Android 5.0 Lollipop

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/android-be-together-not-same.html

by koesie10 • 12 years ago

356 105 12 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

mpthrapp2• 12 years ago

Anyone know if there's a way to find out if my phone (HTC One M8) will be able to upgrade to 5?

buster• 12 years ago

Rumours are HTC One will get an upgrade in the next 90 days:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/When-is-my-phone-getting-the-...

Wondering if my HTC One Google Edition will get the update sooner..

cybrjoe• 12 years ago

Yes, per HTC:

We will begin rolling out updates to the HTC One (M8) and HTC One (M7) worldwide within 90 days of receiving final software from Google, followed shortly thereafter by other One family members and select devices.

mpthrapp2• 12 years ago

Awesome, thanks.

on_and_off6• 12 years ago

it is a 2014 HTC flagship. There are 99.9% chances that it will get a rapid update.

k-mcgrady4• 12 years ago

So the Nexus 4, which is just under 2 years old, won't support Lollipop? Considering the device is from Google and not through a carrier I would expect better. No pricing on the Nexus 6 but I would expect it will cost a lot more than Nexus devices have in the past. And at only 1 inch less than their Nexus 7 tablet it seems ridiculously large. At what point is it a tablet that makes calls and not a phone?

Nexus Player is very interesting though - but again it all depends on the price which they haven't mentioned.

Edit:

As people below have pointed out they changed the page to include the Nexus 4 after my post.

ismavis• 12 years ago

Nexus 6 is $650 for 32GB.

http://motorola-blog.blogspot.com/2014/10/nexus-6-from-googl...

k-mcgrady4• 12 years ago

Thanks. Can't see the Nexus 5 US price so basing this off the UK price. Looks like between $200-300 extra.

mscrivo• 12 years ago

What have they done? They've killed the single biggest feature of the nexus program, getting a great phone for an affordable off-contract price.

Dylan168073• 12 years ago

More importantly they were still selling it less than a year ago.

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

Just over a year ago, actually. It disappeared from the Play Store in September 2013.

krschultz2• 12 years ago

It's all kind of absurd. I skipped the Nexus 5, but was surprised when they didn't release L Preview for the Nexus 4. If that trend holds, then whatever OS update they pre-release at Google I/O 2015 will only be available on the Nexus 6. Does that mean I have to buy a Nexus 6 as an Android developer even though I don't like the size?

izacus2• 12 years ago

Hmm, as an Android developer you pretty much HAVE to buy a few Samsungs, not Nexuses.

That is - Nexuses actually work and run new OS, while people out there you're developing for are using Samsungs with their buggy and broken firmware.

ZoFreX4• 12 years ago

The Nexus 4 has been nerfed since shortly after the Nexus 5 came out - just like the Galaxy Nexus was nerfed just after the Nexus 4 came out. Based on their history, a Nexus device needs to be replaced once its successor comes out, so it's not a big surprise (but still a shame) that the Nexus 4 won't support L.

swartkrans• 12 years ago

As an aside, I don't think you are using the word "nerf" correctly here. "nerf" is a gaming term that means turning a powerful weapon into basically a nerf gun. It means to make something cause less damage or make something less dangerous. I'm not sure how the Nexus phones were ever causing damage to anyone. I think the terms you want are "made obsolete" or "planned obsolescence".

ak217• 12 years ago

The Nexus 4 will be supported by Lollipop.

Galaxy Nexus was going to be supported by Android 4.2 (I was really annoyed that it wasn't!) but the fact that it's not has to do with TI refusing to update their closed-source drivers for their OMAP 4 chip to be compatible with the Linux kernel used in 4.2. By the time people figured out how to update them, Google had given up on providing support. I'm still pissed about that.

mandalar12• 12 years ago

They might have changed the page since your comment but this is on the page :

"Android 5.0 Lollipop, which comes on Nexus 6, Nexus 9 and Nexus Player, will also be available on Nexus 4, 5, 7, 10 and Google Play edition devices in the coming weeks."

