Reply to post: Why not fork Android + make it a shell

UBports community delivers 'second-largest release of Ubuntu Touch ever'

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Why not fork Android + make it a shell

Why try to beat Android, why not just fork it and make it better. Do a proper tablet treatment on it. No more full screen phone dialers, and full screen single pane control panels with one button on them, no more apps that require you pick up the tablet, its keyboard and case and hold it portrait to use the app! 512MB heap limit.... that doesn't need to be, it could have a proper virtual memory manager.. Give Android a proper app lifecycle and port Libre Office to it.

It's waiting to be done, and it could be done as an Ubuntu shell if you want.

I've got my Chuwi Hipad plus tablet and the hardware is great, brilliant 4:3 huge screen, cheap price, fast processor,... but Android....this is the first time I've had to deal with a pure Google Android and I'm not happy.

For example, the navigation bar is huge, it eats a big chunk of the lower screen, it looks like its sized bigger because it can waste more screen! As if peoples fingers grow larger with available screen space. No option to make it smaller. If I switch to gestures, the gesture works anywhere along the bottom screen, so all the swipe up trays I had to use to get me more screen space now also swipe away the app. You lose the whole bottom edge not just the middle portion.

I can pin the app, with app pinning, so gesture swipe doesn't swipe away the app, but some idiot decided they should also hide the status bar notifications for pinned apps, even notifications FOR THE APPLICATION PINNED. So the app is important enough to pin it, yet unimportant enough that you don't need to see its notifications!??

The same random slowdown when crunching a big model too, sometimes it's fast, sometimes its really really slow, I've been seeing this on every Android tablet since Android 9. Let me guess some idiotic AI based thread scheduler? Think you're optimizing for efficiency but actually confusing efficiency with power consumption? Some lazy garbage collect... why garbage collect if Android is only supposed to run mini applets? Something like that? Ditch the idiotic AI in it.

White notification icons?? No wonder OEM's don't follow Google on this. I have color coordinated icons, I can glance and see the category from the color, then the detail of the icon tells me if I need to deal with it now, or it can wait. I can just look, I don't need to swipe down the tray. But under pure Android 10, the icons are blended to remove the detail and look like plain colored dots on the notification tray, these become white dots on the status bar. A line of useless white dots conveying no information at all, I have to swipe it down everytime.

Form over function.

Now it fights harder to get you to enable Google Play Services, I do not want this google crap on a tablet, but its gonna beep at me endlessly till I complete the setup with no chance of disabling those notifications or that setup app.

Build a firewall in it FFS.

I get it, Android is a toy, a way for Google to spy on users, *but* that also makes it forkable and it could be the basis for a half decent OS on tablets that is sorely missing right now.

But not with Google at the helm.

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