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"Last year's phone""Last year's phone"Posted May 16, 2012 12:15 UTC (Wed) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)In reply to: "Last year's phone" by Fowl Parent article: Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
It is rather shocking just how much flash Android uses.
Does anyone here remember GPE (the "Gnome palmtop environment")? This fitted linux, busybox, X, Gtk, and some basic apps into 11 MB of flash.
Yes, android is prettier, but we make a terrible performance tradeoff. Even a basic "flashlight" app is hundreds of kB, and something like a train-timetable app is ~ 4 MB.
Then again, why code for efficiency? CPU and Flash are now really cheap, and battery life is dominated by the backlight anyway.
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Android App Bloat?? Posted May 16, 2012 23:38 UTC (Wed) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] Richard_J_Neill Even a basic "flashlight" app is hundreds of kB... I don’t understand how you come up with that figure. Here is an app of mine that does something reasonably interesting, and includes built-in help, in a package that is just 59kB in size. And the built APK for this sample app is just half of that. Dalvik is a very compact byte code—half the size of Sun JVM bytecode. And all the additional XML resources for your app are stored in a compressed binary form. So I don’t see where the bloat should come from...
Android App Bloat?? Posted May 17, 2012 16:57 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
Don't some of the package formats for Android preinstalled software include the byte-code AND the compiled code?
Android App Bloat?? Posted May 17, 2012 22:30 UTC (Thu) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] I don’t understand what you mean. The byte-code is the compiled code.
Android App Bloat?? Posted May 17, 2012 23:49 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
Android version 2.2 (I think) introduced an optional JIT compiler which compiles the byte-code into machine-code.
I thought that the ODEX (Optimized DEX) format can contain a cached copy of the JIT-compiled machine code. I also believe that the ODEX format is commonly used for all applications which are included in a ROM, because each ROM is hardware specific anyway.
Android App Bloat?? Posted May 18, 2012 1:09 UTC (Fri) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]
None of which is relevant to ordinary apps like you or I might write.
"Last year's phone" Posted May 17, 2012 12:46 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
Well, "hundred*s*" is a bit exaggerated... LED Light has 119 KB.
"Last year's phone" Posted May 31, 2012 15:49 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
> battery life is dominated by the backlight anyway.
What? How can that be? Are you using your phone with the display on constantly, while still using nearly zero CPU?
Have you actually tested this, or is it just an intuitive assumption? If the former, what kind of screen does your device have? If the latter, your intuition is incorrect.
Unless I'm using the power-guzzing Google navigation, 'cell standby' is always at the top of my battery usage list, followed by 'phone idle', followed by 'Wi-Fi' if I've had it enabled, usually followed by 'Android system', with perhaps a few other entries, and 'display' dead last - and that's if I've had it on for the hour or so that it takes to even show up in the list (I think there's a threshold of 1 or 2 percent).
If I do nothing after unplugging the phone but tap the screen every now and then to keep it on, 'display' will go up to 20%, with 'Android' system in the 60s, so if that were more efficient it would have a substantial impact on battery life (although in the real world case 'cell standby', 'phone idle', and 'Wi-Fi' tend to come to around 90% of the total battery use).
"Last year's phone" Posted Jun 1, 2012 9:17 UTC (Fri) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]
Interesting.
Mine says:
The screen is most certainly not on most of the time. Also I didn't realize Dolphin uses that much power; from the stats you'd think I do nothing but surfing the web all the time, which is not true at all.
The phone is a Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000) running Cyanogenmod 7.1 (but I seem to remember that the start where more or less the same when the phone still had the stock software).
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