As in earlier updates, Android O brings a grab-bag of features. Some address lingering pain points in this mobile operating system, while others borrow from features Apple (AAPL) added to iOS. Another represents an overdue remedy for a problem that’s afflicted Android since its debut almost nine years ago: the zombie-like persistence of obsolete versions.
And of course, there’s better emoji support.The most important part of O—a rebuilding of Android’s foundation to remove an obstacle to timely software updates—barely got a mention in the almost-two-hour keynote from Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other Googlers that opened I/O at the Shoreline Amphitheatre Wednesday.
But there’s no missing the reason for its existence in the embarrassing pie chart on Google’s Android-development site showing the versions of Android in use.
As of May 2, the current Nougat release that debuted last August runs on 7.1% of all devices that had connected to the Play Store in the prior seven days. The most widely used Android release was the two-year-old Marshmallow, on 31.2% of devices. At Apple, meanwhile, 79% of iOS devices that visited the App Store on Feb. 20 ran the current iOS 10 release.
Project Treble, announced in a blog post last week, aims to free chipset vendors from having to tweak the code that keeps their circuitry talking to the rest of Android. Treble will add a layer of translation code between that proprietary software and the rest of Android—the equivalent of putting a standard-size joint atop some intricate plumbing in the basement. A hardware vendor can write Treble-compliant, circuit-specific code once for a device and know that future versions of Android will understand it without further rewrites.
That won’t end all Android-update holdups. As this post from Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica explains, Treble won’t stop phone vendors from shipping weird Android interfaces (hello, Samsung!) that demand their own revisions. But it’s an important step in an operating system that now runs on more than 2 billion active devices.
Security and privacy
The afterlife of abandoned versions of Android remains the biggest problem in Android security, but many users worry instead that they’ll pick up malware in the Play Store. In reality, that’s a vanishingly small risk compared to the odds of getting hacked after downloading an app from elsewhere, thanks to a variety of malware scans that happen in the background.
Android O will add more layers of security hardening but will also make these app-safety checks visible in a Google Play Protect feature showing their status. It’s literally security theatre. As Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson, product-management director for Android, said in the keynote, “Most Android users don’t know these services come built into Android devices with Play.” But if it gets people to trust the Play Store over less-secure sources, it’ll be a worthwhile production.
This update will guard against a different device threat—a runaway app killing your battery life—by imposing limits on how often apps running in the background can ask for a device’s location or make other requests of the system. If that sounds like an overdue move… it probably is.
In the area of privacy, Android O will randomly assign different device IDs to apps—a small but significant change that will make it harder for a developer of multiple apps to correlate your use among them.
Notifications, picture-in-picture and other interface tweaks
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