source for planned integration: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/392521081?utm_source=...

Security-wise: True; but Android is a gigantic yet well-oiled ecosystem at this point, from silicon designers to manufacturers to vendors to developers, running on handhelds to TVs to wearables to gaming devices (including AR/VR consoles).

> shame that Chrome OS was subsumed by Android

ChromeOS had a decade but Google is wise focus on just one desktop platform. I don't think it should surprise anybody that a platform with 3bn users & 2mn odd apps won out.

Hopefully they work on that.

It's always funny charging my phone off the USB C for my monitor, nudging my mouse and seeing a pointer appear on the screen though.

I think Samsung recently added a "desktop Dex" mode that's supposed to be less mobile-ui. I haven't tried it tho.

I feel this a lot. I use it daily, mostly as a thin client for remote desktop use but there are little niggles that would make it better. Examples:

- Let me control how the top bar and taskbar are viewed

- Let games capture the mouse in remote desktop (for fps type games)

- Fix the small issues that cause the mouse capture to fail on steam link occasionally

- Fix rendering issues with firefox while in desktop mode

- Let the youtube UI work in a more "desktop" way while in dex mode

These might be mostly app responsibilities, but if they could fix some of this stuff dex would be a dream instead of just being mostly useful.

The hardware can do it, it's just that the system settings won't show you the 4K resolution option for some reason. But you can do some hacks to make it appear and then it works just fine.

You need to install a nondescript app called 'Samsung Good Lock' from the Samsung store (not available in Play store), and use that to side-load an app called 'Multistar', which is an app to tweak display settings. From that side-loaded app you need to tap the 'I Samsung DeX' which does various setting changes to "Make Dex even more friendly", it doesn't specify what it does exactly, but it'll make the 4K resolution option appear in the system settings.

This all feels real sketchy and I don't understand why Samsung doesn't just enable 4K resolution officially, because the hardware is clearly capable of it.

With every OneUI update there are rumors that it'll natively support 4K, but so far that hasn't happened AFAIK. Admittedly I haven't used Dex in a while for myself, but judging from recent Reddit posts this hack is still needed.

It felt so close already back then, sluggish, but still usable. But that initial implementation was running some in-house version of Ubuntu with a custom kernel (if I remembered it correctly).

I just wish this becomes a reality much sooner then later. Especially if I can have my dev environment on some remote VPS with either tunneling, github code spaces or Azure DevBox

Honestly I'd like to see Windows 11 running under this as well, but that seems incredibly unlikely.

https://9to5google.com/2018/11/09/samsung-linux-on-dex-andro...

It was the Ubuntu 16.04 desktop running in a LXD container. It crashed when the tablet went in out of memory, so I had to be careful with what I was running.

So the development wasn't local, but it was sort-of usable. (And the editing is local in any case.)

I run my S23 Ultra with a pair of XReal One's, and a folding Bluetooth keyboard (DeX let's you use your phone as a touchpad). It is really amazing in widescreen mode sitting in a coffee shop, reading through technical documents and answering work email. When I'm done, it can all fold up and fit in a (spacious) pair of cargo shorts.

I think Samsung has played the long game on DeX, with an eye towards their collaborative XR glasses with Google next year. As great as XReal has been, I am eager to see a "first-party" solution.

Are the Xreal One's that much of a step forward that you can use it for serious work? Even on my Quest Pro I find it just on the edge of being too annoying to do coding-work. Web browsing is decent.

And second question, worth buying the One or waiting for the One Pros?

I wear glasses with mine, yet I still find it surprisingly crisp for text in ultra-wide mode. I'd say it is a fairly unobtrusive experience. It also helps that the nose pads don't dig into my skin.

That said, if a Quest Pro isn't good enough, I hesitate to recommend it. The FOV is certainly smaller on the One.

It's not perfect but usable.

I can easily see the future of personal computing being a mobile device with peripherals that use its compute and cloud for anything serious. be that airpods, glasses, watches, or just hooking that device up to a larger screen.

theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others.

Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.

I remember when everyone thought we were going to throw out our desktops and do all our work on phones and tablets! (Someone who kept insisting on this finally admitted that they couldn't do a spreadsheet on a phone or tablet.)

