Official Android 6.0 SDK and Final M Preview

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/08/m-developer-preview-3-final-sdk.html

by cryptoz • 11 years ago

156 88 11 years ago

android-developers.blogspot.com

knd775• 11 years ago

OEMs (and probably carriers) really need to get their stuff together. It really sucks that here we are talking about M when very few devices have seen an L release.

sp332• 11 years ago

The new UI style and notifications means all the skins have to be revamped. That takes a lot of investment, and the only other benefit users are likely to notice is slightly better battery life. Lollipop has better security, but unfortunately that's still not a big selling point. Hopefully cell phone makers have had enough time to update their skins to look good with (or pave over) Material design, and we'll see more updates for M than we did for L.

zanny• 11 years ago

Or they could, you know, just ship stock Android and make everyone happier by not shoving awful carrier skins down everyones throat nobody even likes.

Cough, Touchwiz.

BlackJack• 11 years ago

A good rule of thumb is that 25% of Android devices will have the OS within 1 year of release and 50% within 2 years of release.

Based on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html though, L is behind the pace :(

patrickaljord• 11 years ago

Android L was released on October 15th so it could still make it to 25%. Also note that 5.0 was pretty buggy so that didn't help...

izacus3• 11 years ago

Those stats you're linking are extremely misleading and don't really reflect demographic of actual app users. Pretty much all our apps across the board have higher Lollipop and KitKat usage.

Which makes sense - what you linked is aggregate number of all users on the Play store across the world. Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Ignore newer API versions at your own peril.

whatever_dude• 11 years ago

1. Dashboard stats are global and in general show very different numbers when compared to the users of most modern applications, at least in the western world. It probably overrepresents cheap, old devices from China and India who, in general, don't install or buy as many apps.

2. As bad as Android adoption normally is, in general L adoption has been better or at least on par with that of previous versions. Check the last chart: http://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts Lollipop release date is actually wrong there (makes the chart more optimistic), but by a month only.

aidenn03• 11 years ago

I have a less than 2 year old flagship phone (Moto X) with no L release yet, so this doesn't surprise me.

e40• 11 years ago

I think the release lag for OEMs is far longer than Google thought it would be.

Also, this lag is the reason they won't get rid of the Nexus program. Without it, they would not have a test bed for Android.

soylentcola• 11 years ago

Yeah, I imagine they figured that as long as they kept pushing out updated OS versions, essentially for free, the OEMs would have an easy way to keep offering updates without having to build any of the underlying "stuff" from scratch.

But I think it ends up more like enterprise IT where OS updates get put off and only done when absolutely necessary. To OEMs who only really care about selling hardware, it's just more testing, deployment, and support cost (not to mention porting their customizations).

I realize I'm not in the majority (outside of tech circles) but I really do like Android and the main criteria for choosing a device are specs, build quality, and likelihood of timely updates. My current phone is a Moto X and it's the first non-Nexus I've had in a while. And I only got that because I broke my Nexus 5 and we were still a way off from a refresh. The Moto seemed like a less extravagant (in terms of price and screen size) version of the Nexus 6. But if Lenovo undoes the good things Google did for Moto, I'll be back to the Nexus line regardless for my next phone. I got rid of the carrier as a middleman by avoiding carrier-branded and subsidized handsets but the OEM still plays a huge part as long as proprietary code is needed to port newer versions of the OS to a given device.

julianpye3• 11 years ago

Right now according to my user demographics, I just decided to move to 4.2 (API 17).

Which means that what I learned at I/O 2013 can finally be put to good use!

The sad part is that I decided to skip looking enthusiastically under the hood of M, because I won't be able to use it anyway for quite some time.

izacus3• 11 years ago

And 57% of our demographics are on 5.0 or newer, with 19+ covering over 80% of users actually using the app.

Perhaps updating your app to the 5.x standard will actually make those users use it instead of running away to other Material apps ;)

julianpye3• 11 years ago

There are many useful libraries to get a close-enough Material experience working on the older devices. And I am not talking about the official support library, which should be at least on a par of many MIT licensed Android extensions out in the marketplace.

RyanZAG• 11 years ago

Not quite catching your point - if you set your min sdk to android 5.0, you will remove 43% of your users. That's kind of the problem.

Luckily, Android has a great compatibility library so you can still use many of the new features.

cpncrunch• 11 years ago

And 57% of our demographics are on 5.0 or newer, with 19+ covering over 80% of users actually using the app

You must have a very unusual user base! We have 11.6% using 5.0 or newer, and apps in our category (Communications) have average of 16% using 5.0+. Our largest user base is for 4.4, at 49%.

ino• 11 years ago

For me its less than 7%. Here are my numbers for last month excluding china: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q9yj8k4cac8xaqb/Screenshot%202015-...

