Command, Control, and Optionally conquer the Alternatives

In some ways it may be a touch ironic. For years, I used an Android tablet docked to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard as a workstation; quite happily in fact. Puttering around with iPadOS my only real beef versus doing the same with Android is the keys.

Having spent most of my life around PC based systems, I’m naturally used to the shortcuts on a PC. Such as using control plus left and right to move the cursor a word at a time. On iPad these are more like home/end keys because you use option + left and right to move the cursor a word at a time.

Further complicating the fact is that some familiar shortcuts are control + thing while others are command + thing. For example command + W to close a tab but the familiar control + tab to change tabs. Basically pay back for having owned many a PC but never a Mac, lol.

In terms of keyboard and mouse support the only difference today is that iPadOS sports the same type of mouse based text selection as a PC or Mac. Android and the initial version of iPadOS had simply used it like a finger substitute, and more kludgy in iPadOS’s case. Aside from that I haven’t really had much difference in experience.

One of the notable distinctions as a user however is the software.

Modern iPadOS sports a version of Safari that is as good as Chrome or Edge on my PCs. My Androids on the other hand, being relegated to Chrome was always a bitter existence even if the stability leveled off with the years — and often keyboard/mouse operation in Chrome made my eyes roll out of their fucking sockets at the silly. So let’s just say at web browsers, iPad’s Safari beats Chrome for Android.

For most users I’d call that a win. Most people I know have a heavy slant towards web apps, and thus their connection to the rise of Chrome. In some cases, clutching Firefox like a gunnut and their AR-15s. So the result is Safari doesn’t piss me off, but I’m still one to prefer an app over a browser if you do any kind of decent job at it.

By contrast iPadOS sucks as a terminal client. Networking limitations basically murder any chance of being able to use SSH and multitasking; spend too long away and the connection will be force killed. By contrast in Android land the only real issue with SSH clients I tended to have was the poor copy/paste experiences. Stuff like VNC equally suck on both, but is less multitask friendly on iPad.

For me that’s kind of a negative. 90% of my interest in PCs revolve around command line environment or 3D graphics environments. But given my shift back to laptops for the heavy lifting that’s not been to terrible.

That’s to say, my move from a Chromebook to a Latitude had more to do with Celeron vs Core i5 than it did at using Android apps for terminal work. Likewise, my move from Android tablet to Android apps on a Chromebook was basically generated by Samsung omitted video output on my last tablet.

Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development

Forking and building off Android is what I would call the natural response for Huawei’s situation. And pretty much as long as you respect the open source license agreements and such, nothing is wrong with that. The ability to do so is one of the best aspects of Android; the going it without the Google add ons one of the reasons fewer people do that with actual phones.

Ron kind of says it neat here:

Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say "HarmonyOS is a fork of Android" instead of "HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android." Don't call HarmonyOS "all-new" when pretty much the opposite is true.

Where the real ire of the story lay, and perhaps justly so. But the conclusion towards the end of the article also makes sense. Inside China the Google’less Android idea works, as an international product not so much.

Here’s why everyone should own a cheap Android tablet

An interesting if unusual line of reasoning for a site full of nerds and shifting attention spans.

Tablets are often more natural to repurpose than other computing devices. Phones are often too damned small or the only size you need. Laptops are often too damned big, or all you really want is the keyboard input. Tablets strike an excellent size between being so compact you can Velcro it to the wall, and being large enough to prevent and interact with globs of data like videos and web pages.

Kitchens, bathrooms, garages, craft rooms, head boards, et.al. often have space as a premium. If not at first then eventually, lol. If money grew on trees instead of being made from trees and tears, I’d probably have a dedicated tablet just for scribbling notes.

One of the open questions I’ve had since my Tab S3 -> iPad Pro conversion is what do I want to do with Scarlett. The cracked screen works fine most of the time, but I’d largely prefer to avoid putting it in a position where fluids and cleaning are regular needs. The old HDX7 has principally become a clock now that it’s long form reading duties have migrated to a conventional Kindle.

Currently it resides near the charger cluster of /dev/headboard. Which has shown promising possibilities as an electronic picture frame or clock in either room. Mounting it on a kitchen wall or the side of my refrigerator would readily solve the problem that I’ll need to update my grocery list for something, but don’t have the time to leave my kitchen to go get a phone or tablet. There’s also the perk that the S-Pen still works pretty well as long as you don’t rest your hand too heavily on the screen, or need fine lines near the cracked part.

Signs that this iPhone thing is going to workout:

• Use of three and four letter expletives to describe messaging from my phone is down by 90%, effectively now at the level of autocorrect.
• Use of same to describe messaging from my tablet is now down 70%, and is no longer filled with pain and agony whenever I do more than type.
• I haven’t felt the urge to break the damned thing.