> Given that all the compute and all the data is on the cloud, there is little point in making ways for users to do clever interconnect things with their local devices.

IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.

We're almost there. The cool kids are already using 12" touchscreen ARM devices that people from 10 or 20 years ago would probably think of as tablets. Some kinds of work benefit greatly from a keyboard, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want oneall the time - I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".

> I still think the future is either 360-fold laptops with a good tablet mode (indeed that's the present for me, my main machine is a HP Envy) or something like the MS Surface line with their detachable "keyboard cover".

I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop.

I do agree that laptops might get better tablet modes, but if you want to have a full-sized comfortable-ish keyboard, the laptop is gonna be more unwieldy than a dedicated tablet.

The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else. But even today the cost of desktop processing components that can reach phone-like performance is almost a rounding error; just because they have so much more space, cooling and power to play with.

(Destop CPUs can be quite pricey if you buy higher end ones, but they'll outclass phones by comical amounts. Phone performance is really, really cheap in a desktop.)

> The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else.

Having used the same device as my tablet/laptop/desktop for a few years (previously a couple of generations of Surface Book, now the Envy, in both cases with a dock set up on my desk), I never want to go back. It just makes using it so much smoother, even compared to having tab sync and what have you between multiple devices. It's not a money thing, it's a convenience thing, which is why I think it'll win out in the end.

I think as hardware continues to get thinner and lighter, the advantage of a tablet-only device compared to a tablet/laptop will disappear, and as touchscreens get cheaper, there'll be little point in laptop-only devices. I definitely still want an easy way to take a keyboard with my device on the train/plane, and I don't know what exact hardware arrangement will win out for that, but I'm confident that the convergence will happen. I think phone convergence will also happen eventually, for the same reason, but how that will actually work in terms of the physical form factor is anyone's guess.

Yes, that's useful. But eg ChromeOS already gives you most of that, and a bit of software could get you all the way there.

> I think as hardware continues to get thinner and lighter, the advantage of a tablet-only device compared to a tablet/laptop will disappear, and as touchscreens get cheaper, there'll be little point in laptop-only devices.

I agree with the latter, but not the former. There are mechanical limits to shrinking a keyboard, and still preserve comfort.

(And once you have the extra space from a keyboard, you might as well fill it up with more battery. But I'm not so sure about that compared to the argument about physical lower bounds on keyboard size.)

I don't understand what you mean here. If you're talking about some kind of easy sync between devices software, people have been trying to make that work for decades, but they not haven't succeeded but haven't even really made any progress.

> There are mechanical limits to shrinking a keyboard, and still preserve comfort.

Maybe, but those limits are plenty big enough for a tablet - particularly with the size of phones these days, a tablet smaller than say 10" is pointless, and the keyboards on 11" laptops are fine. Now making a device that can work as both a phone and a laptop-with-keyboard will probably require some mechanical innovation, yes, but that's the sort of thing that I suspect will be figured out sooner or later, e.g. we're already seeing various types of folding phones going through the development process.

I think that's to generative AI, I would expect people to gradually replace manually creating a spreadsheet with 'vibecoding' it.

> IMO, it's a pain-in-the-ass to manage multiple devices, so IMO, it's much easier to just plug my phone into a clamshell and have all my apps show up there.

ChromeOS already works like that, when you log in on different devices, without having to physically lug one device around that you plug into different shells.

That said, market incentives can and do change pretty fast. Especially with climate change, and current tension in global supply chains, we could see a shift away from hardware caused by taxes or pirce hikes (I'm not saying we will though).

That'd be a game changer for how much companies might invest in changing what computing looks like.

I don't see that at all.

That's because I think over time the processing power of a eg laptop will become a small fraction of its costs (both in terms of buying and in terms of power).

The laptop form factor is pretty good for having a portable keyboard, pointing device and biggish screen together. Outsourcing the compute to a phone still leaves you with the need for keyboard, pointing device and screen. You only save on the processor, which is going to be a smaller and smaller part.

> theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others.

Even in your scenario, most of your devices will be idle most of the time anyway. And they don't use any energy when turned off. So you are only saving the cost to acquire the processor itself.

Desktop computer processors that can hit the computing power of a mobile processor are really, really cheap already today.