Zigurd2• 11 years ago

Why aren't you using the compatibility libraries?

julianpye3• 11 years ago

Sure we are using them, but for example the design support library is not very satisfactory.

The whole approach of backwards compatibility has not worked out well. Google's alternative approach for the last two years have been the Play Services, which are now a behemoth requiring multidex in your app, when the majority just use the API client libraries from them.

xienze2• 11 years ago

The Support Library is very UI-focused. There's a lot of stuff added to the Android API that never gets backported.

shams93• 11 years ago

Well if you write a hybrid app in polymer you can use material for everybody and share out a copy of your app on the chromeos app store and ios off the same code.

clumsysmurf• 11 years ago

I predict that only Nexus devices will get 6.0 initially, just like 4.0 and (to a lesser degree 5.0) before that.

But OEMs will wait for 6.1 to let the bugs settle out. After 5.0 and its memory leak bugs etc, i'm wary.

xd19362• 11 years ago

I don't know. Marshmallow feels a lot more iterative than KitKat → Lollipop did.

I'd say

ICS → Jellybean = Lollipop → Marshmallow

Refinements, tweaks, and moderate improvements, as opposed to a whole rethinking of design.

bitmapbrother4• 11 years ago

Oh please. Android 5.0 introduced a new runtime that was the cause of a lot of the issues. These have been ironed out in 5.1.

BinaryIdiot• 11 years ago

Pretty sure that was exactly his point; major issues until the point one release so why wouldn't they wait?

xasos• 11 years ago

Really big fan of the simplified permissions feature. It's something I've always wanted that Android never had. In addition to the supposed battery usage improvements, I'm looking forward to the new streamlined Android Pay features.

jzzskijj• 11 years ago

Just learned about this and it seems really great! This is something I always wished for when I was developing for Android and actively using apps. When the most of the apps seemed to require me to give permission to access my personal information, I quit installing and using apps.

"The M Developer Preview introduces a new app permissions model which streamlines the process for users to install and upgrade apps. If an app running on the M Preview supports the new permissions model, the user does not have to grant any permissions when they install or upgrade the app. Instead, the app requests permissions as it needs them, and the system shows a dialog to the user asking for the permission.

If an app supports the new permissions model, it can still be installed and run on devices running older versions of Android, using the old permissions model on those devices."

https://developer.android.com/preview/features/runtime-permi...

jl6• 11 years ago

Really hoping 6.0 and the new Nexus phones have pen support so I can get over my disappointment that the Galaxy Note 5 won't be released in Europe.

bitmapbrother4• 11 years ago

Android M gets native Bluetooth stylus support so it should be supported.

winslow• 11 years ago

Why does a stylus need bluetooth? I thought it interacted with the display much like a finger (just more precise). Unless they are using thermal touch sensors?

bitwize• 11 years ago

Android as a platform is toast. With the flagrant security issues, anyone who cares about security will buy an iPhone or BlackBerry. Add to that the blatant Oracle IP infringement and you've got a recipe for a platform with no future.

The smart mobile devs are noping the fuck out of the Android ecosystem.

farmdve• 11 years ago

I like the fact that it's open source, mostly excluding some third-party binary blobs, but on most phones I can install custom ROMs and kernels, and even fiddle with these binary blobs.

josteink2• 11 years ago

People who bought into Apple's closed garden (with a capitol c) need to rationalise their investment.

Part of that rationalisation is at will dismissing the value of open technology, despite 99% of the internet and 90% of the Apple ecosystem lives atop of it.

Considering how lots of full on FOSS Linux users were lured to the Apple platform for its (at the time) impressive desktop, this has probably caused one of the biggest damages to open source software we have seen in recent time.

51Cards• 11 years ago

You're correct... at ~78% of the mobile market share the platform is definitely on its last legs. Better to focus development on the remaining 22%, esp with that 30% Apple market overhead.... ???

Android definitely has hurdles to overcome but it's far from "toast". I really can't conceive where that view would come from?

Jerry22• 11 years ago

at ~78% of the mobile market share

That's the most misleading & pointless statistic I've ever come across and definitely the most dangerous one if you're a developer. Why? Well, VAST MAJORITY of that marketshare are phones that are so cheaply made that they cannot run even 4.4 let alone 5. Only a tiny portion of these phones are actually capable of running latest apps & games well. So all these people running non-Android (China for example doesn't really run certified Android but various forks of AOSP) are not really your customers.