Dylan168073• 12 years ago

They did. Well good then.

scragg• 12 years ago

Physically, the Nexus 7 is just over 2 inches (51.4mm) larger diagonally then the Nexus 6.

freehunter• 12 years ago

Am I missing something? The Nexus 4 certainly does appear to be supported.

Android 5.0 Lollipop, which comes on Nexus 6, Nexus 9 and Nexus Player, will also be available on Nexus 4, 5, 7, 10 and Google Play edition devices in the coming weeks.

nucleardog• 12 years ago

Regardless of being officially supported (which it is) it's still a popular phone still in use by a lot of developers.

You might have to wait another month for it to hit AOSP and some of the ROM developers to merge it in, but I generally count on a Cyanogenmod release within a month.

Touche• 12 years ago

This has happened for every single Nexus device, since the Nexus One. I don't know why people keep talking about the Nexus as somehow having fresh OS upgrades; they do not.

dabeeeenster• 12 years ago

https://plus.google.com/+MatiasDuarte/posts/haoy5nDv6yr

jarin• 12 years ago

Darn, I was hoping for Lemon Cakes.

avree2• 12 years ago

Awesome. I'm curious as to when the AOSP public repos will be updated to contain the release version of L.

jastanton• 12 years ago

6 hours of battery life for 15 minutes of charging? Wow.

aroman• 12 years ago

This seems like a misleading claim, based on their "24-hour battery life" claim, which is in fact 24 hours of cellular talk time, with Wi-Fi off.

From http://www.google.com/nexus/6/

Testing was conducted by Google using pre-production Nexus 6 devices and software. Talk time tests used default settings with Wi-Fi off and LTE on. Standby time tests used default settings with LTE on and Wi-Fi on. Wi-Fi internet tests had Airplane Mode on with Wi-Fi connected to a test access point, while loading three popular websites cached on a local server. The Nexus 6 loaded a page, waited 40 seconds, and then loaded a page from the next site. LTE internet tests had Wi-Fi off and LTE on, and used the same testing method as the Wi-Fi internet tests.

Edit: If you're going to downvote, please explain why.

slouch• 12 years ago

Charging is always fastest with airplane mode on, perhaps that's how they reached these numbers.

ToastyMallows• 12 years ago

I'm tried of companies doing this, they're all guilty of it. At least be honest about.

1 week battery life!*

*In airplane mode, no apps running and the screen was only turned on once a day

wldcordeiro2• 12 years ago

They're referring to that turbo charger (or whatever the name is) that can give you 6 hours worth of your battery charged in 15 minutes. The real battery life is reported as 24 hours, so it's saying that you can get your battery from 1% to 26% in fifteen minutes.

r00fus• 12 years ago

That doesn't seem very impressive - a 12W charger can do that for any of my smaller devices regardless of OS.

woobar• 12 years ago

Both battery claims come with interesting footnote:

Mixed use battery life claims are approximate and based on an average user profile developed and tested by Motorola that includes both usage and standby [1]

It means that there is a chance that your phone will be alive for 6 hours after just 15 minutes of charging (Battery must be substantially depleted [1]), if your usage/standby pattern is same as Motorola's.

[1] http://www.google.com/nexus/6/

4lejandrito• 12 years ago

If you read the whole article you'll find that the nexus 4 will be supported

UnoriginalGuy• 12 years ago

I am really curious to see if there will be noticeable "real world" battery life improvements. On paper they have done things which SHOULD give us improvements (ART, and "Project Volta" scheduling), however it remains to be seen just how well those theoreticals will translate into improvements on the ground.