Having all your data always with you stored locally (on your phone) is simpler than syncing and more private than cloud.

One OS with all your software. No need to install same app multiple times on different devices. Don't need to deal with questions like, for how many devices is my license valid for. However, apps would need to come with a reactive UI. No more separate mobile and desktop versions.

Example, you take a photos on your phone, dock it at your desk or laptop shell, and edit them comfortably on a big screen, with an app you bought and installed once. No internet connection is required.

A docking station could be more than just display and input devices. It could contain storage for backing up your data from the phone. Or powerful CPU and GPU for extended compute power (you would still use OS and apps/games on your phone with computations being delegated to more powerful HW).

This could replicate many things cloud offers today (excluding collaboration). No need to deal with an online account for your personal stuff. IMO, it would probably be less mystical than cloud to most users.

Really, the compute on a phone has been good enough for at least a decade now once we got USB C. We're still largely doing on our phones and laptops the same things we were doing in 2005. I'm surprised it took this long

I'm happy this is becoming a real thing. I hope they'll also allow the phone's screen to be used like a trackpad. It wouldn't be ideal, but there's no reason the touchscreen can't be a fully featured input device.

I'm fully agreed with you on the wasted processing power-- I think we'll eventually head toward a model of having one computing device with a number of thin clients which are locally connected.

I might have misunderstood but do you mean as an input device attached to your desktop computer? Kdeconnect has made that available for quite some time out of the box. (Although it's been a long time since I used it and when I tested it just now apparently I've somehow managed to break the input processing half of the software on my desktop in the interim.)

Approximately no-one was watching 4k feature-length videos on their phones in 2005, or playing ray traced 3d games on their laptops.

Sending plain text messages is pretty much the same as back then, yes. But these days I'm also taking high resolution photos and videos and share those with others via my phone.

> I hope they'll also allow the phone's screen to be used like a trackpad.

Samsung's DeX already does that.

> I'm fully agreed with you on the wasted processing power-- I think we'll eventually head toward a model of having one computing device with a number of thin clients which are locally connected.

Your own 'good enough' logic already suggests otherwise? Processors are still getting cheap and better, so why not just duplicate them? Instead of having a dumb large screen (and keyboard) that you plug your phone into, it's not much extra cost to add some processing power to that screen, and make it a full desktop pc.

If we are getting to 'thin client' world, it'll be because of 'cloud', not because of connecting to our phones. Even today, most of what people do on their desktops can be done in the browser. So we likely see more of that.

In a way it's the same strategy that Nintendo used to re-gain a strong position in gaming (including the lucrative Home Console market where they'd fallen to a distant last place) - drafting their dominance in Handheld into Home Console by merging the two.

The only things I can think of are you really want to keep all the data on your phone and don't want to use cloud sync solutions (Dropbox etc.), or you really want to save a couple of hundred dollars getting a (probably terrible) laptop without a motherboard. Not very compelling IMO.

And the hardware to get an SoC with phone-like performance in a laptop or desktop form factor is relatively cheap, just because you have so much more space and power and cooling to work with.

(Your laptop-shell definitely needs its own power supply, whether that be a battery or a cable, because the screen alone will take more power than your phone's battery can provide for any sustained period of use.)

The compute power yes, but the OSs and UX are shit.

I’ve always wondered if this kind of thing is actually that useful, but it’s not even an option for me because of the above.

Seems surprising Google didn’t act on this earlier. But maybe they didn’t want to cannibalize the Chromebooks?

I get the feeling very very few people know this exists at all on some Samsung phones. I’ve asked some tech-y people with Samsungs about it before and they didn’t even know it existed.

That is why I am rooting for Samsung DeX and what Google is offering: Samsung and Google can make money for their own reasons making a universal personal digital device.

I think we've seen this before. Back before phones were "smart" there was one (Nokia, maybe?) that you could put on a little dock into which you could plug a keyboard and monitor.

Obviously, it didn't take off. Perhaps it was ahead of its time. Or, as you say, it wasn't done well at the time.

Phones accepting Bluetooth keyboard connections was very common back in my road warrior (digital nomad) days, but the screen was always the annoyance factor. Writing e-mails on my SonyEricsson on a boat on the South China Sea felt like "the future!"

