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Sony’s MDR-1000X<br />
headphones support<br />
LDAC wireless audio.<br />
accepts any number of audio and video<br />
tracks, as hardware allows.<br />
REDUCING BACKGROUND HOGGING<br />
Smartphones aren’t far off laptops and<br />
PCs in terms of hardware resources,<br />
particularly RAM, but you still only<br />
need a few misbehaving apps running<br />
in the background, hogging RAM or<br />
CPU cycles, for your phone to start<br />
feeling sluggish. Android O will now<br />
impose limits on apps running in the<br />
background — essentially, any app not<br />
meeting Android’s definition of<br />
‘foreground’ (for example, an important<br />
service function or activity visible to<br />
the user) will be classed as ‘background’.<br />
It’ll have a few minutes to continue<br />
doing ‘foreground’ tasks, but after that,<br />
it’ll be considered ‘idle’ and, in all but a<br />
few cases, the OS will halt the app’s<br />
background services.<br />
There are work-arounds, but this<br />
move only affects apps designed for<br />
or ‘targeting’ Android O (currently API<br />
Level ‘O’). If you’re an app developer and<br />
you target any lower API level, your<br />
apps won’t be affected, even if they’re<br />
running on an Android O device.<br />
MORE ART SPEED<br />
Google has been on the charge for extra<br />
performance for a while, offering up<br />
different combinations of its run-time<br />
The new Samsung Galaxy<br />
S8 could also be in line<br />
for an Android O update.<br />
code engines in recent Android releases.<br />
For example, Nougat/Android 7.x<br />
brought back Dalvik-like Just-In-Time<br />
(JIT) compilation in combination with<br />
Android Run-Time (ART) for extra zip.<br />
This time, the Android devs believe<br />
‘O’ can crank out even more speed,<br />
reportedly achieving as much as twice<br />
the performance on some benchmarks.<br />
We’ll wait until we see final code before<br />
testing it.<br />
TRYING OUT THE PREVIEW<br />
According to Google’s timeline, that<br />
final code is expected to be released<br />
sometime in ‘Q3’ (August–October)<br />
this year. In the meantime, Developer<br />
Preview 2 (DP2) should hit mid-May and<br />
DP3 in mid-<strong>June</strong>, by which time, all APIs<br />
will be locked down. DP4 will then land<br />
by mid-July, just ahead of the official<br />
launch.<br />
If you’re into extreme sports and don’t<br />
want to wait until August, you can try<br />
your hand at Android O right now with<br />
a Developer Preview. At time of writing,<br />
DP1 was available for a range of Google<br />
devices, including the Nexus 5X, 6P and<br />
Player, plus the Pixel, Pixel C and Pixel<br />
XL. An early Android O software<br />
development kit (SDK) is also available<br />
via the Android Studio 2.4 Preview<br />
‘Canary’ (alpha) integrated development<br />
environment (IDE), along with an<br />
Google’s general time<br />
frame for the release<br />
of Android O.<br />
Android O emulator, through the AVD<br />
Manager (tinyurl.com/pj3sovs).<br />
Just make sure that if you do try DP1<br />
on actual hardware, know first how<br />
to revert back to the previous OS —<br />
being the first preview, it’s meant for<br />
developers only and not intended<br />
for everyday use.<br />
WILL MY DEVICE GET ‘O’?<br />
Despite all the new features, this is<br />
the question most users are really<br />
interested in. Our golden rule-of-thumb<br />
when it comes to Android updates is<br />
‘never hold your breath’. The stream<br />
of previous Android releases still in<br />
the wild reads like a comet’s tail,<br />
a continuing sign that more devices<br />
miss out on updates than those<br />
receiving them.<br />
Less than 5% of all Android devices<br />
accessing the Google Play website in<br />
the week ending April 3 were running<br />
Nougat/Android 7.x. More than 60%<br />
of all devices were still on Lollipop/5.x<br />
or older. However, given Lollipop/5.0<br />
arrived back in November 2014, it’s<br />
possible this year could see renewed<br />
interest in new Android devices as<br />
two-year telco contracts expire.<br />
But bottom-line, if your device isn’t<br />
already running Nougat/7.x, we don’t<br />
hold out much hope of an Android O<br />
update. For Marshmallow/6.x devices,<br />
your best bet will likely be custom/<br />
community ROMs sometime after the<br />
final AOSP release drops (just be aware<br />
of the risks custom ROMs can present).<br />
Of course, there are always<br />
exceptions to every rule. The long-lived<br />
Samsung Galaxy S3, for example,<br />
simply refuses to die, with LineageOS<br />
custom Nougat/7.x updates currently<br />
available on a ‘nightly’ basis. But on<br />
the other hand, if you have a twoyear-old<br />
$99 online vanilla ‘special’,<br />
we’d probably just put it down and<br />
walk away.<br />
In the end, though, the whole update<br />
question could end up much simpler to<br />
decipher — if your device doesn’t have<br />
the supporting hardware for features<br />
like LDAC or aptX, device<br />
manufacturers may just skip the update<br />
idea, regardless of the OS its running.<br />
MORE TO COME...<br />
All of these features (and more) add up<br />
to another evolutionary step in the<br />
Android journey. The improvements<br />
to Bluetooth audio are likely to be the<br />
standout selling points, but Google still<br />
has some time before final feature<br />
lock-down, so there may be more to see<br />
yet. What will be equally as interesting<br />
to see are the new devices coming for<br />
Android O, but we’ll have a while to wait<br />
yet for those.<br />
www.apcmag.com 103
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