Part of the value here also lay in the use cases. Typically my tablet screen on time can be measured in hours per day. More if I’m using it, less if I’m mesmerized by some video game or book or Netflix or whatever. By contrast my phone screen on time can probably be measured in tens of minutes per day, unless someone sends me a lot of text messages in the middle of the night.

Which is a pretty stark contrast to years past, where I used my phone pretty significantly. Over the past five years or so, Android’s evolution and my usage patterns basically killed my phone use in favor of tablet use the rest of the way. While the transition to iPadOS was rather rocky, given my heavy demands in tablet: the transition to iOS has mostly been trivial.

You could say that my life around Android largely caused me to bypass the long ass wait for decency in iOS features, after eons of going “Huh, how the frak have people lived without that all these years?” whenever a new iOS release happens. Likewise the tablet use killing phone use, basically means I don’t give a frak. Jelly Bean was still a thing when I used my phone heavy enough to care as much about my phone, as my tablet keeping pace with my computing needs. So by now, iOS easily handles my demands upon a phone and mostly fits my demands upon a tablet or desktop.

Sigh. Here’s to hoping someday Google returns to producing software that I can depend on instead of software prone to pissing me off more often than not.

Google’s solution to the end of Hangouts is Messages. My solution to this problem has been, “Screw that”.

For the majority of my use case my SMS roll through my tablet. A process that Hangouts, as meh as a chat app is it has always been: handled well. In the years prior, I had relied on a Bluetooth connection between my Android phone and tablet to make the magic happen. In the post Hangouts world, I pretty much just relied on its integration.

Google Fi and Hangouts started the GTFO and use Messages push a week or two ago. Since Hangouts ends in January, I decided to give it a go and see how good the results would be. Well, an iPhone SE is how well that experiment went.

Using the web version on my tablet shifts from how Meh the current iteration of Hangouts is to “And why the frak am I using this?”. I figured, at least, it had to be worth while on my phone. Whether it’s the natural way it works, or an aspect of Google Fi: Messages sucks ass on my Moto X4. I dislike using the web version; I despise using the Android version. Even more so where the combination of web + phone often leads me to to using multiple profanities when the phone eventually catches up.

Originally, I had assumed that I would be using android messages when I upgraded from my old Galaxy S5 to the Moto X4. But most messages arriving through Hangouts rather than that, pretty much lead to me ignoring it. Not broke, don’t care. Well, at least for a few more years at that time.

My primary computer when I’m not doing real work is a tablet. Many of the Android tablets I’ve used ended up full blown keyboard/mouse/monitor driven workstations on top of being my general purpose tablet. Thus my phone doesn’t really see a lot of use.

Typically I use my phone when:

• Checking off my shopping list at the grocery store.
• I’ve gone to bed, and it’s easier to reach for my phone than my tablet to answer messages or read Wikipedia with one eye open.
• I’m standing in the checkout line at the grocery store.
• Waiting on food at the microwave at work.
• Suddenly need a calculator or a stop watch, and other things that were cool on a wristwatch when I was a kid.
• The rare times I actually want a one hand device more than a better device.
• The few times I rely on Maps to make sure I don’t take a wrong turn.
• The every few years I’m driving out of range of my favorite radio tower, and choose to jack a playlist into my car’s head unit.

In effect this means my phone represents 10 - 15 % of my non-productivity minded computing, and aside from answering messages in the middle of the night: I’m usually found on my tablet or I’m occupied and not available. Since I’m usually using a tablet, my phone’s data use represents an average of up to a hundred megabytes of cellular data. Drastically down from the years where I averaged several gigabytes.

Apple’s iMessage doesn’t really interest me. But it does two things for me. It fixes the suck-ass experience of using my iPad Pro with Google’s new plan for my Messages, and it makes me not want to flip my phone out a window whenever I wait for messages to sync back up 🤣.

Thus Bean Sprout has been retired in favor of Benimaru. So named because the Project (RED) design reminds me of Rimiru’s commander in chief in TenSura.

 Surface Duo postures: Every bend and fold you need to know

For some years, I’ve thought it would probably be awesome sauce if you took two tablets and put them in a book like case side by side, and made some kind of software pipe between them for opening apps and sharing via intents.

Microsoft’s Surface Duo definitely represents something much more complete and natural. And sadly just as expensive, or more. But it’s an actual product you can sell your left nut or right tit for. So there is that 🤣.

I would love to see more devices like this. Both in the Duo’s size that can bridge between a phone and a tablet, and something closer to a tablet than a phone.

 Tested: How much does Bluetooth actually drain your phone battery?

And this is pretty much why for the last decade I’ve had virtually zero fucks to give about Bluetooth draining my phone’s battery. The difference tends to be limited if your device doesn’t suck.