Slightly related, I built most of my first startup with a Palm Pilot Ⅲ and an attached keyboard. Again, though, a larger screen would have been a game changer.

What may shift the balance is that slowly but surely USB-C docks are becoming more common, on their own terms, not related to cell phones. At some point we may pass a critical threshold where there's enough of them that selling a phone that can just natively use any USB-C dock you've got lying around becomes a sufficient distinguishing feature that people start looking for it. Even just treating it as a bonus would be a start.

I've got two docks in my house now; one a big powerful one to run the work-provided laptop in a more remote-work-friendly form factor, and fairly cheap one to turn my Steam deck into a halfway-decent Switch competitor (though "halfway-decent" and no more; it's definitely more finicky). We really ought to be getting to the point that a cell phone with a docked monitor, keyboard, & mouse for dorm room usage (replacing the desktop, TV, and if whoever pulls this off plays their cards right, the gaming console(s)) should start looking appealing to college students pretty soon here. The docks themselves are rapidly commoditizing if they aren't there already.

Once it becomes a feature that we increasingly start to just expect on our phones, then maybe the "notebook-like" case for a cell phone starts to look more appealing as an accessory. We've pretty much demonstrated it can't carry itself as its own product.

That would probably start the clock on the "notebook" as its own distinct product, though it would take years for them to finally be turned into nothing but shells for cell phones + a high-end, expensive performance-focused line that is itself more-or-less the replacement for desktops, which would themselves only be necessary for high-end graphics or places where you need tons and tons of storage and you don't want 10 USB-C drives flopping around separately.

Still in the "smart" era, but the Motorola Atrix allowed that, but with its own laptop form factor dock.

https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-does-the-motorola-atrix-4g-...

There have been multiple attempts at this over the years.

https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-sma...

Agreed. For this reason I'm quite excited about glasses like the Xreal One Pro. Having to carry around with me just my phone, a pair of glasses and a lightweight Bluetooth keyboard would be a game changer for me in terms of ergonomics.

An M4 Mac is way more powerful than an iPhone 16, but the iPhone is powerful enough to prove a much better experience on normal tasks compared to what that 2010 phone could at the time.

Basically I think everything has enough headroom that it’s not the compromise it would’ve been before. The biggest constraints on an iPhone’s performance are the battery and cooling. If you’re plugged in the battery doesn’t matter. And unless you’re not playing a fancy game cooling may not be an issue due to headroom.

Obviously the trend didn't take off

What's strange is that vanilla OS does show a taskbar (tablet mode) if you increase DPI to 600+. Theoretically you can get a taskbar now only if tablet mode taskbar could show up in secondary virtual displays.

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/blob/master/doc/virtual...

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/issues/6032

Maybe this is the answer? Even though I don't need the screen, the footprint of a smartphone is smaller than almost all SBC supporting the above requirements.

Women in tech loved the concept: instead of carrying a laptop they could use the medium-size tablet we provided and have a wireless mouse and keyboard both at the office and at home. We also provided a monitor for both home and the office.

The project didn't lauch commercially because in our tests the microusb to micro-hdmi cables caused a lot of issues and management decided against it.

The screen could be used as a touchpad

I wish there was a phone-laptop-dock solution that wasn't as expensive as an equivalent Chromebook. My phone is more than powerful enough to act as a travel laptop, yet its potential is constrained by a small touch screen..

I've only ever used Nexus/Pixel phones which haven't supported USB-C external monitors until just 1.5 years ago with the Pixel 8.

In case glasses are an option, I heard that Xreal glasses can be hooked up to Android phones directly. Such a setup with a proper Android desktop mode (or even better: a Linux VM with all one's dotfiles and everything) would be fantastic IMO.

Sadly like many of their great features it was not well known....

https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/6/9464639/microsoft-windows...

I use Moonlight to remote to my desktop. Moonlight on Windows can capture Windows key(and some other shortcut like alt-tab) and redirect to remote machine.

Moonlight on Android can't do that, the dev this is Android issue and can't do anything about it.

The only thing that wouldn't work was a ruby CSS library that had a (if processor='arm') {crash()}.

What a pleasure to have a computer in your pocket.

I've done that with my Pixel 8a connected to external screen and input devices. Works ok.

