Android 7.0: What is Direct Boot, and how will it improve your experience?

Direct Boot mode allows apps to communicate and interact with us before we have unlocked our phone after a reboot. This is more important than you might think.

We all hate it when our phone reboots. Sometimes we mean for it to happen and sometimes we don’t, but a reboot means we aren’t logged in, preventing many background tasks from working. It’s even worse if you use your phone as an alarm clock or reminder.

Android 7.0 Nougat can help through its Direct Boot feature.

What is Direct Boot?

We’ve all probably been there. We have a lock screen so nobody else can see what we have stored on our phones (everyone has that one friend) and something happened and our phone rebooted. If you didn’t realize it, you may be sitting there happy (or sad) that you aren’t getting buzzed every 10 minutes — until you notice and log in, only to see everything you missed. Hopefully, it wasn’t something too important.

Not every app needs to use Direct Boot, and developers need to think before they enable it.

Google has things covered in Android Nougat, potentially making that scenario a thing of the past. We assume Android 7.0 will be stable, and any reboots few and far between, but just in case, the new Direct Boot feature will let an app (or part of an app) run as soon as your phone is finished booting and before you sign in.

Keeping you secure, and informed

The way things work as of Android Marshmallow is pretty good from a security perspective. When your phone gets turned on or recovers from a reboot, the operating system loads and then everything halts while it waits for user input. That means you need to enter your password or PIN or you need to swipe your pattern. Even if you don’t lock your phone you need to swipe the lock screen away. (But please, lock your phone.) If you have an encrypted phone, the data you have stored stays encrypted and unavailable by any means until you get logged in. That’s a good way to help you keep unwanted eyes off of your stuff.

With Android 7.0, there’s a new step in the boot process. Once your phone is fully powered up and Android is running, there’s a method for developers to allow communication before you log in. Everything else stays locked up, and you can’t interact with any other app. Google has even inserted a new storage area called Device Storage for apps that need to run immediately because they will have no access to the normal credential-protected file system.

A new storage area is in place for apps that need Direct Boot because everything else is still protected.

Here’s an example of how this would work with a simple messenger client. The developers of the messenger can allow the app to collect messages and fire off a notification before you unlock your phone for the first time, but you wouldn’t be able to access your photos to send a reply because they are protected by your login password.

To get to them you would need to log on. For encrypted devices, Direct Boot mode allows for data in the new Device Storage area to run while the rest of the data on the phone stays encrypted. It’s a nice compromise between security and convenience. Google is getting pretty damn good at those, and it’s working — more people are locking their phones and protecting their privacy and data. To Google, that’s a good thing. And we agree.

Not for every app

Not every app will (or should) start running immediately. The Googlers we talked to at Google I/O this year all agreed that most apps shouldn’t run right away using direct boot. The new mode is reserved for things that you need right away and you don’t want to miss after a reboot. Examples are your alarm clock, your texting app, or an app that helps in the accessibility department — these are the types that need to run right away. Developers can add the functionality to any app when it’s installed on a phone running Android 7.0 (API 24) or higher.

Google tells us they won’t stand for apps that try to abuse Direct Boot.

The folks we talked to also were aware that this could be abused. Nobody wants some spammy ad network dropping links in their notification bar or the lock screen every time the phone starts. And some apps shouldn’t be storing things until you log in and decrypt them. For apps that are in Google Play, they will take claims about apps abusing the Direct Boot feature very seriously, and won’t hesitate to remove them from the Play Store.

Direct Boot is another of those features you can’t see but needed a lot of creative thinking and engineering to implement. These small features and improvements should add some much-needed polish to Android, and make our phones work better for us.

If you’re a developer and interested in Direct Boot, be sure to check out the documentation at the Android Developer site as well as watching the video below.

Android Nougat

Android Nougat is the 12th nicknamed version of Android and will be released to the public in the fall of 2016. Here’s everything you need to know so far!

• What’s new in Android Nougat
• Will my phone get Android Nougat?
• All Android Nougat news
• Should you use the Android N Dev Preview?
• Join the Discussion

Bose QC35 review: So nice, I bought it twice

Ridiculous comfort, insane noise cancellation and huge sound: the Bose QC35 Bluetooth headset is a hyperbole hater’s nightmare, but a traveling music lover’s dream.

The QC35 was pushed on me by an aggressive salesman at San Francisco International while I was waiting for a flight back to Boston; I initially found the price too rich for my blood, but that all changed the moment I flipped that noise-cancelling switch. Six hours of blissful flying between two screaming babies later, I was sold for life – and I even bought the QC35 a second time when I lost my first set in a hotel room.

As iMore’s Serenity Caldwell can attest, it’s just that good. Check out all the high points — and a few of the lows — in MrMobile’s first Bluetooth headset video, the Bose QC35 review!

Make with the socializing!

• YouTube
• Le web
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Snapchat
• Instagram

‘Fuchsia’ operating system project is interesting, lacking details that make it matter

The Fuchsia project looks to be a promising new operating system but it’s not going to replace Android anytime soon.

There’s a bit of chatter on the nerdier side of the internet today about a mysterious repository of code hosted at Google’s Git called Fuchsia. Fuchsia is a new operating system being developed by folks like Travis Geiselbrecht (BeOS, iOS, and webOS) and Brian Swetland (Android, BeOS, and HiptopOS) as well as current Google software engineers like Petr Hosek. The limited information provided at thew code repository doesn’t tell us much.

Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)

So we went digging.

