Huawei's HarmonyOS Will No Longer Support Android Apps - Pandaily (pandaily.com)

submitted 7 months ago by ijeff@lemdro.id to c/android@lemdro.id

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[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 33 points 7 months ago

Makes sense, Java sucks and native apps are much faster and use less resources.

Once they paid Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba to port their apps, basically 95% of the Chinese market is satisfied.

You only need WeChat, taobao, alipay, pinduoduo, Baidu and amap in China.

Because they don't need to worry about selling their device abroad, they have the luxury to not only give up to google apps, but to all the apps

iPhone users are also having similar limitations with all the apps in the app store blacklisted except a few dozens manually approved by govt, but Apple is still selling a lot of units, even if it's just a "WeChat mobile terminal" and not a real smartphone anymore

[-] logicbomb@lemmy.world 30 points 7 months ago

Java is not as bad as you're making it out to be. It's always funny to see people list the problems with Java as if they're obvious. They're trade offs.

With this change, you're right, they certainly won't have to worry about selling the device abroad.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it -3 points 7 months ago

the phones are already impossible to sell abroad without the google apps and a locked bootloader, it changes nothing for them

because they are in control of the platform they don't need to run everything in an interpreter. The cpu is and will always be arm-based, any interpreted language is a waste of power

[-] logicbomb@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago

I don't know whether they currently sell phones abroad, but I know in the past they have sold abroad. It's a big market.

So it certainly affects them organizationally. Any phone that they want to sell abroad will have completely different software. They'd likely have to use an entirely different team of people.

any interpreted language is a waste of power

It's not a waste of power. There are a lot of tradeoffs like ease of development and fault tolerance. And the cost of the interpreter is greatly mitigated at run time. Please just stop talking about this. It's not as good of a point as you think it is.

[-] pgetsos@kbin.social 21 points 7 months ago

Java definitely does not suck. There is a reason it runs virtually everywhere, from SIM cards to most servers of the world through Spring

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it -2 points 7 months ago

interpreted languages are inherently slower than native code. Because huawei controls the hardware they don't need portability and can focus on speed

on a phone, using java will give all the disadvantages with no advantages

look at iphone vs android, for years apple had better battery life and better performance even with half the ram, a worse cpu and smaller batteries

[-] runefehay@kbin.social 14 points 7 months ago

Java isn't an interpreted language any more than C. Java gets compiled into its own machine code developed by Sun. That machine code can be converted to native code or just run "interpreted." (which is more like emulation.)

Maybe you should learn more about something before you criticize it.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it -4 points 7 months ago

I can't think to any program made in java that isn't a memory hog.

Look at the performance of Minecraft java vs native

Or vuze that uses 20x the memory of qbittorrent for doing the same stuff but with less features

So either java devs don't know how to optimize code, or the language itself has some problems

[-] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 9 points 7 months ago

Of course there comes the Minecraft comparison. Which also conveniently ignores the fact that Minecraft can run incredibly fast using certain performance mods. It's not Java, it's just shitty programming / code that hogs its performance.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 1 points 7 months ago

i did a comparison also with vuze, which is incredibly inefficient compared to other clients

[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 6 points 7 months ago

can’t think to any program made in java that isn’t a memory hog.

Can you think of any Java programs that aren’t Minecraft, tho?

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 2 points 7 months ago

ok, give me a list of programs made in java that are faster or use less resources than a similar program written in any other decent language when run on the same hardware.

The list has zero entries.

[-] taanegl@beehaw.org 0 points 7 months ago

Pretty much large suathes of banking and financing companies, as well as other massive industries, which btw are hiring and pay well.

Java (or rather JVM) is slow at first, but once a JVM has "booted" Java performance wise is on par with the performance of other languages, even system languages. This isn't too apparent in the open source world, because Oracle.

Most infrastructure running on Java have been doing so for decades and continues to be implemented, not because the project managers are idiots, but because the software is portable and java (believe it or not) is getting better, similar to how JS has gotten better post-TypeScript.

So let's not throw the language and infrastructure on the fire in a time when we know *technical debt" is just an executive excuse to allow rushed, faulty and unoptimized programming in order to meet insane deadlines by white collar deadites.

"Agile", "crunch", "technical debt". We've been taken for absolute fools, and now we're blaming the tools. Smh.

[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago

Ah sorry - I wasn't dissing Java - I was questioning the commenter's knowledge of Java, given that Minecraft was the example they chose.

[-] pgetsos@kbin.social 9 points 7 months ago

The language has nothing to do with what you describe in your last paragraph. There are a lot of reasons what that was happening, and using Java is not one of them. Just the openess of the OS and how it was written was enough to justify such a difference vs a closed OS with a fraction of the possibilities

Also Android is not using just Java, otherwise you would be able to run any normal Java app without "hacks"

[-] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 17 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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[-] CPU@lemdro.id 7 points 7 months ago

Android has moved on from Java 7 for years, Android 14 is Java 17 now

https://developer.android.com/about/versions/14/behavior-changes-14

[-] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 3 points 7 months ago

harmonyos is almost aosp where they did a "search and replace" for "android" strings

i understood "HarmonyOS NEXT" is different, if it's not rewritten from scratch then it's a waste of time+money, forcing devs to port apps for "it's almost the same but it's a bit different" it's not a smart idea

[-] evo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago

Could be worse. I'd take a Java 7 over Objective-C any day of the day.

Also what exactly is stopping developers from using Kotlin? It compiles to the same bytecode. Is there a framework that can't be imported? I thought IntelliJ handed all of that, not Google.

[-] pgetsos@kbin.social 2 points 7 months ago

Also the native apps look like they are written on Java? Or based on JVM

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 3 points 7 months ago

if it's still based on a jvm then they're dumb and it's a decision that makes no sense

[-] Not_mikey@lemmy.world 21 points 7 months ago

Get ready for even more "apps" that are just glorified web views of their mobel site.

[-] Auli@lemmy.ca 3 points 7 months ago

that's a vast majority of apps already, oh i guess they add tracking also.

this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023

77 points (94.3% liked)

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