I wonder if we'll see USB-C docks for phones with fans blowing at the device for improved thermals.

If they nail the Linux container UX as well as ChromeOS it would motivate me to buy a top-tier device rather than my sluggish Fairphone 4, right now I don't see the usecase other than good camera.

Imagine thst a large userbase could just skip the laptop and desktop in favor of a USB-C dock and a decent display :)

Are they though? Phones already have a broad range of uses. I've seen people try to make laptops out of them and it just doesn't make sense for a number of reasons:

- As screen size goes up so do battery requirements, so you're already paying for a screen, a chassis, and a physical keyboard. Why not go the whole way and pay for the silicon?

- When your phone is being a PC it's no longer being a phone; you can't do phone calls and camera photos (at least not well) while it's a PC.

I have a Samsung and use Dex occasionally, but the uses are limited. In my case it's to check personal emails, which is not allowed on the corporate network. But outside of cases like this I can't imagine ever preferring Dex to a laptop or a dedicated computer. It's much better at being a phone.

I travel a lot and do not like carrying things, so xreal and phone are more than enough for coding while going day long, easily augmented with a small power bank (unlike a laptop), with all of that fitting in my pockets after I drop my luggage at the hotel. Most my colleagues have macbooks and while they have good battery life, it is no comparison: the search for places with power outlets starts when I am not even at 50%. It is not an apples to apples as I do a lot of compute in the cloud, but even with that on the laptops, they still last a lot shorter and you cannot plug in normal power banks.

I'm a developer so I have my needs which are unlikely to be "completely fulfilled" by a Phone-as-computer either.

However "as screen size goes up so does battery requirements", my thought was to keep the device docked in a Dex dock with PD and a fan for cooling, and since the resolution on modern phones is so damn crazy, as long as the device screen isn't pumping pixels when connected it should be fine to do 2k.

While it's a PC it's docked so you can't take calls on the phone easily (unless you have a long cable) but you could with a headset. Now I am not talking about the Dex implementation, I'm in the "what can be" discussion for the future.

For "normal people" a good Android desktop would be a lot better than not having a "desktop setup" at all. They don't have to buy a new device but can still get a mouse/keyboard/display combo and so some "productivity tasks".

I tried Dex out on a S10 or something but it wasn't enough for me other than as a cool gimmick, but I definitely see a usecase that could become widespread.

The silicon only has to be fancy, because phones are so constraint in terms of space, power and cooling.

Getting phone-like performance in a desktop or laptop form factor and power and cooling budget is a lot simpler and cheaper.

> They don't have to buy a new device but can still get a mouse/keyboard/display combo and so some "productivity tasks".

The point was that they do have to buy a new device. The only thing they don't have to buy is new silicon. But that's trivial compared to everything else.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/samsung-dex-first-impre...

Yeah - I don’t think the user base interested in container UX is “large” in relation to the mobile world.

Also, who wants to carry around a display with its own battery, a keyboard with its own batteries, a mouse/trackpad (batteries) and cables for the above? At some point it’s honestly easier to just grab a MacBook Air and walk out the door.

And I don't know, the container UX people didn't exist for ChromeOS before ChromeOS made it easy to run Linux apps that way so.

Since Windows has started this iteration of their move to ARM, I wondered if Microsoft would be the first to do this properly, by building an adaptable/mobile Desktop/UX to Windows 12 (or 13), pumping up the Microsoft Store, and then relaunching the Windows (Surface, I guess) Phone with full fat Windows on it.

In a way it's the same strategy that Nintendo used to re-gain a strong position in gaming (including the lucrative Home Console market where they'd fallen to a distant last place) - drafting their dominance in Handheld into Home Console by merging the two.

If they really try to make a convergent Windows phone, I think they could make it if they manage to integrate Android apps into the Windows mobile UI. However, we are talking about Microsoft, so I doubt they'd actually manage to do it.

No.

This is baffling to read

They like to wait until stuff is “ready” to their standard. Android had 3G, 4G, and 5G first. OLED screens too.

Early folders had a lot of issues, but I know a lot of that has been sorted for years.

If it’s the size of my current phone and folds out to be twice as wide, that sounds kind of nice. Except it would be so thin I worry it would be flimsy and there wouldn’t be as much space for battery (which the open screen would use faster) so wouldn’t I get worse battery life?