Unless you’re optimizing for the worst case scenario: like fifteen minutes of phone charge is going to make the difference between getting home and sleeping at the airport kind of scenario. Pressuring you actually use it for something: it’s simply more bother to diddle Bluetooth than to charge normally.

Which also reminds me of why I use a Bluetooth speaker at work instead of my tablet’s speakers. For comparable volume blasting my tablet’s four speakers all day sucks down more charge than running the Bluetooth speaker.

Rather the real train to turn off Bluetooth IMHO is because you’re not using it more than a handful of times a year, or to limit your exposure to some one in a ten million asshats trying to spam you with pairing requests, lol

The other day, I decided to plug in my old Thor model HDX7, since I couldn't remember the last time I had bothered to charge it. Was surprised to find it with 6% remaining. But, my relationship with it regarding battery life has been kind of like the Energizer Bunny commercials with "Going, and going, and going"; or whatever it is they use as a slogan. I don't think I ever managed to really ding its battery, aside from leaving it idle for a couple weeks.

Extra surprising: the last update it got for Fire OS was 4.5.5.3 installed February, 2019.

That's really not bad for a device I got free from a Dolby developer raffle. Still running a form of Android 4.4/K, but considering the device came out around 2013, and had internals on par with the Nexus of the day—I'd say the little thang has faired pretty well.

I suppose one of these days, I should probably finish turning it into a digital picture frame, or something.

Chrome OS has stalled out
https://flip.it/ung6rA

Personally, I’ve come to have mixed feelings about Chromebooks but that mostly owes to a mixture of my own tastes and Google’s performance.

Pretty much if you’re happy to live in a full screen browser session, or can’t remember the last time you dragged anything other than a browser window around—Chrome OS is for you, and the appliance factor is a win. Just buy a better model with a better processor than average.

By contrast I’d like me, your interest is largely in an Android powered laptop: you will be disappointed or suffer the same slings and arrows that iOS users do. That is to say things work pretty well but you must avert your eyes from the problems more often than you should have to.

Android actually works pretty well with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. I’ve done that a crap fuck ton since Honeycomb. Chromebooks offer an easier path to the docked experience, and a tremendously easier path to a laptop style form factor.

But by in large Android on my Chromebook has been far more buggy and glitchy than any Android tablet that I’ve ever connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard; and I’ve done that to more than a few! The flip side is that the hardware strain of running Android apps tends to be less than heavy, complicated web applications.

So there are times that a cheaper Chromebook running an Android app can be more ideal than throwing the web app at the same hardware, or more appealing than buying a Chromebook that has a Core M or i series processor instead of dinky Celeron and Pentium processors.

Combined with the limited choices for high end Android tablets, not to mention ones with a true hardware stylus, my Android experience on my Chromebook is chunk of why I decided to buy an iPad Pro—because a Chome OS tablet won’t replace my Android tablet the way it could most people’s Windows beater.

This is what happens when you cross a tablet with a 1980s phone
https://www.techradar.com/news/this-is-what-happens-when-you-cross-a-tablet-with-a-1980s-phone

Kinda instantly snickered slash rolled on floor cackling as I saw this. Apparently, being a real product it sounds like the only thing missing is the ability to plug it into a phone jack.

Surface reveals new holiday lineup and introduces a new category of dual-screen devices built for mobile productivity.

Yippee ki yay, Surface!

The refreshes of the existing stuff are somewhat less exciting; I might care more if the regular laptop can drive a eGPU over Thunderbolt, otherwise it’s mostly iterative goodness.

Far, far more interesting to me is the Neo and the Duo.

Surface Neo is the device I’ve long wanted to see someone build, and have a snow balls chance of not screwing up the productivity side of the software. The keyboard trick, is where I shout, “Fuck, yeah!”. Pretty much it matches up with the oh so wish it becomes a product, rumors from earlier this year.

Duo on the other hand is a long overdue device IMHO. Thanks to how Nadella era Microsoft has played out, I’ve been kinda wanting to see a Microsoft based Android device. It might not be as technologically innovative  as something like the Galaxy Fold, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Behind the Scenes: Improving the Tag Experience for Evernote on Mobile

Kinda like where this is going. With my switch from Android to iOS, tags suddenly become less part of the pie rather than one of the largest pieces.

As a 90% interface, I find that the main win for Evernote is the raw performance the iPad begins to the table. Instead of sighing and waiting, it’s more like waiting for animations to finish than waiting on data to load. But beyond that I’d say it feels a bit lack luster, like it takes the worst of the Android UI and glosses it over with iOS conventions.

On the flip side they make it easier to print or export notes outside the app (yippee ki yay) and you can do some fancy formatting by entering a set of symbols that auto convert to rich text stuff, that I don’t think is supported on Android.

So yes, improvements are welcomed 😊

Annoying differences in culture, or slow points of progress.

