It’s Android 7.0 Nougat day! Well, for the owners of a small number of Nexus devices, and even then, of a small subset of them, because of the staged rollout – well, for them, it’s Android 7.0 Nougat day! If you have a Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Pixel C or General Mobile 4G (Android One), you can try checking for updates starting today. Alternatively, you can manually install a factory image once they become available.
Since Nougat’s been out as a developer preview for a while – I’ve been running it on my 6P for months – I doubt any of you will be surprised by what Nougat brings to the table. It’s a relatively small release compared to some other Android releases, but it still brings a number of interesting refinements and new features – the biggest of which is probably the new multiwindow feature.
The Verge’s got a review up, and mentions some of the less obvious features that I think are quite important:
A lot of what’s new in Nougat are features you can’t really see. I’m talking about deeply nerdy (but important) stuff like a JIT compiler for ART apps and support for the Vulkan API for 3D graphics. The former should provide some performance gains while the latter will help Android games look way better. Google also fixed up the way Android handles media so that it’s more secure, added file-based encryption, and added some features for enterprise users.
Another important feature laying groundwork for the future: seamless updates. Starting with Nougat, Android will use two separate partitions so updates can be installed and applied in the background, so that the next time you reboot, it’s ready to go.
As always – no idea when any of you will get to use Nougat, but it’s out there now.
Hey what do you know, my 6P on the dev channel has been updated over-the-air to the final Nougat version!
Odd feeling. Did I get hacked or something?
Sounds like good news for select Android users!
True but I think the following part will be a great piece of foundational work for Android, which iOS and Windows Phone could learn from:
“Another important feature laying groundwork for the future: seamless updates. Starting with Nougat, Android will use two separate partitions so updates can be installed and applied in the background, so that the next time you reboot, it’s ready to go.”
Edited 2016-08-22 22:32 UTC
The thing I find interesting is that this has technically been possible from day one, yet Android hasn’t actually supported doing it until now.
This technique has been used for years in firmware updates on server systems, and more recently on good desktop motherboards. Similar methods have been used in a large number of embedded systems over the years. This isn’t anything new, and it kind of saddens me that Google’s taken this long to get to this point.
Oh sure, updates are so very seamless. Which is why hardly anybody ever gets them!
Oh god, not another idiot…
Google has made it pretty clear they only care about updates on devices they design, aka Nexus and Pixel. And if they are not older than 24 months (36 months for security updates).
What do they have to do to shove that simple fact inside your thick, thick skull? Don’t like it? Go to the iPhone. Stop whining like an overgrown infant to anybody who is within range. It is annoying to me, the listener within range, hear an overgrown infant like you whine about his purchasing decisions when he had all the information on the table available before purchase.
When they say seamless updates, they mean for that category of users that hasn’t shunned vanilla Android for whatever offshoot some manufacturer cobbled up.
Edited 2016-08-23 23:52 UTC
As one of those select users who was smart enough to vote with their wallet during purchase instead of whining later, by buying a Nexus 5X, I agree…
B… B… But I needs to has teh latest Snapdragons and 10jiggabytes of RAM and 20 megapixal camerazzz. Nexus isn’t good enough for me.
At least average users know what they are buying when they buy Galaxy phones and don’t care about updates at all. All those nerds however buying non-Nexus Android devices and then clogging Android forums whining about lack of updates or about how much buggy third-party ROMs are sound really confused to me.
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I don’t know what they mean with the JIT bit. We supposedly went into to ART in order to get out of JIT hell, where apps that aren’t already cached have to be recompiled as they are used. Now they want to bring JIT back?
I never got the point of this dex (dalvik executable) nonsense anyway, which is basically code that has been compiled to a fictional ISA nobody has ever implemented in hardware. Couldn’t they just mandate from app developers to compile their apps for ARM, x86 and MIPS64 before submission to the Play Store and be done with it? This is what is regularly being done for apps with Native-code components anyway.
Edited 2016-08-23 15:33 UTC
It is a consequence of Google not being able to learn what Microsoft and Apple are doing with native compilation for managed languages on mobile OSes.
While Apple and Microsoft compile their bytecode, LLVM bitcode and .NET Native/MDIL respectively, on their store servers and serve a fresh baked binary to the users devices, Google has decided to do AOT compilation directly on the device.
