each individual window, and not worry about having a global back button, which wouldn’t make sense.
And then let desktop mode app dev decide whether they want to utilize it or not. Every desktop environment has some standard window dressing or menu options that the developer has to either opt out of or opt in to. The back button is an Android standard, and should definitely be attached to individual apps.