Android land:

1. Copy files over network to Pictures/Wall Papers
2. Launch set wall paper thingy.

iOS land:

1. Copy files over...fuck that's slow.
2. Copy files over USB...gah still slow.
3. Well fuck.
4. Okay, Photos has no idea of how to import from my USB drive.
5. Jack in to desktop.
6. Launch iTunes.
7. How the fuck do you make this music player push files to applications again?
8. Clicks little iPad icon that's not the obvious one.
9. Where the heck is it?
10. Google it and find directions that are out of date.
11. Screw it. *click Photos*, *drag and drop shit*. Nope that don't work either.
12. Files -> On My iPad -> Wall Papers/.... -> share -> save image.
13. Yeah, fuck if I'm doing that ~1,700 more times!
14. Launch set wall paper thingy.

That's just the short version of things I tried, being a stranger in a foreign land. Of my various attempts it's hard to decide if I feel more trapped by the '90s or the '00s. So let's just say it's unlikely I will bother to change my iPad's wall papers very often (tm).

Also while I give kudos for being able to select multiple files and actually share them, *cough* save to the photos app, I would not recommend trying to select several hundred at a time and then tap share. You'll just end up swiping the process away a few times.

Android's nature of making defined shared places to stuff shit, and API hooks for Applications to resolve those is pretty intuitive to a nerd like me. Likewise the idea of making an application's private files not usable dickable, rather attractive for many reasons.

iTunes, if you can find the right screen, pretty much lets you explore an what private files an application choose to allow or means of importing/exporting things they (probably) think of as a database. Which owes to the tradition of not having any real concept of shared storage that multiple applications can monitor. But it's better than not being able to touch anything at all.

The only real forgiveness I have for these concepts, is once upon a time the bane of my existence was the amount of people that couldn't double click a file after downloading it from a web page. Countless games were held up for hours because of the challenge of launching a map installer. I had kind of came to grips with the concept of a file somewhere between DOS 3 and Windows 98. So as counter intuitive as something like iTunes feels to me versus a file system, I do recognize if you can't tell the difference between a mouse and a floppy disk, it's probably easier to use iTunes' model.

Or as I like to remember, remove choices, because most of us give up faster than I do 8=).

I find it kinda curious how things work.

Traditionally, if you had a PC or a Mac: you operated on blind trust. Well, almost blind trust if you had faith in antivirus software. But by in large the architecture of these systems let your software do anything you can, so there isn't a gap between you uploading a file to Google Drive and some random time-waster uploading your super-secret.docx file to someone else's server. That's just how far the security architecture got by the time Unix and NT came into existence.

More modern platforms that rose up around touch screened phones aim for tighter security. Typically applications get strongly isolated from each other instead of being peers on par with the user, and restrictive access to your hardware instead of equal to yours. That's been real progress IMHO, and one of the things that I really like about Android.

Digging into iOS, I also find it kind of curious how this works out.

iOS seems to take a more shrouded approach to what applications can request, in favour of focusing your attention on what they are doing. You can view some top level data about what applications can touch, based on the privacy settings group. Which largely amounts to hardware features like your camera and common personal data like your contacts. Not so a technical view such as a friendly one. Trying to STFW about the perms apps have access yields rather different experiences if you swap the words iOS and Android around. So in the end, you're really trusting Apple far more than the application, IMHO. On the upside, it's easier for Apple to push patches to devices than pretty much anyone can push to anything Android based in practice.


Android on the other hand traditionally required applications to state their permissions in advance when the user installs the application. Thus the trust lays between you and the developer with a sort of contract like transaction. The move to runtime permission twiddling in Android 6 is a lot more like the current experience on iOS, and I assume adapted from what Apple was already doing at the time or had been planning. But it's easy to tell what an app can do, and all the more possible to look up online what permissions exist. No perms to access your camera? Then it can't. A little Google-fu and you can get a list of what apps can ask for, and grok at it to draw your own conclusions.

In the end though it still boils down to trust. Does a flashlight need access to your contacts or detailed location? Probably not :P. Do you trust Apple or Google to keep an eye on things? Well, if not there's always a flip phone.


At least modern operating systems aren't as really nilly as DOS and the old Mac system software was, in letting apps have total control over the hardware. Because let's face it, most programmer's aren't super genius about every aspect of your system.

As I begin to settle into my main machine running iOS, these are the Android apps I'll really miss big time.

Beyond that, pretty much everything I use tends to be cross platform. Much like how most of the desktop apps I use, compile and run on both Linux and NT: most of the apps I use run on both Android and iOS. Many of them are also similar enough that the deltas are local convention, much like how Windows and *nix builds often relocate where editing application settings go in their menu bars.

But of course there are a few Android apps that I'll miss, because they aren't cross platform.

