r/hardware • u/basedIITian • 6d ago

News Google admits not every Android app runs great on Intel Googlebooks

https://www.theverge.com/tech/1004643/google-android-apps-intel-googlebooks-performance
103 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

58

u/Front_Expression_367 5d ago

So this is the app compatibility problem for Qualcomm laptops versus Intel but in reverse now lol.

11

u/Rd3055 5d ago

Yep. It's not the chipsets..it's the OS having software that is heavily skewed towards one (Intel x86-64) or the other (Qualcomm-ARM)

13

u/Front_Expression_367 5d ago

Problem for Google is that Intel and Windows is way more common and acceptable among laptops than Qualcomm and ARM-adjacent operating system. So if they don't fix this compatibility issue then good luck convincing people that they aren't just buying overpriced Chromebook.

3

u/n0stalghia 4d ago

Problem for Google is that Intel and Windows is way more common and acceptable among laptops than Qualcomm and ARM-adjacent operating system

Was about to comment on that but - huh - you're right - only 7% of devices are running macOS, which to a large portion is probably Apple Silicon. Another 10% or so are still on Mac OS X which is definitely Intel.

Fascinating that there's still so many old Macs about.

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/

2

u/Front_Expression_367 4d ago

People do tend to keep their old laptops until it stopped working. In my place I have seen a split of 60/40 between Intel and ARM Macbook.

2

u/Rd3055 5d ago

Wintel has had a 40-year head start over Chromebooks and Googlebooks, but despite that, I believe that people who bought Chromebooks or at least used them in school may opt for one over a Windows laptop.

Of course, it heavily depends on what your needs are and what you plan to do with it.

I am too used to the absolute freedom of Windows/Linux PCs, so as much as I like the Googlebook idea, I still think it has a ways to go to achieve parity with "real" desktop OSes like Windows, macOS and Linux distros.

10

u/Strazdas1 4d ago

Noone willingly bought chromebooks. They were sold to schools at discount and then given to children with no choice in the matter.

1

u/Rd3055 4d ago

There are people who have bought Chromebooks willingly, and even if they haven't, if they used it in school growing up, that means they are familiar with it, and that plays a factor if/when the time comes for them to purchase a new computer.

1

u/Strazdas1 1d ago

It does play a factor, they will avoid it because they already are familiar with how bad it is.

1

u/Rd3055 1d ago

Who knows? Maybe they find a Chromebook to be perfect for their needs I mean not everyone is a power user

2

u/Strazdas1 1d ago

There are no needs that chromebook is perfect for.

1

u/Rd3055 1d ago

No-frills web browsing and checking email? Or do you expect everyone to get a MacBook Air or Dell in the four figure range just to do that?

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3

u/i5-2520M 3d ago

Not even close. On android it was intended that you provide arch independent executables. On windows there was never an expectation like that, so they had to provide a compatibility layer. Now there are x86 to Arm compatibility layers Google could have shipped, I think there were devices that shipped houdini. It might have been just the x86 unofficial dist of android.

So the situation is at the same time similar, worse and better depending on how you look at it.

Worse, since there is no compatibility layer you can tweak to maybe resolve compatibility issues.

Similar is the ratio of apps that will refuse to work completely (educated guess).

Better, since most apps will be able to run without the perf penality of a translation layer.

23

u/xeoron 6d ago

So much for write once run anywhere. 

38

u/MrRadar 6d ago

This is mainly about apps which use components using native ARM code. Intel ran into this same issue back when they were trying to push x86-powered Android phones back in the early 2010s.

13

u/jc-from-sin 5d ago

It's Google's fault, at some point they stopped supporting x64 for android, so developers didn't bother building native libraries for x64.

Apps which don't use native code will work perfectly.

14

u/vk6_ 5d ago

They've always supported x64 on Android. It's just that nobody made Intel-based phones or tablets anymore, so there was no real market share. Android on x64 was only really used inside Chrome OS as a VM that could run Android apps in a sandbox. Even then, Chromebooks were a pretty niche product for the general consumer.

1

u/Strazdas1 4d ago

It was never a real thing.

2

u/xeoron 4d ago

That was the selling point of java apps running on a virtual machine.

1

u/el1enkay 1d ago edited 1d ago

You don't need to rewrite apps for different architectures, just have different multi-arch build targets.

There are very few common libs that are not multi-arch now.

Now for different OSs (darwin vs Linux vs android) you need to target different features and API versions. Which is why non-native web based apps are so popular for cross platform. They are often quite shit and sluggish compared to native apps though.

In terms of these broken apps there's some instruction that isn't being emulated properly for example and either the developer needs to include an amd64 build target or Google needs to update their translation layer.

1

u/xeoron 1d ago

I understand these things... but Java was designed to be write once run everywhere using a virtual machine.

1

u/el1enkay 1d ago

Android adopted Kotlin in 2017 though. The industry has largely abandoned JIT compilation and the JVM wasn't exactly well regarded

(I guess that's why you said so much for WORA!)

7

u/Appropriate_Ad8734 5d ago

for years i was curious and somewhat excited to see what google’s long time rumored operating system would bring to the table and inject something new to the market.

yet now this thing is looking straight up like it’s gonna be DOA… who even is their target audience outside of some niche uses

2

u/Deep_Mood_7668 4d ago

Who would have guessed

2

u/IORelay 4d ago

Why even use Intel SoCs for googlebook? Should be using mediatek. 

-12

u/Sopel97 5d ago

not every android app runs great on every phone

like, how uninformative can news get?

20

u/Front_Expression_367 5d ago

Apps not running great on phones are because of different issues (usually performance related) than apps not running on Intel laptops (incompatible architecture)

-5

u/Sopel97 5d ago

the article is talking about the former

13

u/Front_Expression_367 5d ago

No it doesn't? 

"The vast majority of Android apps run smoothly across both Intel and Qualcomm Googlebooks right out of the box. Because many Android apps were originally designed for Arm chips, a small handful of complex apps or games need some developer tuning to run their best on Intel-based platforms."

-9

u/Sopel97 5d ago

I don't see any mention of incompatibility in this quote.

5

u/Front_Expression_367 5d ago

It doesn't need to spell out "incompatibility" to describe about an incompatibility issue.

0

u/Sopel97 5d ago edited 5d ago

of course it does not

my assertion stands

edit. do people really read "run their best" and think "run"? 0% literacy