Google has the money, why it doesn't reinvent Android Kernal System?

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maverick786us

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First of all this isn't an apple appreciation thread. I own iPhone 12 Pro Max and a Galaxy Note 10 Lite. Both have the latest state of the art Mobile hardware.

But from my years of experience I found iOS more polished and smooth, I've been using iPhone since the days of 6s plus and even in the older devices with mediocre hardware its smooth and polished.

Don't get me wrong I like both the mobile operating system. When I use my Note 10 Lite which has Octa - Core processor and 8GB RAM i find it bit buggy and miss the smooth of iOS, no doubt the UI, Graphic are great.

I somehow feel that Android was designed in LINUX as opposed to UNIX in case of iOS and the fact that these apps are made in JAVA which need more RAM to clear garbage collection. Once or twice a week I have to restart my device.

Google has the money, manpower and infrastructure, why don't they redesign Androids Kernal in UNIX to make it smooth, polished and efficient like iOS?
 
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I think your premises are all wrong.

Google has actually created their own OS and kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia and is working on an Android Runtime for it.
Google has made lots of contributions to the Linux kernel that implement major features used by Android, such as Wakelocks.
That Android apps are often written in Java/Kotlin is unrelated to the kernel, and also unrelated to the problem that some devices need to be restarted occasionally. Also you can write native apps.
Then Android allows vendors to implement their own UI. Samsung chose to make TouchWiz followed by One UI that are very feature rich, but also slow and a resource hog. So the lack of smoothness is more a Samsung problem than an Android problem. You can buy phones that have pure Android and they will work well even on less capable hardware.
 
Google Fuchsia

But really, that iOS uses a kernel long-ago derived from BSD and Android uses one forked from Linux is irrelevant. Both are heavily modified and optimized to within an inch of their lives.

Apple has an advantage in that the complete package is developed in-house. The kernel, GPU, driver, hardware, etc. teams can all come together and create an optimized product.

Android phones, on the other hand, are at the mercy of whatever Qualcomm, etc. put together. And most of their effort on drivers seems to be "eh, good enough, we only have to barely support it for a couple years until we can force users to upgrade".
 
chithanh said:
I think your premises are all wrong.

Google has actually created their own OS and kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia and is working on an Android Runtime for it.
Google has made lots of contributions to the Linux kernel that implement major features used by Android, such as Wakelocks.
That Android apps are often written in Java/Kotlin is unrelated to the kernel, and also unrelated to the problem that some devices need to be restarted occasionally. Also you can write native apps.
Then Android allows vendors to implement their own UI. Samsung chose to make TouchWiz followed by One UI that are very feature rich, but also slow and a resource hog. So the lack of smoothness is more a Samsung problem than an Android problem. You can buy phones that have pure Android and they will work well even on less capable hardware.
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I haven't used Pixel smartphones but it is that smooth and polished like iOS. With the case of Pixel the hardware, software and hardware drivers are all created by Google
 
maverick786us said:
I haven't used Pixel smartphones but it is that smooth and polished like iOS. With the case of Pixel the hardware, software and hardware drivers are all created by Google
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Nope. Huge chunks come from Qualcomm (hardware drivers for GPU, modem, WiFi/BT, USB, user input, battery/power management, etc.).

This may or may not change with the "in-house" CPU that the Pixel 6 is supposed to contain.
 
Hmm... Apple too was using Intel CPUs in its Mac and iOS devices before moving on to M1 and A12 Bionics
 
chithanh said:
I think your premises are all wrong.

Google has actually created their own OS and kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia and is working on an Android Runtime for it.
Google has made lots of contributions to the Linux kernel that implement major features used by Android, such as Wakelocks.
That Android apps are often written in Java/Kotlin is unrelated to the kernel, and also unrelated to the problem that some devices need to be restarted occasionally. Also you can write native apps.
Then Android allows vendors to implement their own UI. Samsung chose to make TouchWiz followed by One UI that are very feature rich, but also slow and a resource hog. So the lack of smoothness is more a Samsung problem than an Android problem. You can buy phones that have pure Android and they will work well even on less capable hardware.
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Well maybe its just me, if I don't count restarting the device, while scrolling, I can feel that jerking, though its not a big deal in my daily tasks, but creates a negative impression
Samsung's home screen and overall is bit similar to iOS, talking about not having hardware or driver of their own, before my first iPhone, that was 6s plus in 2016, I was a Nokia user, I had Lumia 900, 920 and 950, those smartphones had Windows Phone 7 and 8 operating systems, those smartphones were smooth like any other iOS devices.
 