Aqua Mail

There's not many mail clients that I like. In fact the next in line are the Berkeley mail program and the Mutt, both of which run in unix terminals; one of which could still be used on a teletypewriter with paper in place of a display So it's safe to say most mail clients are kind of meh in my eyes, and I've used a lot of them since the '90s.

Aqua Mail on the other hand is a superb client. Between how well it runs on my Tab S3 and my Chromebook, I wish I could transplant the damned thing to my Linux and NT machines as well. Be it my personal e-mail accounts or business accounts, it's become the gold standard in my sending e-mail.

FolderSync Pro

The cornerstone of managing my wallpaper collection for a long time has been FolderSync Pro. Over time it's great abilities to pretty much file sync anything to anything else have been pretty awesome.

Each of my Android devices have at least three jobs.

1. Every night, move photos to my file server under Camera Uploads/{Host name}.
2. Every week, sync my interal storage to my file server under Backups/{Host name}/Internal.
3. Every month, sync Pictures/Wall Papers with the master in my cloud drive of choice.

Combined with alternate methods of syncing my photos offsite, FolderSync Pro basically makes it so I have to worry more about powering on my file server after a power break than I do about my device's local files.

Photo Wall FX

Been using this so long that I don't even want to check the receipt. Nor do I want to see when it was last updated, it's kinda orphanware now. Over the years, I've amassed a lot of wall papers. The way I have my Androids rotate between them at random is Photo Wall FX. In addition to that simple goal, it's generally been good about scaling and cropping the wide variety of images to fit my screens.

I've actually been worrying a bit, how the lack of updates and quirks with Android's evolution interact. When Google stops allowing old-ass apps on new-ass devices this would be the first one I'd notice gone.

ArtFlow Studio

When it comes to drawing with my S-Pen, I end up in ArtFlow. It's the most full featured drawing app I've met, and over time got good enough that I stopped bothering to look. 

By full featured: I mean whenever I go do something the process is like I'd expect from an app targeting desktops. To get any better than Art Flow, you'd have to talk to people that draw for a living instead of making this doofus glowy and happy.

Juice SSH

Since most of what I do depends on a Linux terminal environment, like literally if it doesn't involve reading web pages or responding to e-mails, I'm likely to be found in an xterm or on my tablet.

Juice SSH has been a long companion, I've been using it for at least 6 years now. First on my Android 4.x tablets and later on my Chromebook as well, where the performance beat the tar out of the Chrome SSH thing. If it were better at copying terminal contents ala xterm, Juice SSH would be nearly perfect.

Samsung's Calendar

Ahh, I remember the day I first realized how great it was. See, I used to have to take my mother to doctor's appointments and cover her copays. But my momma was the kind who used a paper calendar. I stopped using a paper calendar when I was still in grade school. Thus whenever we had an issue of something that was on her calendar but not on mine, friction occurred. 

Easiest way I found to solve that is when making the next appointment on our way out, just duplicate the event and update it with the new appointment. Actually it works so well, I do the same with my own health care.

So, I'm standing in the middle of the doctor's office and looking at my Nexus 5, and I'm like, "What the !@#$, why can't I just duplicate today's event and change the date, like on my Galaxy SIII?". In the years since a preference for Samsung over Google has become stronger. I mostly ignore Google Calendar on my current, non SamWiz phone.

Nova Launcher

Honorable mention goes to Nova because not only is it the best Android launcher I've used in the post ADW world, it beats the tar out of Apple's concept of a launcher 😜

Pie sucks at multitasking

Things that Pie has wrought: Google's curse.

Overview now has a more useful grid like view. Aside from the nauseating effect that happens when closing an app makes them all resort but at least it is really fast on the Tab S3's hardware. on the downside multitasking is now chunky and fundamentally broken.

In the previous version the overview screen was a chunky phone centric sliding flipper but apps had a button on the side of their card, so you could open them in the current side of the screen. Now each app has its icon on the top of the card, and you get a menu when you tap the icon. Containing app info (used to be long touch/hold), open in split view, open in pop up (floating window) view, or lock the app. Which is a lot slower but at least flexible.

So instead of very, very quick access to snapping an app to either side of the screen: you get very slow access to deciding if you want it split or floating. The ability to just turn the currently running application into a floating window has been removed. Which is both good and bad: the gesture was easy to trip when you didn't mean to but was also extremely convenient if you wanted something like a calculator floating over a web page. I'm not sure if the UI the device used on Oreo was a Sammy thing or a Google thing, but it was pretty nice.

Now here's why I say fundamentally broken in Pie.

Splitting the screen and hitting overview used to place the overview in the currently active side of the screen. So if you wanted to replace one of the applications, you just tapped it and hit overview. Vola, really fast and simple and obvious. And good if you decided both apps needed to change before you were done.

