[ladyanita22]

The nearest linux has been from dominance is back in the glory days of Android when it was thought mobile would conquer everything. Now it's increasingly clear it is going to dominate only the mobile market, and even then the power uses of phones are extremely limited.

[pjmlp]

Except Linux isn't exposed to user space, and its syscalls aren't part of NDK stable APIs, so Android Next can use BSD, Fuchsia, NT, NuttX or whatever Google comes up with and very few would notice.

[ladyanita22]

And except Android is architecturally a shitshow that would never be able to compete against a proper OS like Windows or macOS.

[pjmlp]

In that regard the only thing I appreciate is their approach to securing native code.

As for everything else, kind of agree.

10 years and still a broken NDK experience, Java stuck on a pseudo Java 8 subset, every IO the best practices get rebooted, Vulkan requires cloning github repos, already went through 3 animation frameworks, JetPack Composer still has no idea how to match existing GUI tooling, ....

[lern_too_spel]

The developer experience is a horror show, and the people who control it have been making head-scratching decisions for years (you forgot to mention releasing libraries via SDK manager and git repos long after switching the recommended build system to Gradle and encouraging people to use Maven repos for dependencies), but that doesn't mean the OS architecture isn't sensible. Especially for current app-consuming use cases, the security model makes far more sense than MacOS's security model.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, I didn't want to list everything.

[ladyanita22]

And don't even mention drivers. Lack of stable ABI is why Android gets 2 years of updates vs. how many in Apple and Windows?

[pjmlp]

Project Treble and Modular System Components are that stable ABI, but it doesn't help if Google doesn't put on the Play Store license agreements that OEMs are obliged to push updates.

https://source.android.com/devices/architecture