It amuses me how banks are so anal about the environment their apps run in, but I can open my bank in any browser with god-knows-what plugins installed on whatever OS of my choosing and just because I’m using a browser suddenly it’s totally fine and meets all security requirements.

I don’t like the feature bundling. If there’s a way to pick and choose the features I want, I’ll be happy. We’ll see how this gets implemented on real devices.

I get to spend a surprising amount of time reading and writing assembly. I consider myself so lucky to be able to do this, and it’s true that after enough time you start seeing through it. The human mind is excellent at finding and seeing patterns. Code is no exception. It’s just another kind of data. Even the different compilers have their own flavor after a while.

Curious to me that you began in Basic; my experience is that people continue to see their first language in other languages for some time, and the best reverse engineers I’ve met usually start with something unusual. My hypothesis is that when you start in a weird place, it brings all others closer together so that they appear not so different from each other. The distance between the top of the mountain of code and the deepest valley of flat data doesn’t seem so great if you start with, say, Lisp and you never considered that lists weren’t both code and data.

I come from Matlab, and to this day I can’t see memory as anything but matrices.

I am often working as reverse engineer professionally and I also feel that mindset is half the battle–a willingness to see everything as data and to look inside to see what is there. Like digital spelunking.

Google can already push apps to your phone at will via their remote installation service. How does this create or open a backdoor?

Better late than never. We shouldn’t strive to produce garbage, and that’s exactly what phones with less internal storage are made to be.

Compiled isn’t a property of a language but it describes the implementation. You can compile Python for example to native code using Cython, but it will need a Python runtime that is not much less work than running the code through the interpreter. There are C interpreters. Further, Java is compiled to native code and is being used in this fashion right now. You can also ship native C, C++, or Go binaries by using the Android Native Development Kit and that’s exactly what most Android games do for performance.

Should Android not have started with Java? Even looking back, it’s hard to say. Java helped Android get started quickly using a language many developers already knew how to use. We might have been discussing something other than Android if that wasn’t the case. I cannot know.

There are CPU and Android version differences, but it’s not that hard a problem to solve. On-device bytecode->native compilation long struck me as a bit of a silly hack. Surely Google can cache build products.

PWA rant incoming.

The context of your question reminds me of why I had to leave app development – it’s a race to the technological bottom. It’s a real damn shame that PWAs work so well because it points to distribution and consumer reach to be the real limiting factors in writing a great application rather than infrastructure and code. It shouldn’t have to be this way, but it is because we don’t want to write an app for every platform separately. However, when we do this, we lose something and that is the vision for how the OS developer intended for applications to operate and interact with the rest of the system. It’s a gap-filling technology that makes up for the lack of consistency between platforms that just never sat very well with me. It’s something that shouldn’t need to exist, but it does to fill an important role that could be designed out of an ideal system.

Rant over. Think I will label this as a rant at the beginning of the comment before wasting readers’ time.

We need Android because at some point an app needs to interact with the real system. This could be through a library or some kind of native plugin. Sure, we could accept it’s proprietary all the way down in the system, but that would be a dark world to live in, indeed. We could live without it, but we should care.

Golden parachute primed and ready to bail, sir!

Totally get your vibe. I don’t want AI BS, and it’s a huge waste of my memory and battery. Keep it simple and stupid, please.

I think the downside is one of consent. There’s no way to categorically indicate that you don’t want to participate in the play protect program.

This is an update to the standard, right? No actual software support, so we still don’t have it. Is that correct?

It is Linux, but with a bunch of non-free software on top of it.

It’s a problem with the business in general. As an employee, you’re not rewarded for good practices and maintaining systems. You’re rewarded for new ideas, which sounds good on paper, but creates a massive motivation to throw everything out and start over each year. Google can’t commit to anything because of that culture problem.

It’s reflected in their products, their hardware, how they treat developers, and so on.

I’m not really sure that the article title matches the content. It looks like some great improvements in game development, but I’m missing the part where this is specific to porting PC games. Maybe I missed it in the article.

Carriers do not have your best interest in mind. At least smartphone vendors are closer to the end user. Carriers figure you’ll have to buy from someone and have a long and colorful history of disregarding the consumer.

The technology as it is used today isn’t ready. It’s half-baked, and many of its features aren’t fully or properly deployed. I think we’ll get there eventually, but carriers are known for stifling technology for decades being on the wrong side of history. Who thought it was a smart idea to give carriers more control?

Look at RCS, and look at how Apple more or less has to force carriers to comply to get updates to users in a reasonable timeframe.

Smartphone vendors need to strong arm carriers into compliance. They’re happy to do nothing and collect rents in perpetuity.

A phone really, REALLY should not talk to USB devices while locked or at least have that disabled by default unless the user needs it.

Honestly, a really smart use of AI given that it’s being used to generate many of the scams in the first place, and there are many elderly that use smart phones. Just give people the ability to turn it off so they’re only scanning your data with consent.