So of course it lead to very lenghty installation times.
Now for Android N, instead of doing what Apple and Microsoft are doing, they missed again the opportunity and decided for an hybrid approach.
A very fast interpreter written in Assembly that works together with a JIT compiler, which does profile guided optimizations. Then when the device is plugged and not being used, that information is used to AOT compile to native code, just the code being actually used.
As why everyone is using bytecode for mobile devices, they want to give maximum freedom to OEMs to freely change their CPUs.
However the approach taken by Apple and Microsoft make much more sense than what Google is doing with their battery eating compilers.
That’s probably because Qualcomm has some better than default compilation technology and OEMs are demanding that it’s supported.
It’s more like Android is a multi platform/architecture system, something which iOS or WP are not. So in this case, what works for the single target goose, doesn’t necessarily apply to the multi target gander…
WP surely is, as it makes use of UWP model.
iOS as well, because it both targets tvOS, watchOS both using different types of processors as the iPhone and iPad.
Both Apple and Microsoft are able to generate all possible combinations for downloading, Google could easily do the same.
Nope.
Android not only supports multiple sets of the ARM architecture, but completely unrelated MIPS and x86 as well. In contrast WP only support the same set of ARM, and iOS only has to support 2.
Android is a nasty mess because the binary target configuration combination it needs to support is explosive in size, whereas both WP and iOS have a pretty well defined (sane) limited matrix of binary targets.
Edited 2016-08-23 18:03 UTC
Yep, this bears out when you compare the dev environments for each of them. Android’s dev studio ships with support for a dizzying array of processors and platforms.
In other words, they want to leave the maximum freedom for OEMs to fsck everything up as they usually do.
Apple and Microsoft stores are walled gardens – you cannot get a binary for your device anywhere else.
For Android, you can get your apk anywhere you want, it does not have to go through Play Store. That’s why your suggestion is a no-go from the start.
You’re right when it comes to iOS but dead wrong when it comes to Windows 10 Mobile. You can install appx files (UWP apps) from any source you want, just like Android. But most of the time, why would you? There’s a reason Android is hit by so much malware.
I find the multi window thingy slightly useful on a tablet, but have so far found zero usecases on a phone, even the size of a galaxy s7 edge. If anyone have found some clever use for it then i am genuinely curious.
The rest of the features is not something that would make me cry at night because it might take some months before i get them.
In the review he complains a bit about searching, am i the only one who find the google app, Google now, etc, fun to play with but totally useless, and just open chrome instead?
Here’s an use case: you play Pokemon Go on your phone, the game is active only when displayed on the screen. If you open another app on top (to make a phone call or so), it will pause activity (including tracking your movement).
Now with multiple windows, I don’t know, but maybe they will be able to work in parallel.
That one would actually be clever, but pokemon go does not support the multi window mode, or so i heard a friend say who have the game installed, or something like that 🙂
From what I understand, most games are not likely to support it.
Doing something else like reading osnews while watching youtube video
I have yet to find a specific use case, but I have a feeling it could be useful with screen casting.
I’m more excited about the ability to quickly toggle between two apps by double tapping the overview button. In most cases, I have exactly two apps I need to deal with, and being able to quickly switch while barely thinking about it is really nice.
Every Android release is the one to fix GC pauses, and the new compiler technology in every release is the one to make apps run as fast as other platforms. Until the next one. On the other hand maybe this really is the one to take Android out of lag central and to get rid of the stuttering. I’m sceptical though. I think I’ll stick with the consistent smoothness of iOS.
Meanwhile, everyone else has already forgot that Android was ever laggy or stuttery like 4 years ago.
Then maybe those people need to look at things objectively and not be blinded by fanboism. Android will always be laggy because it uses a garbage collector. That was a choice they made to get market share, and it worked. But this is the downside.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/22/galaxy-note-7-iphone-6s-speed-t…
You mean a Samsung phone laden with Samsung bullshit is slow?
I am SO surprised.
It’s not just the Samsung, the 6s has won that test against all major Android handsets for the past year. You can argue about the merits of that test, I guess, but it seems like a useful test to me. I’m not saying Android is bad – it’s clearly not. But if you’re the kind of person who cares about performance consistency and smoothness, Android is not the best available option unless you see other downsides to iOS that outweigh these major benefits.