After updating to pie: the overview ALWAYS opens in the bottom or the right side of the screen, based on whether you're in portrait or landscape orientation. I have yet to find any way to invert the split apps--you used to tap the resize bar in between and have a UI to switch them. 'Cuz that is useful. Now you're stuck with the first app chosen being in the top/left side until you're done. You might think the first app would show up and you could just select it again? Nope, its card gets removed from the overview.

Likewise you can only stuff in apps from the overview grid that were running. I used to be able to hit a button and select apps from a launcher instead of requiring them to be already opened in the background.

But really, whose fault is it for destroying the multitasking functions? Google's. It's Google's fault. Why do I say this? Because my Google Fi phone running Android One and its pure Googely experience has virtually the same broken multitasking UI. The only real difference is my Samsung changes the string "Split view" to "Open in split view" and adds the popup and lock entries to the menu. Likewise on the phone sized screen it's a sliding view of the exact same cards rather than a grid view of them.

Suddenly I realize why DeX became so popular among users of newer model Tab S's that shipped with it. It's not because DeX mode is that more PC like: it's because Google fucked Android's multitasking experience. And I fear, if I was to dig up the CDD for Pie, it would say OEMs aren't allowed to fix it anymore, lol.

Of course my model being older, DeX is not a feature that was integrated into it. Much like how my model was the first to get USB-C charging but alt modes for driving a monitor didn't show up until the Tab S4, which does have DeX. Reasons to buy an iPad, += 1.

I find it a great shame. Samsung has done multitasking for so many years, I first used it on my Galaxy SIII phone a very long time ago.  In recent years it became a standard piece of Android, which was a really good thing until Google pissed down the feature's throat and crippled its utility for real multitasking.

As I watch my tablet upgrade to Android 9, I find my mind flashing to when my phone updated closer to Pie's release--and the distinct feeling that "All my icons are different for no good reason. Other than that: it's hard to tell anything changed."

But it's worth noting, I use my Galaxy Tab S3 excessively every day, but my Moto X4 is only lightly used. Because unless I'm literally walking around in public or answering a text message in the middle of the night: there's a 95% chance that I'll use my tablet instead.

Both devices were released in 2017 and had Android 7/Nougat as their original operating system image. The primarily difference is my Android One edition got Pie around Christmas time and my Sammy gets pie to the face shortly after Android 10 launches.

That's par for course for Samsung's tablets in the past, except seeing three major OS versions on one tablet is odd for them; I had the upgrade to Android 8/Oreo to be the Tab S3's final operating system based on previous experiences with their high end tablets. I've owned a lot of those.

If anything actually changes that makes me give a flying floop, it'll probably rely on Samsung's UI customizations. Because on the more "Pure" load my phone uses, "Damn it, my icons are all different", really was the most noticeable difference. The bit about text selection might be more in my face on a tablet but wasn't necessary on my phone, nor is it on my big screen; especially with pen in hand.

Over the years, a number of things have attracted me to Android.

Around the time Android first showed up on the T-Mobile G1, it represented what I really wanted at that time. Which was something more like a computer and less like a PDA that could send e-mail or word files. Something that I could scratch my itches by writing software. Likewise at that time, I may as well have wanted a Porsche, lol.

What really made me enjoy the experience however was the moderness of the platform and the compatibility it offers.

Permissions

It has long bothered me how PC software works. You run as a user, let's call you Bob. You go download some program written by someone else, and probably won't be compiling it from code. That program can do anything you can, Bob. Whether that's as simple as uploading your address book (if you actually, still have a local one), encrypting your files for ransom, infecting your files, or just being useful, like you know: doing that task you had downloaded it for. A frequent solution in PCs has been to require running software with elevated permissions. But usually in a nuclear form: where the program goes from being able to doing anything you can, to literally being able to do anything your operating system can.

Newer models like the one Android follows, I believe are the natural evolution. Rather than "Ahh, shucks, I'll just run it as root!", the solution is a service interface. Android applications don't shout "Hey Bob, I need you to hit the grant godlike powers button right now". Instead they shout, "Hey Bob, I'm gonna need permission to use location services before I can tell you the nearest shawarma place". That's how things should work.

Once upon a time, computers didn't really have permissions. Time sharing used to have more to do with computers being expensive rather than a commodity. Today, I wouldn't expect a non-nerd to know what I just said. To be fair when the IBM PC came into being, it didn't have a lot of horsepower and having fifty people using it at the same time was the least personal worry.

UNIX and Vista probably had the longest reaching impacts prior to Android. I say that for two real reasons. Firstly, Unix's concept of users and file permissions are not only pervasive but the baseline of what you can call a multi-user system today. Secondly, thanks to the CP/M heritage, it wasn't really until Vista that a lot of PC using mooks got smacked over the head with the permissions stick; despite how long NT supported ACLs. Yeah, I'm a asshole.