I have read reports from people who have tried the developer preview, however their anecdotes vary so wildly (e.g. 10-60% improvements) it is hard to believe any of them. Need something more scientific than people's vague "I got more hours today than yesterday."

bergie• 12 years ago

Ars Technica reported pretty significant improvements http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/examining-project-vol...

on_and_off6• 12 years ago

It is very hard to measure battery life. Testing it on a buggy developer preview is entirely irrelevant. Volta and ART will improve battery life but they can't do anything for a shitty app that requests your location every second ..

ojiikun• 12 years ago

Speaking just as a developer updating code for L-devices, the new scheduling interface almost guarantees an improvement depending on how many apps that sync in the background you have installed.

The paradigm went from "wake up every 10 minutes, turn on the CPU, check for network, try to do stuff, if you fail, try again in 10 minutes, keep waking up the device" to "tell the device to do my stuff when next there is network and sufficient battery and the CPU is already on for the sake of running other tasks".

spindritf• 12 years ago

Motorola will also update their older phones to Lollipop. Including Moto X and G starting with the 1st gen.

http://motorola-blog.blogspot.com/2014/10/its-official-andro...

wldcordeiro2• 12 years ago

Most excellent! I just barely got a Moto X (2014) just a couple weeks ago and it's great to hear that it'll be coming my way soon.

microtonal2• 12 years ago

Terrific, both my wife and I have a Moto X. Previous upgrades to the Moto X (not carrier-bound) were also very quick. Not Nexus-quick, but still very timely.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

Just got a 2013 Moto G, and really curious to see if the 4x speed improvement ART can bring are frequent enough to matter. Also hope for stability, you know, like the battery bug.

eggoa• 12 years ago

A guest user mode is a great idea. It would be nice to be able to lend someone my phone without effectively handing them the keys to my entire life.

Too• 12 years ago

Android 4.4 already has this. Anyone know what's new in regards to this?

tonfa• 12 years ago

Wasn't available on phones iirc.

dotBen• 12 years ago

Wondering if Google will clarify the upgrade path for those of us with Android L side loaded onto our phones.

My guess is it will require a re-flash back to KitKat so that Lollipop can be auto-upgrade over the air. In which case I might as well get that going now...

izacus2• 12 years ago

I doubt there will be an OTA, you'll just have to flash the full "clean install" factory image as it becomes available. Probably factory reset the phone as well.

ChrisClark• 12 years ago

They probably aren't going to try to upgrade safely. All the latest Google apps that have updates, like Photos and Newsstand and Google+ have actually been broken and crash on the L Preview.

They are just treating it like a true dev preview, not treating it as a daily driver.

You will most likely have to flash from scratch.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

This is a better link:

https://android.com/versions/lollipop-5-0/

fakename5• 12 years ago

"Improved network selection logic so that your device connects only if there is a verified internet connection on Wi-Fi"

jfc, I can't believe this is just now being fixed. This has to be the most infuriatingly stupid thing about android. I don't have hopes of them adding the ability to intelligently switch from a weak wifi signal to a strong cell signal, but this is a step in the right direction. No more assuming I have no new emails/texts when I'm in an airport because my phone quietly joined a wifi network and is waiting for me to open a browser and log in.

Florin_Andrei3• 12 years ago

adding the ability to intelligently switch from a weak wifi signal to a strong cell signal

Yeah, it hangs on that tiny, unusable WiFi signal for dear life, even when it cannot move a single bit of data through it. Meanwhile, the GSM data channel lies there unused. :(

fakename5• 12 years ago

I live in a long apartment with thick walls, so there are lots of wifi dead zones. I'm constantly turning wifi on and off as I move from room to room.

leeoniya2• 12 years ago

quietly joined a wifi network

i would suggest not having your phone auto-connect to just any open wifi network, but that's just me.

fakename5• 12 years ago

Sometimes I will purposely log in to an airport's wifi network to use their connection. The next time I'm back in that airport, my phone remembers the network and automatically connects.

I guess I need to manually remove these one-off networks, but I don't think I should have to micromanage my phone like that.

pornel• 12 years ago

I don't know about L, but KitKat instantly "saves" every network you tap on, even if it's broken. I didn't find option to disable that (but then I'd worry whether it'd save passwords at all).

