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by jmholla 1082 days ago
I don't think the fact that Google has two popular OSes with telemetry means that telemetry makes them better OSes. For Android, their only real competitor is iOS. Their big advantage there is cost and the reason there isn't really another competitor is the difficulty of creating an OS which requires a number of resources. For ChromeOS, the situation is similar with regards to the time to create an OS. I think there, their main competitors are small Linux distributions, but, in addition to manpower, Google has the money to procure and sell laptops with their software already on them at scale. So, I'm not convinced telemetry is actually creating a better product, their products happen to have telemetry.
1 comments

The is HN so you are allowed to hold forth out of pure ignorance, if you want to. Android-wide and ChromeOS-wide profiling produce binaries including the Linux kernel that are peak-optimized for actual conditions in the field and real use cases. They ship the only profile-optimized Linux kernels you can get from any distribution. It is a demonstrably better product through telemetry.
Got a link to any information on this, especially the collection of the profile information from user's devices? The only reference I can see to PGO on android is the support they have for a more traditional flow (create special instrumented binary, run a 'representative' workload or two, get profile data for PGO). It would be especially interesting if there's any info on how much of a performance improvement this yielded.
> It is a demonstrably better product through telemetry.

Demonstrable, perhaps; but to actually demonstrate it, they'd have to share their telemetry results.

Also, demonstrably better than what? Demonstrably better than a Google-free kernel with no telemetry? How can you demonstrate that?