I am constantly seeing blogs about fragmentation and how it is poisoning the well for developers. I personal think it is a load of crap, but i thought i would ask the developers.
What do you guys think?
Is fragmentation an issue?
YES, it could be an issue if Google did nothing to fix it, but they are:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/29/exclusive-android-froyo-to-take-a-serious-shot-at-stemming-plat/
Not pretending to be an expert, or even a developer, but plenty of apps didn't cross well from various WinMo builds, or devices. WinMo fragmentation hasn't been trending. It's a rhetorical buzzword sustained by iPhanbois, imo.
bwhite82 said:
YES, it could be an issue if Google did nothing to fix it, but they are:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/29/exclusive-android-froyo-to-take-a-serious-shot-at-stemming-plat/
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Yea I saw that too
It's just today we are suppose to be in fragmentation hell... It's just i don't see it.
Once in a while i will tell my friend with a Samsung Moment about an app, and for some reason he does not see it in the market, but this is few and far between.
I chose yes but I doubt it will kill android. It is annoying though to have a phone that is way behind because the maker of the custom UI is too lazy to do anything.
It did not kill the pc, or Windows for that matter. It will probably be gaming benefiting the most of future power increases.
Yeah, iFanboys are the most common people to critizise android for fragmentation - but they are not safe either.
Now with 2g, 3g, 3gs and ipad - and all having diffrent hardware in one way or another - they will also experience fragmentation. Esp. now that OS4 wont be feature-complete on 3g vs 3gs - and ipad wont get it until later.
Just because android got 3 res (320, 480 and 800) doesnt mean that it will be problems since 1.6 came out. Sure they need to fix/force vendors to upgrade handsets to latest android, so that people wont be left out - but since 1.6 that problem is much smaller, and there aint many handsets left out there with builds earlier then 1.6.
It's a problem.
Why do you think there are so many apps that are rated lowly on the market because of incompatibilities.
If there was only 1 phone and 1 version of android to code for, then bugs and compatibility would nearly be a thing of the past.
I think it's an issue, but a minor one. I'd rather them improve the OS rapidly and deal with not being able to use some apps, than sit with a stagnate OS but have more apps.
Like the other poster said though, they are going to try to fix it after 2.2 and work on making apps more compatible with all OS versions.
Hell, at least they realize it's a problem. Microsoft sure didn't give a ****, and doesn't now with 7 series.
Because of the "vendor delay" and the frequent Android releases, Android phones seem to have a 5-month lifecycle (my 1.5 Magic is 6 months old now, and I still can't use Donut/Eclair apps like Goggles, Maps w/ Buzz and many new apps that require 1.6+).
Access to applications is what makes most people buy smartphones. Remove or limit this, and people will switch to other vendors or platforms.
For people that root and switch custom roms, this doesn't seem like a big issue. But the majority of the users won't have access to all the new 1.6/2.1 apps being released on the market.
clamknuckle said:
I think it's an issue, but a minor one. I'd rather them improve the OS rapidly and deal with not being able to use some apps, than sit with a stagnate OS but have more apps.
Like the other poster said though, they are going to try to fix it after 2.2 and work on making apps more compatible with all OS versions.
Hell, at least they realize it's a problem. Microsoft sure didn't give a ****, and doesn't now with 7 series.
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@Clam*, you're right about them realizing it's a problem and working on it.
I believe they plan to have every phone running the same version of android, but with many add-ons available from the market.
This is surely a desirable route. Might it never happen? I haven't the slightest.
Alternatively a big pack of goodies you can get from online or preferrably the market that has all the addons depending on the sufficiency of phone hardware.
Hell, better yet! It could be part of the "first use tutorial" we all know and love
The first time the user turns on the phone after entering google info etc. they can check all the options they want and it will automatically download them from googles servers and set them up on the phone.
Very reminiscent of certain linux installations with addons from repositories.
OpenSuSE comes to mind.
Or to speed that process up, the phone retailer can install the addons specific for that phone.
Though it would still be nice to have the option to checkmark features at our own whim, allowing the system to discard the rest for example.
Of course if the addons were discarded or never installed by phone retailers in the first place they could still be downloaded from googles servers automatically.
**To Google Gods: It would be nice to have such options in the settings where we could enable and disable features and have them download or be discarded in the background**
There are so many methods out there to make fragmentation nothing more than a bygone.
I hope Google can turn this OS into what I've dreamed (figuratively) that it could be..
Ahh how I concieve ideas that will likely never occur..
Sorry.. i could write volumes about my futile ideas for the world, though I'm too hopeful and eager.
I'm sad to say..