Florin_Andrei3• 12 years ago

It happens with my own WiFi access point at home, too.

cylinder• 12 years ago

If you login to attwifi (at starbucks and other public places), Android will save and then auto-connect to any SSID named attwifi.

fudged71• 12 years ago

It's a ridiculous hack, but here is what I do on Android:

Wi-Fi Matic saves the cell tower info when I successfully connect to an accesspoint, and turns on my Wi-Fi when I enter that area again. When I'm there, Wi-Fi Web Login replays a script that logs in to the captive portal webpage.

Great for travelling.

foldor• 12 years ago

+1 for Wi-Fi Web Login. It's a great app I used to log into the guest network at my work to bypass filters. It even detects when a portal expires your connection after X time and reconnects again.

olalonde• 12 years ago

+1. I always end up turning off my Wifi because of this and often forget to turn it back on when I'm home (which wastes my cellphone data).

zo1• 12 years ago

Samsung did their own enhancements to Android just for this problem. They have some sort of feature called "Smart network switch". The description says: "Automatically switch between wifi and mobile networks to maintain a stable internet connection.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

This! I made the mistake of ONE TIME using the xfinity wifi hot spot and suddenly my phone became severely crippled as it would randomly try to be on some hotspot (configured or not) with that SSID.

serve_yay• 12 years ago

Bummer. Is there no "forget this network"?

ZoFreX4• 12 years ago

I don't have hopes of them adding the ability to intelligently switch from a weak wifi signal to a strong cell signal, but this is a step in the right direction

Android (supposedly) already has that feature. From the about page for Jellybean 4.2[1]:

A new setting lets you stay on mobile data and avoid nearby Wi-Fi networks with poor connections.

Weirdly this seems to be off by default. In Wifi settings go to the more options drop-down and tap Advanced, and it's in that list. Give it a try!

[1] http://www.android.com/about/jelly-bean/

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

I had no idea this option existed, and like you I'm surprised this isn't the default.

Thanks for posting this, you may have just improved my Android experience by quite a lot (just enabled this, need time to see how well it really works) since this is something I've been constantly annoyed by and didn't realize this existed as an option despite being a heavy Android user since Eclair.

fakename5• 12 years ago

after my initial bitch-post, I noticed this setting as well. I turned it on, and will be really happy if this resolves my problem. weird that it's off by default.

Florin_Andrei3• 12 years ago

It's called Avoid poor connections, and yes, it's indeed off by default. :(

I'm gonna give it a try, thanks.

nradov• 12 years ago

It's a good feature, but I wish there was a way to disable it for certain WiFi networks. My Nikon camera can act as a WiFi access point so I can download images to my phone. But if I turn on that Android feature it continuously drops the camera WiFi connection because obviously there's no Internet connection available.

fakename5• 12 years ago

ok, I turned this on. unfortunately it's overzealous.

I work in a pretty cavernous studio where I never have trouble getting wifi, but there's no cell signal. With 'avoid poor connections' turned on, it drops my 2/3 bar wifi signal in favor of a nonexistent cell signal. I have to disable this feature to get any service.

kolev• 12 years ago

Based on over a month on Android L Preview, it's not working as well as advertised. Often I just drive by my home and my LTE connection drops although the connection is really not operational. I hope the final version fixes this as it's been years of frustration already!

bookwormAT• 12 years ago

"I can't believe this is just now being fixed."

I always cringe when I read a complaint like this. Every larger project has a long issue list, and it is perfectly normal that an issue that is super important to some ends up further down on the priority list of the team.

The Android team implemented a lot of issues and features over the last decade. Just because there is an issue that deserves fixing doesn't mean it is the most important task at hand.

obsurveyor• 12 years ago

As previewed at Google I/O, Lollipop is our largest, most ambitious release on Android with over 5,000 new APIs for developers.

