Android

What was interesting about the Keynote: Brillo: the OS for the IoT… but but but, there were no talks about it, almost no information about it, nothing. Android Studio with C++ support: Finally :) The NDK really needs love, and having an IDE that supports it is great. Hey, even Microsoft is supporting the NDK now in VS2015. Photos is decoupled from Google+ with free unlimited storage: This is great. I’ve been using Picasa since day one and I never used Google+ to store my photos. So basically Photos is the same as Picasa, but with unlimited storage. Offline maps: Yeah Chrome Custom Tabs: Interesting alternative to present 3rd party views with the benefits of both the web and native worlds. What was not-that-interesting about the Keynote: The rest. I don’t care if Android has better permissions or not (yeah, the old permissions-model sucked, but I don’t find that news interesting). The Family section for Google Play is good, but not interesting. Android Pay, meh. etc. One thing that I liked, but was not announced on the Keynote, was Project Jacquard. They are using conductive threads and other stuff to create “smart” cloths. Something that Adafruit and Sparkfun have been doing for a while, BTW.

For the past 5 or 6 years, I used iPhones as my default phones. But a few months ago I decided to switch to Android. I tried Android devices before, but never as my default phone. At the beginning I started using a Samsung Galaxy S4 (a 2013 5" device), but later I switch to a Xiaomi MI4 (a 2014 5" device with better specs). Without further ado, this is my feedback: Launcher In case you don’t know what the launcher is, think of the shell that allows you to launch the applications. It is the first thing that appears when you turn on the phone. In a way, it defines the UX. Each phone maker customize the Android launcher according to its needs. And you can also download 3rd party launchers. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The bad thing is that every phone maker have a different launcher, making it difficult to switch to other Android devices, since the UX is different. Google has its own launcher called Google Now Launcher, and tries hard to make sure that Android makers don’t differ too much from it, although that is not always true. Samsung, as an example, ships its phones with a launcher called TouchWiz. It doesn’t differ that much from Google Now Launcher, but its changes make it a worse phone, not a better one. Xiaomi, on the other hand, ships its phones with a completely different launcher which makes your Android device behave like an iOS device. The good thing is that you can use a different launcher if you don’t like the default one (or create your own). This as a good thing because everything that can be configured, changed or replaced is an opportunity for innovation (see below).