As your article says: “This is just a single test that compares an unusual usage scenario”.
I doubt there are many users preferring iOS over Android because it opens 14 (whatever selected) apps in parallel a bit faster. I also doubt any iOS-fanboy would name that a top-reason. Don’t you agree?
Edited 2016-08-24 23:49 UTC
Seems not so big a difference if you live in the parts of the world where you get the Exynos cpu instead of the Snapdragon one
http://www.gsmarena.com/galaxy_s7_edge_exynos_vs_iphone_6s_speedtes…
These app loading benchmarks are silly anyway, they might just show that the specific apps were better optimized in the iOS versions
I am plenty happy with the speed of my Galaxy S7 Edge, i don’t know what people who manage to get it to lag are doing, but for my workflow it is plenty fast and smooth.
It’s still slower than a phone that’s six months older than it. I don’t think the benchmarks are silly. They typically use apps that are popular and that many people will be launching, and if the apps are faster because they’re better optimised for iOS, then that’s just as important as raw CPU speed. It’s not important why something is faster, just that it is faster.
Of course, all that matters is you’re happy with your device, and if you’re the kind of person who likes to customise the experience, and aren’t too worried about security, then Android is clearly a great choice.
Edited 2016-08-23 10:42 UTC
You are forgetting that iOS is out of reach for many countries where the average salary is around 500 euros or less.
That benchmark is silly because up till now who on earth opens 14 apps in parallel on a non-multiwindow OS and complains it takes some seconds longer on the one system? Its beyond silly because the first thing to complain about would be the need to switch from the current started app back to the appstarter 14 times in a row just to start another app what takes factors longer on both systems.
Edited 2016-08-24 23:55 UTC
So basically every single cross-platform app out there outside those made by Google?
Are you sure is not laggy any more on the current 50$ devices?
Except for Nexus 5X owners like me.
Or anyone using a reasonably priced smartphone. Until recently I had a third gen Moto G. While it’s technically a budget phone, it still worked well. When I got it almost a year ago, it ran everything smoothly with no issues. In the months leading up to me getting a Nexus 6P though, it started showing progressively more and more lag, despite factory resets and everything else I tried. At the point when I finally switched, even Chrome was functionally unusable on it.
Android is still laggy, but it’s an issue of the software running on it, not the OS (mostly, there are latency issues inherent in the design of the OS, but they’re not significant to most people because it’s in the single digit millisecond range). It’s suffering from the same problem that has plagued Windows for years, and has caused issues on almost every other platform in existence: Developers think that new hardware means they don’t have to care about efficiency as much.
That’s totally up to the display / touchscreen drivers / hardware.
Nexus 5 have been supersmooth and had zero perceptible touch lag even on Android 4, whereas Samsung devices (even flagships) seem to have fixed it only with 7th gen.
In general it’s hard to find an Android device with good touch lag characteristics. It’s partly fault of reviews that largely ignore that aspect leading to manufacturers getting away with 100ms and more
A few years back, I could see people complaining about not getting updates like iOS, but there is no excuse for that today.
If you want updates, Nexus phones are available to everyone, and you can get the updates as they come out. It’s a choice, and a good one. If you choose another OEM, then that is your choice, and you have known that updates aren’t at the top of the OEMs list, so you purchase into a crapshoot.
I have been using Nexus phones since the Nexus 4, and I have always gotten my updates.
Google is extremely anal when it comes to saving server CPU time. For example, their YouTube videos are of lower quality than H.264 videos encoded at the same bitrate (size) but on higher-quality (aka more CPU demanding) modes. Which begs the question why they had to go forward with the whole dex idea, based on some nerd fixation with multi-platform-ness which doesn’t even work (see Native apps).
That’s precisely the kind of Silicon Valley “nerd dogma over substance” kind of engineering I loathe
Edited 2016-08-23 20:25 UTC
Meanwhile it looks like Sony announced there will be no Android 7.0 for the Xperia Z3 phone family, the same devices that happily run the Android N Developer Preview.
The unofficial reason is that “Google/ Qualcomm removed msm8974 support from aosp N kernel” [1], so no SD801-powered smartphone should ever officially get Android 7.0.
Oh yes, good Google, bad OEMs.
[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=68331384&postcount=1…