As someone mentioned Apple has the advantage of never having to support hardware they didn't put together.
Both the Unix and Linux kernels are actually very much the same in their implementations. Over the last 20 years any clever bit of code that found its way into one code base got pulled into the other. (and in general that was Linux->Unix both as Linux has much more ongoing development but also because the Unix licensing means you can't just pull Unix code into the Linux code base, nor do the Unix companies even need to detail the workings of their tweaks. Still anything major was "white roomed" into Linux... and frankly there isn't much new under the sun. Fusia if its faster then Linux is so mostly as there is no legacy bits and no concern for older hardware ect. And I believe its a micro kernel but that's another topic)
My point... in general both *nix kernels perform very close to each other in all theoretical and practical ways.

The advantage to using Unix... for Apple. They don't have to open source anything... Apple doesn't want to share any specific tweaks with everyone... aslo Apple has always fought cloners and closed source makes that easy to control. (Apple shares their kernel work from mobile with MacOS... so also remember they have 20 years of experience at this point with a Unix kernel)

The reason why Google HAS to use Linux (and the dreams of Fuscia are probably never going beyond IOT stuff) is third party hardware. There are frankly 1,000s of hardware manufactures creating hardware that just works with the Linux kernel. Google doesn't have to make sure 20 different touch screen manufacturers are supplying them with proper code to implement into a Fusia driver system. Heck they don't even have to be the bad guy that says NO your code is ugly and itsn't going into our beautiful kernel try again next cycle. (Linus gets to do that for them). If Google does decide to use Fusia for real in Android... Google has to hire a bunch more developers whos only jobs will be to police third party hardware drivers for inclusion in the kernel. (or into the system anyway as I believe its a micro kernel) There is no way they will do as good a job as the Linux kernel team already does. (and it costs Google next to nothing as the entire industry supports the Linux foundation financially).

Bottom line Apple is the only company that can really get with doing things the way they do. The only third party drivers they have to worry about are for external peripheral type stuff. And even in those cases Apple doesn't much have to worry anymore. Apple has always been a big proponent of standards for those things for a reason. As an example without Apple USB audio wouldn't be what it is right now. Basically any modern external audio device will just work when you plug it into an Apple cause its using a standard USB audio spec not a custom driver. This has benifited windows as well... anyone into audio recording can attest windows drivers for such things can be a nightmare, although its much better the past decade or so since MFGs started supporting the basic standard. (thanks to Apple) Now windows drivers are more about bypassing windows terrible audio systems latency issues ect.
 
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Oh, and one "advantage" Apple had/has that hasn't yet been mentioned: Steve Jobs breathing down everyone's neck to get it right or get their ass kicked.

He's gone now, of course, but that legacy still lives on I believe.
 
Android UI isn't slow and janky because of the kernel or really because of the vast hardware ecosystem except maybe the low end stuff. It's slow because the system UI toolkit is slow, just things like instanciating a handful of widgets takes double digit ms, and you have to make them on the UI thread; you can't create them on a different thread and then add them to the UI on the UI thread, which would at least help a bit with smoothness. I think you really get better performance making everything a webview, which is derpy.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
Oh, and one "advantage" Apple had/has that hasn't yet been mentioned: Steve Jobs breathing down everyone's neck to get it right or get their ass kicked.

He's gone now, of course, but that legacy still lives on I believe.
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His legacy lived on for a while, nowadays MacOS has become just another buggy OS. iPhones still work pretty flawlessly at least.
 
toast0 said:
Android UI isn't slow and janky because of the kernel or really because of the vast hardware ecosystem except maybe the low end stuff. It's slow because the system UI toolkit is slow, just things like instanciating a handful of widgets takes double digit ms, and you have to make them on the UI thread; you can't create them on a different thread and then add them to the UI on the UI thread, which would at least help a bit with smoothness. I think you really get better performance making everything a webview, which is derpy.
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Seriously Google has the money, the infrastructure and man power, they cannot resolve that system toolkit issue? I am not saying that few ms lag is an issue for me or it would affect my day to day activities or tasks, its just looks bad, and buggy. I like both the mobile OS and being a consumer I would prefer competition instead of one OS monopolizing the whole world
 
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B00nie said:
His legacy lived on for a while, nowadays MacOS has become just another buggy OS. iPhones still work pretty flawlessly at least.
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And WatchOS too. I remember when first generation Apple watch came, its hardware was 10 generations old, but Apple did a great job with WatchOS with hardware limitation. WatchOS 2 had the same hardware, Google did a better job with Wear OS, compared to smartphones. It looks smooth and polished.
 
There is no payoff for The Goggles to do this. They already have your money.

the only people who would notice this are hardcore gamers like you, but everyone else can game just fine on existing "super slowness."
 
maverick786us said:
Seriously Google has the money, the infrastructure and man power, they cannot resolve that system toolkit issue? I am not saying that few ms lag is an issue for me or it would affect my day to day activities or tasks, its just looks bad, and buggy. I like both the mobile OS and being a consumer I would prefer competition instead of one OS monopolizing the whole world
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How do you get promoted at Google by fixing the toolkit to not suck? Better to work on a new messenger.
 
My Android UI is just as smooth and free flowing as any iOS based device - It's been the case for about five years now.
 
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