Just like last year, Google’s Android engineering team for Android O has hosted a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). It’s more like ‘Ask Us Anything’. The thread was opened yesterday, July 18, Wednesday, and has received over 340 comments from other developers and curious guys interested in the yet-to-be-released Android O. We’ve seen several developer previews already but we’re still excited to finally and officially get a taste of the new Android dessert.
The AndroidEngTeam said public release will happen later this summer. A new developer preview will be released before that so expect to receive an alert or notification if you are on Android O Dev Preview.
The Reddit thread was started with a purpose of getting questions answered by the experts. Technical questions were mostly asked–anything from Android Instant Aps to SDK to APIs, as long as they are focused on engineering. It was a chance for geeks to ask the Android engineering team technical questions.
The team consisted of almost two dozen developers working on different aspects of Android. They are as follows: Adam Powell, Adam Cohen, Allen Huang, Alan Viverette, Anwar Ghuloum, Aurash Mahbod, Ben Poiesz, Chet Haase, Dianne Hackborn, Dirk Dougherty, Jonathan Karmel, Kathy Kam, Lukas Bergstrom, Mike Cleron, Narayan Kamath, Rachel Garb, Romain Guy, Selim Cinek, Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson, Tim Murra, Trevor JOhns, Xiaowem Win, and Yigit Boyar.
Below are some interesting and important questions asked and the answers given by the team. But first, here is a photo of the Android Engineering Team answering the questions on Reddit:
Q: Can we have the option to turn on the color navigation bar in the settings for every single app without the developer doing any work. Or do we just copy the color for the notification bar and automatically apply it to the navigation bar?
A: We are trying to find a balance between visual appeal and burn-in protection. We initially considered colorizing the navigation bar using the same color as the status bar, but it did draw too much attention to it, distracting from the content. Given that the navigation bar is only showing when the screen is on, the harm is slightly reduced as well. On the other hand, do also not all apps use a colored status bar, so you would still get some amount of burn-in and with a colored navigation bar you might even get some color shift, in addition, to burn in. Using color gray would be the safest way to improve this, but that user experience is rather questionable.
Q: Should I still use UiAlarmManager to trigger the sending of these or maybe do something with what seems to be the preferable APIs like maybe a job schedule with a deadline and minimum time of the same time?
A: Since you and your user expect something to happen at an exact time I would recommend continuing to use AlarmManager. Using Jobs, while generally preferable since they give the OS more flexibility on scheduling, depending on conditions the Job could be delayed. AlarmManager is meant for quick things at fixed times.
Q: Any plans to stop bothering users with SafetyNet? We want to be able to have root and still use Android Pay and Amex pay or download Netflix from the Play Store. Linux and windows superusers can do that.
A: Some apps opt into using SafetyNet in order to protect users that may be unknowingly running on a device that is compromised, but that inconveniences power users like yourself. Ultimately, it is the app’s business decision to allow or not allow their services to be run on unlocked or rooted devices. That said, we’d like to do more to both protect users as well as meet app requirements, so in some of the use-cases, nobody has to make the tradeoff between users and business requirements. As an example, for the DRM case, if the hardware itself could guarantee that a protected video cannot be copied off, then whether the phone is unlocked or not shouldn’t affect the decision to allow video playback.
Q: I am recent CS graduate and If i want to dive into developing and modifying Android OS where should I begin? Say for example, if I want to customize my own OS ? Any resources you can point me?
A: Start by downloading the AOSP source code and making sure that you’re able to build a system image. Then go hang out on XDA Forums and learn about ROM development. It’s a really good community for learning and sharing information about modifying the OS.
Q: Will Autofill be integrated with Chrome sometime soon?
You’ll actually find that “integration” is already there. Specifically, if you’ve used Chrome Autofill, you’ll find that the same addresses, etc will be available in Android if you choose to use the Google autofill provider. Chrome browser uses the same password repository as Google Autofill. If you enable ‘Save passwords’ and ‘Auto-sign in’ in the Chrome browser then it should work for websites just like it does Android Apps on O. WebView support is coming soon and will work automatically when Google Autofill is enabled.
Q: Are there any plans to include a theme engine, like Cyanogen OS had?
A: Yes, we already have one based on Sony’s RRO engine. It’s still a work in progress.
Q: Why did you kill the blob emoji? 🙁
A: Over the last few years Unicode has expanded the range of emoji considerably and created new categories of emoji. In parallel new messaging use cases have emerged (ie: larger emoji used as stickers). The current design system did not lend itself well to supporting the expanding emoji set and these new use cases, so we needed a significant visual refresh.
Q: My question is, how does the team get to choose what restrictions to create and at what point do you consider user benefit vs developer headaches?
A: We haven’t made these changes lightly. All of the background restriction changes were driven by degradations in user experience we frequently see in the system when it is getting into low RAM situations. The service restrictions were done because apps continually running background services that the user doesn’t care about is one of the main causes of systems getting into low memory states. The intent broadcast restrictions were done because they are very often the cause of major system thrashing when RAM is getting low, as large swaths of apps need to get launched (and then quickly killed) in response to events going on that are not directly related to the current user experience. (Full answer here)
Q: Will ContentLoadingProgressBar ever be fixed?
A: Yes, but it’s a low priority issue given that the bug is low-traffic (starred by three users) and the widget’s functionality is trivially implemented outside of the Support Library. That said, we are happy to review externally-contributed Support Library bug fixes
SOURCE: Reddit