I really like the brokered model that systems like Android follows. You don't solve a problem by running as god almighty with power to touch all the pointy things. You solve the problem by a service that brokers access to that specific thing. Because why should a program have as much power as you do? Do you trust strangers on the side walk with your debt card's PIN? I hope not.

User Services

Over the years a lot of things have become broadly universal. Today, you would be hard pressed to find a network aware program that does not utilize network sockets. Likewise as GUIs rose, so did frameworks to ease the task of writing such software. No one makes a GUI program by drawing raw pixels into a byte buffer anymore, they use things like GTK and MFC. Often these interfaces become common (e.g. BSD sockets and winsock are very similar) or they become portable (e.g. Qt runs on just about anything).

But there are also a great many things that are not broadly universal, aside from the concept that we want those things to work.

There are no universal APIs to solve problems like syncing and managing your contacts, calendars, locations, and so on. We have tools not interfaces.

In Android, we have concepts like a Calendar. It doesn't matter if I'm using Samsung's calendar app or Google's calendar app, or someone else's. There's a concept called a damned calendar. Wanna create an event? Fill out a common intent and expect good things to follow. If you write a calendar app then you're expected to do some things deemed the right thing, to make this work for the user, and that is the right thing if you're writing a calendar app that supports events.

On my laptop, I have to run a program like Mozilla Thunderbird or KOrganizer if I want an event calendar. Can I write a program that opens a new event in them and pre-populates it with some user provided data? Probably. Is there a common interface for my program to say, "Hey, operating system: Bob would love me to add this appointment to his calendar called 'Medical'. Here's the info!". Nope, nope, and nope a doodle! That's just not how PCs have evolved.

On the flipside, I will confess that Windows 10 does one thing I actually like. My contacts, messages, calendars, etc are all synchronized in much the same way my Android device does; I do not have the gag reflex necessary to see if MS also added any decent interfaces for applications to trigger these data exchanges the way Android does. But using Microsoft's built in apps for that suck less than interfacing my Debian machine.

Openness

As a curious and opinionated nerd, I prefer easy access to knowledge and limited restrictions. I first used computers running MS-DOS but most of my time has been around Unix systems.

To me the best way to know how something works is to take it apart and study the pieces. Want to know how programs are loaded into memory? Read the kernel's code for loading and linking executable files. Want to know how files are stored? Read a file system driver; coincidentally one for FAT is usually pretty simple compared to modern, more robust ones.

While I am a fan of tight permissioning and siloing of software, I am not a fan of restricting the owner. You paid good money for the device and it shouldn't try to stop you from using it. Whether your taste is cat videos or bouncing boobies.

A lot of people have been uppity over the nature of app stores, and they probably should be. But I also see it as natural. Modern unix systems typically get their software from a repository, and any package manager worth its salt is going to do things like verify signatures on those packages.

Where we diverge with younger systems is control. Android has done pretty well at that--in that you should be warned about importing some random file that you might not even know is a program, but you're still free to do so. Most people should obtain their software from a repo that they trust. Whether that's something like Google Play and iTunes, or something like your local mirror of Red Hat and Debian packages. But you should always be allowed to decide what that repo is.

Android has managed to hang onto a lot of that openness, where Apple has preferred to maintain control. I mean, razor wire, triple layered concrete thick barn doors. Whatever.

Stable Runtimes

There is a pretty long history of being able to run a pre-compiled program and share it with others. We've been doing it longer than most people have owned a computer. I view a major key to the success of PCs, the ease at which you could write a program, compile it, and expect it to run on someone else's machine without having to ship a code monkey with each floppy diskette. And not have to have a warehouse full of every microcomputer known to man, usually. Since then, computer software and hardware have become more isolated from the other for a great many tasks.

Today software is very long lived. Further time goes on, the more likely the code you write is to outlive you and the machine it first ran on. How well that binary runs on future systems is a more variable story.

Android has generally maintained a pretty strong ABI for keeping developer's stuff running. Think of Dalvik and the Android APIs what you will, and please do feel compelled to make rude hand gestures, but an Android application tends to execute without shouting "Holy link error, batman!" and aborting back to the launcher. Unless you do something that you shouldn't, or someone upstream does something that should be considered violation between vendor and stability worth smacking with a Googlely test suite sized beating stick.

But nothing is perfect or forever. To evolve, platforms must both create and destroy.

When I install a program from eons ago and it just runs on my PC, this tends to be a testament to how stable Microsoft's ABI is, and how (insanely) much work they have put into backwards compatibility. I find it kind of amazing how often old ass programs just run.

When it doesn't run, this tends to be a testament to how well the program was written or how well its assumptions have aged. It could be anything from assuming every file on disk is writable, or that all of nVidia's graphics accelerators work the same as back in 1999.