"Such is our reality serving as the torrent thrusting back creative thought." -me
Hi guys,
A bit of a question for you, I am running the magnificent endymion 3.4 at the moment and want to know if it is ok to update my Rom manager and titanium back up as the market is now saying I have updates,apologies if this has been asked before I couldn't see any other threads on this and am just a bit curious
Sent from my HTC Desire S
Yes, of course. It's recommended.
No need at all. Works fine. Many things are recommended, just in case of Bugs / more features. None the case here
To Update Or Not ??
pughie said:
Hi guys,
A bit of a question for you, I am running the magnificent endymion 3.4 at the moment and want to know if it is ok to update my Rom manager and titanium back up as the market is now saying I have updates,apologies if this has been asked before I couldn't see any other threads on this and am just a bit curious
Sent from my HTC Desire S
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi pughie.
The thing about updates, is that you should know what benefits, if any are there in an update, before you apply it. Sometimes it's a good idea to keep certain apps updated (like Gmail, Maps, Facebook and twitter), because, i've learnt from experience, that these usually only get better with time.
Then there are those updates that only add new language support, some UI changes, permission changes, etc... and you may or ma not update these, because they don't really change the core functionality of the app.
Some app updates are completely ridiculous. For example, the application "Folder Editor" had a beautiful looking interface and flawless unintrusive performance, but the latest update shot it to hell and made it push irritating pop-ups on the screen all the time. I would avoid such updates. Good thing is, there's an option to uninstall updates from an app in the "Manage Applications" setting.
Finally, there are updates which essentially change the core capabilities of an app, and it is always a good idea to update them as a rule. The ones i have on my phone, that fall into this category, are 4EXT Recovery Control and Titanium Backup. (For example, the newer Titanium Backup updates add compatibility with ICS, which is essential if you decide to try out the ICS ROMs available for the DS) Ditto with ROM Manager... I hope you get the general idea.
So it's always a good idea to look at the changelog of any app update before deciding to update it. A good practice is to use Titanium Backup to backup the previous version of the app before updating, so that if you don't happen to like the update, you can revert to the previous version (Uninstalling updates from the "Manage Applications" tab will set you back to the oldest version you had on the phone, so i recommend the TB method.
Hope this is of some help to you...took long enough to type!!
Thanks a lot, very grateful for any advice I can get as I am a total novice at this and am learning a lot each day.
Sent from my HTC Desire S
Edit: Important: The newer V4 version of LeSec may no longer be usable for non-Chinese speakers. See this post #17 here, also to discuss alternatives
For all you Lenovo users out there,
I wanted to (re-)introduce this application. Because I have the impression that many Lenovo phone users rather quicly move on to migrated ROM's from for example APKHOT/Smileyvvv/Etotalk etc, where this app is cooked out.
You may want to reconsider going back to it, if it will still work on your phone with whatever ROM you have. It is really a very useful utility:
Firstly, it is a virusscanner. Not sure how useful a virusscanner is on Android, and as I want to avoid that discussion in this thread, that is the last I say about it.
It is also anti-spam. You can black- or whitelist SMS and Calls. See screenshots for an impression. Very useful.
Anti-theft is there. Send SMS upon SIM change, or remotely instruct the phone to send location or self-destruct. I suspect, but did not try, the SMS instruction is stored in /system, so a data-wipe will not undo this. But a good hacker will fully flash, so it only protects against noob thieves, like all anti-theft apps.
But those are common functions, readily availible in other apps. But now for the interesting feature:
It has a firewall. If that is the correct name. Or an app-wall. An permission-wall? You know those apps that you download that for some reason want permission to send SMS? Why does it need that? Or why does it want to read my contacts?
Well, you can per-app decide to block a permission. This app does not need to read my contacts. That app does not need to send SMS. And it will show you if an app tried to anyway. How cool is that?
Guest- and Childmode. Hide some apps. After all, we do not want junior to see daddies tripple-X rated apps. Or the wife. Which is why you can also hide certain contact's and call-history entries (wink, wink). It may also apply to banking apps and your bookie, though that is a bit more boring. Oh, and in Child mode the radio turns of as we want to protect junior from radiation...
Some of you that use Etotalk or APKHOT ROMS may have noticed the notification area buttons to these last two that were dead because this app was missing.
We could of course worry about whether this app in itself is not a spy, reporting everything you do to the Chinese government. But you may not be aware that this is true for *any* Chinese clone you buy. Typically those clonemakers do not release the kernel or framework source, so such a spy would be in there, not in a de-installable app. And if you are really worried about it, make sure you get a phone where you can install CyanogenMod compiled from source.