And don't even get me started on user base... if you read Google Play reviews, you'll notice that people give you 1 star ratings if you decide to charge for an app or decide to have IAPs in your "free" app. So good luck making a living off Android apps. About the only way you can do it, and the most common way for Android devs to make money these days, is to exfiltrate as much personal data as possible and sell it to data brokers. That's why all these "free" apps require so many permissions.

Anyway, I've been an Android dev for 4+ years and recently moved into server-side development but I pity the guys who still try to make a living off Android.

s73v3r2• 11 years ago

"Better to focus development on the remaining 22%, esp with that 30% Apple market overhead.... ???"

You realize that Google has the exact same 30% overhead, right?

bitmapbrother4• 11 years ago

Looks like the Windows troll decided to show up. I'd be more worried about the sad state of Windows, its flagrant security issues and it's invasive privacy "features". No wonder the PC market is declining.

drzaiusapelord5• 11 years ago

Please Google, how about some real battery improvements this time? I was disappointed to hear that the new "doze" feature is only for completely stationary phones. So sitting in your pocket or the bottom of your purse won't set it off because there's too much motion. I imagine this will be nice for tablets that sit on the kitchen counter all day, but might not affect phone battery life at all.

Apparently, the battery gains from Volta in 5.0 didn't do much and from what I've read many of the popular apps never bothered supporting the new APIs for their own reasons.

On the plus side, hearing about monthly security updates tackles my biggest concern with the platform. The problem is only a handful of the biggest players have signed on for that, and even then these updates need carrier approval for some asinine reason. The smaller OEM's will probably never deliver these updates.

andor• 11 years ago

"App standby" in Android M also works for non-stationary phones. It disables services and background data for apps that you don't use for some time.

https://developer.android.com/preview/behavior-changes.html#...

I'm pretty sure that Google cares a lot about battery life, but there's no magic way to save energy, so don't expect too much from optimizations. Apps, not the OS, use most of the energy for CPU, screen and radio time. The new features only limit the apps a bit by disabling or rescheduling background tasks.

drzaiusapelord5• 11 years ago

Well, I don't think my demands are unrealistic. Compared to my iOS devices, Android does terribly, even with much higher capacity batteries. It would be great if google caught up.

MichaelGG3• 11 years ago

Or OEMs could just put decent batteries in the phones? Huawei has the Mate 2 with a 4000mAh battery. I easily get over a full 24-hour day. I never worry about charging it.

Other OEMs could do this if they wanted. But they choose to slice another mm off thickness, and everyone's happy if they can get through 12 hours without charging.

If Apple has chose to ship a battery capable of lasting 24 hours, everyone would just take it for granted that this is obviously how devices should work.

Grazester• 11 years ago

That's a brute force way of trying to solve the issue and one I am not big on.

Rangi42• 11 years ago

The Android emulator system images and developer preview system images have been updated for supported Nexus devices (Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 & Nexus Player) to help with your testing.

The Nexus 7 is pointedly absent. Will they even get an OTA update for the final Android M release?

niedzielski2• 11 years ago

I thought I was the jaded dev until I started reading these comments! There's a lot of stuff I hate about Android but, in my opinion, the tools, first and third party libraries, testing support, and design have made really great progress this year alone. Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along (and I'm on Linux!), the Support libraries are filling in a lot more holes than they ever did before (and I have to support Gingerbread!), Robolectric is at 3.0 RC3 and you can finally run it in Android Studio, and Material Design is getting more well defined and seeing more and more saturation into other tech (Polymer hit 1.0!).

vorg2• 11 years ago

Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along

Too bad Gradle only allows us to use one language (i.e. Groovy) to configure the builds. Because Maven uses generic XML, any language can sit atop it. E.g. Polyglot Maven [1] not only allows us to use Groovy, but also Clojure, Scala, and Ruby to configure its builds.

[1] https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven

niedzielski2• 11 years ago

Build systems have been particularly tumultuous for Android. It was unfun to build an app in Eclipse, then want CI and have to write a lot of boilerplate in Ant. The complete translation of all that Ant code and related CI materials to Gradle / Android Studio took weeks for my team on a large codebase. And, if you're a platform dev, you also have to support nonrecursive Make.

I'm not a big Groovy fan either but I am a big fan of picking something that works. The transition was painful but I'm glad the road ahead looks clear and focused.

needusername• 11 years ago

Slightly OT: Does anybody have an ETA of Java 8 in Android?

richardboegli• 11 years ago

I think that next version of Android will be called Oreo.

Just putting it out there, so when I am right in a year or so time we can refer back to this comment ;-)

I'll write up a separate post later as to why I think it'll be called that.

Official Android 6.0 SDK and Final M Preview

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