Considering how many programmers that I've met had a source-only mindset, I find it amazing how stable Android's runtime is at running APKs. As a user, you probably need worry more about issues like the evolution of GPU or service brokering breaking the apps assumptions at runtime than the app will fail to run at all.

You see there's a really big distinction between API and ABI. In really simplistic terms, an API means the programmer's shit will probably compile and an ABI means the programmer's shit will probably execute.

The more complicated operating systems and frameworks become: the less likely this is to be the case. But it's kind of nice when you can install an old game or utility and enjoy it without having to fire up a virtual machine with an antique operating system.

During the time my journal rolled through G+ rather than a traditional blog platform, Android was one of the subjects that I most posted about and followed. Usually, close enough that up until Nougat: I typically parsed my way through the compatibility definition documents when they were published. Not just the user facing and developer facing release highlights because a lot of detail about what devices could and have to offer lives in the CDD. The stable release of Android 10 was earlier this week, and frankly I find it quite hard to care.

The difference between these two points kind of makes me said but in a way, perhaps it is natural given how much the platform has matured. Or just an indication of how much Google pisses me off these days.

For most of Androids history, new versions have brought new functionality that was both worth it for my user experience and of interest from a developer's perspective. In more recent years there's been a pretty thick lack of anything that impacts my experience as a user, aside from how to manage annoying as all fuck heads-up notifications that 5.0/Lollipop introduced. Much of what has interested me from the developer side has been incremental changes to the platform. Much of what the user experience has been has become change for changes sake, once the platform returned to the level of stability.

The way I use my devices has not changed much since Android 4.x. I still spend an excess of time on my tablet. I still tend to prefer Android apps on my big screen instead of desktop apps. What's really changed are methods and patterns.

From Android 2.2 - 4.3, I utilized my phone very heavily. At the highest point, charging my phone three times a day while my tablet was being repaired back in 2012. Today I just don't use my phone for a lot. Unless I am checking items off my list in the middle of the grocery store or something: my phone is not the device I reach for first. Usually it's the last device I'm going to use, because I usually can use two hands :P.

Tablets have been part of my flow since Honeycomb, and likewise became my main platform of choice. Be that as a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop like form factor. For many years I used a tablet docked to mouse/keyboard/monitor and been a lot happier than using desktop apps.

When I upgraded to a tablet that didn't support HDMI out, I eventually took the opportunity to upgrade my rarely used Chromebook to a model with Android apps; because that's what I really wanted. My fucks given for Chrome OS is pretty nill beyond as an Android platform that has a laptop sized keyboard attached and being less effort than loading Android-x86 on a regular laptop.

This year, I started using my Latitude as both my development system and my workstation. Because my Chromebook is just too slow for my workload and I'm tired of how buggy the experience is versus my Android tablets. Otherwise, I would have planned to buy a more powerful Chromebook. But I don't enjoy the experience as much as docking an actual tablet; unless I'm swiveling around in a chair in need of typing on a real keyboard at the same time, and I like to avoid doing that regardless of OS. I've done the keyboard / mouse / monitor thing with Android very heavily--so don't bullshit me that Android doesn't work well without a touchscreen :P.

In fact, the outlook towards 2-in-1 Chrome OS devices becoming more common is 1/3 of why I am contemplating making my next tablet an iPad. The other 2/3 is that Samsung is the only one really making tablets that interest me, and the only options when a pen is required. My opinion of Apple tends to run towards the negative but they at least are making it easier to pick your device and have a decent stylus experience.

The sad thing is as Android has evolved, my opinion of Samsung is considerably higher than my opinion of Google when it comes to a user facing device. Or as I like to remember it: when I bought Google's devices, all I got was a fast track to bugs being released or UI changes for the sake of changes.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 still getting security patches four years after release

In recent years: Samsung has done well to resolve the one problem I actually had with their firmware updates: the lack of security patches.

Generally, I found upgrades to knew versions of Android were nearly a year behind their phones. Perhaps a small price to pay given they were largely stable releases and the tablet builds cut most of the bloat from their phones while keeping the useful features.

Android has also evolved into such a state that I don't really care about getting the latest version of the OS anymore. By the time Google does something user facing that worth while: it's almost time for a new device. Kind of like a certain other operating system: the previous version or two still runs most of the apps.

The part that's bothered me is the security updates. Most of my tablets didn't get squat for that, as security was bundled with the OS upgrades and the occasional patch.

Meanwhile the Tab S2 and Tab S3 have been a very different experience versus the other Samsung Tablets I've owned over the years. Pretty much every quarter the security patches rolls out. Seeing security patches every 3-4 months is a lot better than every 8-16 months or so. On the flip side my Motorola on Google Fi gets monthly patching.