Personally, I doubt either Lenovo or China is interested in me, and if they do it means they have a Infinitesimals bigger datastore to clog their machinery before they find something on people like Liu Xiaobo or Tenzin Gyatso, which is actually a good thing. But I suspect the app is simply without such sinister intentions.
Anyway, attached is the version I got from my phone. From a Lenovo A750 ICS 4.0.3 S306. But I suspect it works with any phone that uses the Lenovo Framework, so any Lenovo ICS phone that has a not too heavily modded ROM. It did also work on the ICS 4.0.3 Lenovo P700 ROW S113 (Rest Of World edition) edition.
I provide update.zip installers for MT6575 and MT6577 (because I know their partition table). It probably also works on Lenovo Framework phones based on MT6573/MT7513 or even MSM7227/MSM7527, maybe even GB ones. But then you need to take the two *.apk files from inside the zip file, and copy them manually into /system/app, as the update.zip installer will not work for that.
But do try, and please report back if it does or does not work on your phone/rom. There is also an uninstall package. Oh, and you are messing with /system, so as always, at your own risk, ensure you can always flash back a working ROM or have a Nandroid backup before you experiment.
Your zip didn't work on my A789, which is using the apkhot based rom available on forum.china-iphone.ru. After extracting the apk files, copying to /system/app and manually setting permissions, it's working like a charm.
Thanks, I really missed it. On the most recent cooked roms, I miss many things available on the Lenovo official ones, like the fm transmitter, or the butterfly-like widget on the default home screen. Some cookers tend to leave out any non standard apps without even taking some time to know what they do. Not all Chinese apps are rubbish or impossible to understand, and Lenovo is a serious company.
Ok, here you have the FM radio and transmitter of the A789, but it probably does not work, as it is Odex'ed.
And I uploaded seperate installers for MT6575 and MT6577
Also, on your APKHOT, please confirm it actually blocks permissions and blacklists SMS. I am not sure how much the APKHOT deviates from the Lenovo Framework, so merely being able to install and configure may be too soon to tell.
PS: why not try my factory-cleaned A789 ROM? It comes with all those apps by default, and I now have 3 positive feedback.
Come to think of it, why did I take this security app from A750, when A789 is newer....
Edit: Because they are both the same version. In fact the LeSec has not changed since Dec 2010, according to the internal dex binary.
I have tested call blocking and it works, but it isn't so important, since call blocking is a built in feature of the Mediatek framework. You can block calls from any contact you have on your Google account just out of the box, and it works great. I've tested older phones which used older Mediatek chipsets and that feature has been part of the Mediatek framework since MT6573.
The FM transmitter won't work that way, since it is odexed. But it doesn't work deodexed, either. I've just got a deodexed version of the app, thanks to a friend from another forum, and it doesn't work very well. It works, but I had to stick the phone to the antenna on my radio in order to hear something. People I've talked to say that the transmitter works great on the stock Lenovo roms, so maybe it's just some incompatibility with the apkhot roms.
The only reason I'm not using your rom (which I have downloaded) is that I wanted to setup the phone in Spanish, and the rom I'm currently using is the only one I've found which contains that language. Just a quick question: is there any noticable performance increase on the s227 based roms? If so, I don't care using the phone in English, since I just want the most feature rich rom.
Thinking it twice, I've remembered another reason. One of the things I like most about the apkhot rom I'm using is that the external sdcard is mounted on /sdcard and not /mnt/sdcard2, which avoids problems with many apps. I tried one of the newest apkhot roms, based on s227, and none of the tricks to exchange /sdcard and /mnt/sdcard2 worked with it.
I'll reply to that in the A789 thread, as we seem to deviate from the security app.
cybermaus said:
Edit: Because they are both the same version. In fact the LeSec has not changed since Dec 2010, according to the internal dex binary.
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I remember there was an update of that app on my A750 with your ROM. Now with apkhot I installed that package posted above and I have the older / original version. But there is no update offered...
That was probably on the S148 Gingerbread ROM. That one has an older version. I know, because I messed up trying to install it, as I had that older GB version and the new ICS one both in my Titanium backup. Also, the Dec 2010 date is probably false, I just got OTA ROW_S114, and it too had all files timestamed to Dec 2010. But I am certain the LeSec from S306 and S227 are the same, the binary compared identical. Official version is V3.5.1.3.5.2.0041 and the update button tells me there is no newer.
Every so often it does update the virus/blacklist signatures, but that is not the app itself. Current virus signature 2012.09.14 Current harasment (blacklist) 2012.07.11
But if you find a newer one, please do let me know.