As a developer not initiated to the Android platform, the second half of this sentence is a very scary thing to read.

k-mcgrady4• 12 years ago

iOS 8 included over 4,000. It's not really a big deal. There's stuff that's deprecated an replaced but won't be removed for several releases (and you'll get compiler warnings so you're aware), there's a tonne of stuff you'll never use, there are lots of API's for new features (iOS example: HealthKit), and then there are things which you'll come across from time to time that make your life a little easier.

on_and_off6• 12 years ago

As an Android dev, Lollipop is indeed a big release but not a 'throw everything you have and start over' style change.

Some things have been completely rewritten :

Notifications have been using the same expanding API since version 1, it has been strongly revamped. The RemoteControlClient (which manages the lockscreen and is used for some other things like communication with Chromecast) was one of my least favorite parts of the Notification code, it is being phased out and replaced by a new, simpler (and hopefully more reliable) one.

The ActionBar API (the bar of controls at the top of every android app) was initially based on the old menu API (from the time when we had menu buttons on Android). It was a very nice move to soften the menu button > actionbar transition but it is now adding unnecessary friction. Since the ActionBar has been redesigned, it was a very good opportunity to deprecate its API and replace it by a completely new one.

ListView (the widget that handles lists) is one of the oldest Android widgets. It has been conceived in an era where displaying a static list was all you wanted. It is a central piece of almost every app UI and it is comically inadequate. It is going to be replaced by RecyclerView, which take into account modern requirements on lists (adding, removing items, handling gestures, ...).

Many other changes are just additions. A better animation system, a tinting system for on screen elements, some new widgets, ... There are also some completely new APIs but many of these will only be used by a handful of developers (it is not every day that you need to convert the content of your screen to a PDF and print it).

JamesSwift• 12 years ago

RE: ListView

Are they providing first-party horizontal lists (i.e. something to compete with UICollectionViews)? Still waiting for an official Gallery replacement...

EDIT: Did the reasonable thing and actually looked it up myself [1,2]. Turns out they provide RecyclerView paired with a LinearlayoutManager to achieve arbitrary UI on top of a dataset. This is nearly identical to the iOS setup of UICollectionView with a UICollectionViewLayout (and LinearLayoutManager is == to UICollectionViewFlowLayout as far as I can tell).

  [1] - http://www.grokkingandroid.com/first-glance-androids-recyclerview/
  [2] - https://developer.android.com/preview/material/ui-widgets.html

ryandvm• 12 years ago

a.k.a. iOS 9

twobits• 12 years ago

Your chains are more golden now.

hayksaakian• 12 years ago

No SDK until the 17 though.

mtck• 12 years ago

"The songs, photos, apps, and even recent searches from one of your Android devices can be immediately enjoyed across all of your Android devices."

Catching up to Apple but I'd love to see this across laptops as an app or through Chrome.

chris-at• 12 years ago

Privacy isn't even mentioned in its features :(

https://android.com/versions/lollipop-5-0/

avree2• 12 years ago

"More ways to secure your device"

Siecje• 12 years ago

I would like to be able to view battery as a percent.

solrwnd• 12 years ago

Looks like no fine-grained control of app permissions, either dynamic/on-demand or manual. This approach (all or nothing) is one major issue that cripples Android usability for me. :(

vutekst• 12 years ago

This feature is one of the reasons I run CyanogenMod. You can drill down and toggle particular permissions for each app if you want, and set default policies for new apps.

hartzler• 12 years ago

I just can't install apps anymore. They all want everything. There is no reason for a todo list app to need my location, sms, camera, etc, etc... This needs to be fixed.

MichaelGG3• 12 years ago

Google does not want people taking over permissions and privacy. This is demonstrated by the deliberate design of the phone state permission. Any app should be able to query "is the user on a voice call", but Google wrapped that up in a "get my device serial, as well as phone numbers I call or call me".

Download a flashlight app, then call your cancer or fertility clinic? Awesome, now some random developer has that information.

josho2• 12 years ago

Just wow. I was considering making a switch from ios, but this reality just put me off until their next release.

Android 5.0 Lollipop

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