Some Google-Fu and IRC lurking (#fuchsia on Freenode for folks who are still into IRC) give us a little more information. It looks like Fuchsia is an operating system that uses the LK kernel, with a component called Magenta that extends its capabilities. LK was designed for embedded devices with limited hardware. Magenta “targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAM with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation.” Other interesting bits include a new graphics rendering project called escher, which appears to use OpenGL or Vulkan APIs to support advanced graphics like diffusion, real-time volumetric soft shadows, and other lighting effects, and the Flutter framework for the user interface.

If you’re a code nerd on any level, take a few minutes and look through what’s been uploaded to the Git. It’s buildable on Linux or OS X, and there’s even an emulated version if you want to play with it. There is just enough there to get interesting.

Based on what we have now, any ‘conclusions’ are pure speculation

But anything else is just speculation at this point. I’ve already seen headlines about how Fuchsia is going to replace Android and Chrome with a new unified unicorn. Based on what we have now, that’s not even close to correct. Google isn’t going to abandon the current Android and Chrome ecosystem, and it will take a lot more that what we have now for any of that content to run in Fuchsia. I never say never, but the idea of a unified operating system to rule them all from Google doesn’t seem to be the goal here.

The developers say that things will eventually be public, documented, and announced, but not right now. In the meantime, we all get to guess what Fuchsia is going to be and what it’s going to do.

My guess is that it will have something to do with robotics, automation, and AR/VR. Ideally, you would want a real-time operating system here so you can have a reasonable expectation of latency and how consistent it will be and the graphics engine needs to have its own low-latency pipe. There are some examples and project files included in the escher code for iOS as well. We know that Google loves VR and they are always working on the next thing, and we might be seeing it as it develops.

Or this might just be a bunch of guys doing the things they love because they can.

What I can say is that Fuchsia isn’t poised to replace anything you have now. As it develops, we’ll be able to get a better feel for their end goal with Fuchsia.

No Man’s Sky devs are working on issues, brought in team to spot bugs

The developer behind No Man’s Sky wants you to know it is actively addressing the game’s issues.

Hello Games posted a blog post to No Man’s Sky website on 12 August to announce it is working on fixes for the most “critical issues”, and that those problems should be corrected in a patch releasing sometime in the “near future”. Although the company failed to specify which issues will be addressed first, Hello Games did reveal that it brought in a quality assurance group that’s bigger than its entire developer team.

This QA group will hopefully be able to spot bugs ahead of the curve. In addition to the upcoming patch and QA group, Hello Games suggested a few workarounds for some existing gameplay problems. For instance, if you believe you are stuck, or can’t reach your ship, “you can jetpack forever whilst pushing against any surface”. You can also revert to two previous saves if you’ve made a mistake.

And if you have left your ship somewhere inaccessible, you can summon it from landing pads or beacons found at most buildings or points of interest (which are marked by question marks). Despite all these issues, Pocket-lint still highly recommends checking out the game. In our limited, initial amount of time with No Man’s Sky so far, we have found ourselves well and truly hooked.

Even just a couple of hours with No Man’s Sky, it becomes obvious that it is a major triumph. It’s indisputably original, and really makes you feel like a space-pioneer. It’s a game you can lose yourself in, and certainly achieves its aim of generating a state of consxtant wonderment.

Ebay, Etsy, Microsoft and others vow to ban illegal wildlife trading

A smattering of internet merchants, services and tech titans have spoken: no trading of live animals or their illegally-sourced body parts, like rhino horns or turtle meat, on their watch. Etsy, eBay, Gumtree, Microsoft, Yahoo and Tencent have all signed a compact to standardize practices across social media and ecommerce platforms. Ideally, these uniform practices will tighten up loopholes that permit trading of illicit wildlife goods.

The guidelines only cover animals and parts that are illegally-sourced, which are threatened with extinction or which are protected by national law. Thus the pledged companies won’t block backdoor deals between Facebook users for dogs, cats or chickens.

The World Wildlife Fund, The International Fund For Animal Welfare and TRAFFIC collaborated to write the initiative and announced today for World Elephant Day. Although the partner companies don’t include a few tech heavy hitters like Facebook and Amazon where some of these illicit peer-to-peer transactions take place, the coalition is in talks with some other possible signatories, a senior TRAFFIC official told Mashable.

Source: Mashable

The European Space Agency will land on Mars in October

Nearly 13 years after the British spacecraft Beagle 2 went missing on Mars, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli module will touch down on the red planet — assuming everything goes according to plan, that is. The module, which launched with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in March, will serve primarily as a test bed for the descent and landing systems and is expected reach the surface on October 19th.

Unlike NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars for four years now, Schiaparelli’s mission is a short and immobile one. The module relies on a battery source that is expected to last somewhere between two and eight Martian sols. (At about 24 hours and 37 minutes, a sol is slightly longer than an Earth day.) The ESA plans to land Schiaparelli in the Meridiani Planum, which NASA’s other long-running rover Opportunity explored in 2004. During it’s short time on the surface, Schiaparelli will study the electrical fields that trigger Martian dust storms and weather patterns, then upload the data back to the Trace Gas Orbiter to transmit back to Earth.

Even after the module runs out of juice, the TGO will remain in low orbit until at least 2022, searching the Martian atmosphere for methane and other rare gases that may hint at the presence of organic life. Altogether, the data from the TGO and Schiaparelli will help guide ExoMars’ next mission to Mars in 2018.

Via: The Guardian

Source: European Space Agency