I've been trying LeSec further and it works, but I found a problem I wasn't able to fix, so, until I found a solution, I've freezed it with Titanium Backup. The problem is that I'm using Go SMS Pro, instead of the default messaging app, since I need to write SMS in Spanish and the default app doesn't support Spanish characters like accents, etc. Go SMS Pro works, but every time I send an SMS, LeSec thinks an unauthorized app is trying to send an SMS in the background, and shows a popup to let you decide whether to allow it or not. I haven't found a way to disable that, and it's a bit annoying having to click two buttons everytime I want to send a message.
Its probably a silly question, but you did go into LeSec->ChargeShield-SMS and ensure that your app was allowed to send SMS in background?
Probably for reasons of 'likely form of attack' the SMS apps are (unlike other permissions) by default in a 'Warning' setting, but if the warning does not come to the foreground on your phone, it may simply not work.
Also, rather than freezing LeSec completely, you could go into ChargeShield, and simply turn of the ChargeShield.
cybermaus said:
That was probably on the S148 Gingerbread ROM. That one has an older version. I know, because I messed up trying to install it, as I had that older GB version and the new ICS one both in my Titanium backup. Also, the Dec 2010 date is probably false, I just got OTA ROW_S114, and it too had all files timestamed to Dec 2010. But I am certain the LeSec from S306 and S227 are the same, the binary compared identical. Official version is V3.5.1.3.5.2.0041 and the update button tells me there is no newer.
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No, I used the S148 just some days and updated to your S306 V1.2 and simply stayed there, because it works very well. After some time it offered me an update and the user interface changed a bit with that update. The way how you set privacy on app level and so on. The update button itsself never worked for me either.
Sadly, backup never worked on that rom. I found that out as I wanted to try apkhot. To be honest, I didn't try on apkhot, yet.
A few minutes ago, I was offered a 4.1.4 version and installed it. Now it's purely chinese
Maybe I have to reboot the phone for english...
From the design it is a version newer than the version I wrote about...
leFloyd said:
A few minutes ago, I was offered a 4.1.4 version and installed it. Now it's purely chinese
Maybe I have to reboot the phone for english...
From the design it is a version newer than the version I wrote about...
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Click to collapse
Well, before you put the old one back, safe this one for me will ya.
cybermaus said:
Well, before you put the old one back, safe this one for me will ya.
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Click to collapse
I don't want the old one back - I want this one to be english
How do I save it? Any idea where it has downloaded it's update? This was done within the app...
Well, it would have simply replaced the two apk's in the /system/app folder.
So look for:
LenovoSafeCenter.apk
LenovoSageWidget.apk
or something similar, it could have changed its name, or added a 3rd component.
Got the files?
Sent from my Lenovo A750 using xda app-developers app
Well, it seems that Lenove Security (LeSec for short, and LenovoSafeCenter officially) is becoming less usuable. As mentioned above, it is fully Chinese, no Engrish anywere.
I had a look at the new V4 of it, even decompiled it. Not only 100% Chinese, but is hardcoded in the app, there are no resource xml files that we could translate. A big pity.
Also, there is one app (Waze, a social car navigation app) that in the latest version is incompatible with LeSec. Though it is at this moment the only incompatibility I ran into, it is also a pity.
That may mean we need to find an alternative:
For now, these two has shown up:
LBE : Somehow, I think LBE is actually the company that makes Lenovo LeSec. Or at least, there logo is shown in the about menu of LeSec as part of the "in cooperation with" mentions. Maybe the reason why the free LeSec is limiting itself?
Anyway, I am trying out LBE at the moment, to see how it works.
pDroid : pDroid looks promising. Specifically, they are promising ICS support, but right now, only GB, so one to keep an eye on, but not availible to us just yet.
Permissions Denied : A Paid app. But if it works well, it may be worth it. Not looked at it yet.
So, LBE seems to work well. It does not have the hiding of apps for 'child mode' and 'privacy mode'. Nor does it have the 'anti-theft' or 'virus-scan' but it does the permissions thing well.
I tested, it nicely prompted/blocked permissions. And to be honest, using a slight more clear interface. If it is permissions, which was indeed what I was after, LBE seems to do the job. I also like I can block internet use separate for 3G and Wireless. Very useful.
One problem though: Waze is failing in the same way as with LeSec. Even if I make it a 'trusted' app. It seems the latest version of Waze simply does not like to be looked at too closely.
anti theft
I cannot input number In anti theft . for ex if I write +35989xxxxx I need two more digits but it does not allow it. If I write in national format 0899.... I have to write more digits than the phone number has. Any solution?
As mentioned, while I started enthusiastic about LeSec, it is now focussing too much on China alone. Not as good internationally.
Try using one of the other anti-theft solutions.