Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 20, 2014 3:19 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Android without the mothership by magnus
Parent article: Android without the mothership

I understand your point and I know people who already have dropped traditional PCs in favor of mobile devices for all their computing needs but those people are not software developers who would be able to personally take advantage of Free software Freedom. It is not too much to ask that developers have appropriate tools, you don't expect a house to come with a fully-stocked woodworking shop, you don't expect a car to come with all the tools needed to disassemble and reassemble it, you get those tools separately if you want them. Computers are much the same, I expect that software development will continue on traditional computers for the foreseeable future, even as the majority of the market moves to mobile devices and derivatives.

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 20, 2014 12:40 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (5 responses)

There is no ethically legitimate reason for Android to continue to require a cross-dev environment at this point.

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 20, 2014 13:53 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

It's not question of ethics. It's question of technology. Right now most Android installations are 32bit ones and even few 64bit ones (which are rare) are not powerful enough for Android development. I'm pretty sure 5-7 years down the road (when it'll be feasible) Android will become self-hosted.

That's what happened with PC quarter century ago, after all.

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 20, 2014 13:58 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

What constitutes "powerful enough" for Android development? I mean, I'm not demanding a full bells-and-whistles IDE here. (And yes, the inability of Android to build itself, or to build Android applications, is the single biggest reason why I haven't even looked at developing for Android. Dealing with proprietary RTOSes for thirteen years has given me a distinct aversion to compulsory-crossdev environments.)

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 20, 2014 16:10 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

If you want to develop for Android then you can do that on pretty lean system. If you want to build Android itself then you'll need 64bit linker and gigbytes of RAM (on my laptop with it's 16GB of RAM this feels somewhat painful since build process pushes everything else to swap, on my main development system with it's 64GB of RAM it works without pushing anything to swap; probably 8GB will be enough althugh I'm not too sure).

Still it should be possible to create SDK for Intel-based devies, but these are rare. And one could not create an SDK for ARM devices since there are no OpenSDK for ARM!

ARM64 version of OpenJDK, on the other hand, exist (recently RedHat released it) but then devices with ARM64 support are not yet here (but will be soon)!

This will give us two basic pieces needed for self-hosting, but there probably will be some other, less serious obstacles. As I've said: I expect to see self-hosted Android in 5-7 years, perhaps even 3 if we are lucky. And that will be a watershed moment because shortly after that traditional desktop Linux will become pointless. Clocks are ticking.

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 21, 2014 5:52 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (1 responses)

> And that will be a watershed moment because shortly after that traditional desktop Linux will

… just pick up whatever components are necessary to run Android apps, and then your Linux distro for your ARM/AArch64 desktop/notebook hardware will run Android apps alongside all the rest (just like running X apps / command-line apps / whatever else alongside Cocoa apps on Mac OS X). At that point, any difference between Android and "traditional desktop Linux" (except possibly for stuff related to the Google "mothership") will have effectively ceased to exist.

Android without the mothership

Posted Jun 26, 2014 11:46 UTC (Thu) by accumulator (guest, #95885) [Link]

Interesting.. After years of divergence we enter into an era of convergence again. Linux Desktop as the "iron" and Android as the VM/Container