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!

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‘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

Intel should buy Jawbone just for its fitness app

If recent reports are to be believed, Jawbone is in serious trouble after missing a payment to a creditor. Sources close to the company have denied it, but this isn’t the first time we’ve heard such rumors. The Information reported earlier this week that the firm is running out of money and has put itself up for sale. If that’s the case, then I can think of the perfect suitor: Intel. After all, the chipmaker has both the money and a smartwatch division in need of a win, while Jawbone has arguably the best fitness app on the market. From the position of an armchair quarterback, it’s a match made in heaven — at least on paper.

Why is Jawbone’s mobile app worth saving?

Up, by Jawbone, is an iOS and Android app that seems more determined than its rivals to help you develop healthier habits. The key selling point is that it will proactively do things to help you reach the goals that you’ve set. Motivation, after all, is the key to sticking with life changes, but most apps assume you’re capable of pushing yourself every morning. As well as eschewing the usual 10,000-step target for something more tailored to your body type, it offers something beyond just inactivity alerts. Up is great for proactively identifying problems in your activity patterns over longer periods of time and suggesting ways to remedy it. For instance, if you spend a long week sitting down, it’ll give you a prod to counter that laziness. Basically, the advice is more personalized than an hourly buzz to the wrist.

On the surface, Up is friendly and unthreatening with clean, colorful, easy-to-read graphs. Its unintimidating design belies a hidden strength, with the more granular data hidden away unless you want to see it. If want to closely examine your stats much more exhaustively, you can do so in the trends menu, which lets you compare two sets of data against one another over time. So, for instance, if wanted to look for a correlation between calorie burn and sleep, or carbs consumed vs. resting heart rate, you could.

Intel has great hardware and bad software. Jawbone has the opposite problem. Merging the two together would see two fine products become one class leader.

There’s also a robust social component that lets you compete with friends and colleagues in so-called duels, or just keep an eye on their progress. Many apps don’t have much in the way of social features, and there’s little to create a sense of community with your friends. With Up, meanwhile, Duels allow you to engage in one-on-one challenges that’ll see you and a friend going head-to-head. There’s also diet tracking, which is clumsy in practice, but still effective for making you more aware of what you’re eating. More than once I wanted more detail on outlining portions, since it’s hard to quantify “1.5 servings” of bolognese sauce.

Why Intel needs it

Until a few weeks ago, the Basis Peak was one of the best — and most underrated — wearables in the market. Unfortunately, the company found an issue whereby a handful of devices were overheating and burning users’ skin, which forced Intel to issue a recall. Earlier this week I outlined what otherwise made the Peak such a great device. Rather than trying to replicate the experience of a smartphone on your wrist, it stuck to the basics: fitness and sleep tracking, smartphone notifications, not to mention vibrating alarms. Hell, it was even able to automatically detect exercise down to the type of action you were doing. That made it effective and seamless, with a battery that could last almost a working week between charges.

But, thanks to these overheating concerns, Peak has been taken off the market, and may never return. But what Basis can do in hardware can’t be overstated: Its main issue (aside from dodgy batteries) was that its companion app was awful. As good as the watch was, the app was ugly, unfriendly and designed for gym nerds who obsessed over minutiae. Intel has great hardware and bad software. Jawbone has the opposite problem. Merging the two together would see two fine products become one class leader.

Then there’s the fact that Intel really could do with a hit, something that will help the company with its long-overdue reinvention. Intel’s fate has always been inexorably bound to that of the PC market, and as people buy fewer desktops and laptops, its financial dominance will begin to wither. Back in 2013, then-CEO Paul Otellini admitted that it was a mistake not to build ARM-designed chips for smartphones, namely the iPhone. The move effectively tied Intel to the mast of a sinking ship, and allowed Samsung, Qualcomm and TSMC to become the chipmakers of the 21st century.

Earlier this year, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich conceded that the company will have to fire 12,000 people as it begins to refocus. Intel is making inroads into other businesses, like consumer hardware — wearables and drones — as well as the internet of things. Buying Jawbone would give it a quirky, reasonably decent consumer hardware maker that could benefit from Intel’s backing. It also, crucially, has the Up app, and Up is such a good piece of software that it could form the center of Intel’s wearables universe.

Intel is also one of the few companies that could afford to buy Jawbone. The struggling company raised $165 million at the start of the year, and at the time was valued at around a billion. Even with banks cutting their expectations for Jawbone, it’ll still cost Intel a few hundred million to pick up the business, but that’s pocket change for a company that still generates $1.3 billion in quarterly profit.

Why this is all a fantasy

For starters, spending hundreds of millions on a company to get at one component of its business makes iffy sense to most CEOs. As we’ve seen with Snapchat and Instagram Stories, if you’re really committed to building a competing product, you can easily build something similar in house. I’m not suggesting Intel rip off the concept behind Up — just that it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened. Intel could, theoretically, hire some software designers and build a comparable app for significantly less than Jawbone’s asking price. (Though to be fair, it hasn’t yet.)

Jawbone doesn’t make much sense as an acquisition target because of the baggage it carries as a troubled company. It has constantly over-promised and under-delivered on its devices and struggled to produce reliable hardware. Search for any combination of “Jawbone,” “Up” and “broken” and you’ll find the internet awash with disgruntled users. The Jawbone patent portfolio isn’t worth much either, now that judges have ruled several of them invalid in the company’s ongoing lawsuit with Fitbit.

Plus, Intel would have to deal with the messy business of deconstructing Jawbone to get at the meat it really wants. That would require layoffs (expensive, bad PR) and sales (time-sapping) that it could otherwise avoid. Plus, it would inherit a Bluetooth audio division that’s tangential to Intel’s current and future plans. Besides, Jawbone has reportedly already tried several times to sell its speaker arm to little avail, so Intel would likely have to sell it at a knock-down rate.

Fundamentally, this is pure speculation on my part, and Jawbone has too many problems to make a rescue worthwhile. But it deserves repeating that the Up software is a great app that deserves to live on in the face of whatever corporate drama is unfolding at Jawbone. It’d be nice if some white knight would come and rescue Up from possible death. And it’d be especially nice if Intel were the one on the back of the horse.