Unless you make it twice as thick. Then it’s twice as thick.

And so I’m not sure that bigger screen would justify any of that for me. Now if it was three times as wide that might be significantly nice because now you’re approaching like iPad mini size. But that just makes the thinness/thickness problem worse.

If it’s say half the size of my current phone and then unfolds to be the size of my current phone (game boy SP style) I’m not sure that’s really buying me anything either. My phone is fine, I don’t need a twice as thick half as tall version in my pocket that’s not really gonna help me.

I have heard they’re popular with women which makes a certain amount of sense to me. Because if you’re going to just carry your phone in your bag then the fact that it’s twice as thick doesn’t matter that much but you get the bigger screen.

I’m a phone-in-pocket person.

So I don’t know, it’s just not making a lot of sense to me. But like I said I’ve never used one and it may be one of those things where after a couple of days the light would go on and I would totally get it. I questioned the Apple Watch at first and now I love it. But that’s not always how it goes.

It isn't. I went from Apple's 16 Pro to an Oppo Find N5. Battery size 16 Pro: 3,582mAh. Though in fairness the Oppo is the same size as an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which has 4,685mAh.

Battery size Oppo Find N5: 5600mAh 56% more than my old phone. 20% more than the 16 Pro Max. Silicon carbon batteries.

It's beautiful what can be done if we go with modern technology and not Apple's profit maximising regurgitation of the same same for many many years.

    Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6
    Weight  239 g (8.43 oz)

    Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max
    Weight  227 g (8.01 oz)

In addition Apple would be happy if people started upgrading their phones more frequently.

I've swapped dozens of users from iOS to Android in the last year or so and nobody has had issues. Over the years I've helped hundreds of people migrate. Most everyone really likes the freedom to use different apps or workflows.

The only folks who ever have problems are people who need to be told how to use their devices. Choices confuse them so android is overwhelming, which is understandable. That's where iOS excels. iOS dictates how users can do things, which works for some people but also atrophies people's understanding of technology. People learn to do as they're told, not how to think about what's going on. Apple's walled garden makes people worse at technology.

Also sounds like you bought a garbage bargain android device. Idk how something can barely work as a camera/powerbank unless user error is present.

While this may be the case - many iPhone users love their phones (and iOS) for a different reason.

I've been with Android for some time: rooting, custom builds, different launchers, you name it. And it was fun back when I was in my early 20s, when had the time for this and when it was something new (HTC One, the very first model was my last Android phone).

Then I've bought iPhone 6 (I had switched from Arch to macOS few months earlier) and tried a few android phones since.

I simply don't need those "workflows".

I need about a dozen apps (the ones I use almost daily), I want them to be thought through (like Drafts) and I want my OS to work and behave the same way at least 5 years later (not to mention security updates and such).

This is where iPhone delivers and where Android quite often fails. I have iPhone 13 now and I can be sure that even few years from now everything will just work the same way does now.

>Idk how something can barely work as a camera/powerbank unless user error is present.

I literally explained this in the comment. the device doesn't connect to my laptop when I plug it in, meaning that I can't transfer photos off it easily

your entire comment smells viciously of "oh my god! how dare he not have had a good experience with android. my poor baby android..."

if I was biased I wouldn't have bought an android in the first place

AFAIK Google got rid of built-in support for this in Android Jelly Bean. Additional tricks are needed to make later versions of Android behave as a USB Mass Storage device. If it works for you out of the box, I suspect it may be specific to your Android distro.

certainly not

And you have the bonus that with a Pixel you can remove big tech from the equation when needed with GrapheneOS.

That said, I would only recommend people to buy Pixel or Samsung A5x or up. They are the only Android phones that have reliable monthly updates [1], plus they are the only two brands that are not vague about having a truly separated secure enclave (Titan M2/Knox Vault respectively). Other vendors don't really talk about it and probably only use ARM TrustZone.

[1] Pixel is the only phone that gets them really on time, but with Samsung it's normally within a month on A5x and the flagships.

In 2025? I got my first Android phone, what, 15 years ago and I've never transferred files over USB because why would I.

Yes. It literally protects your precious photos from being stolen if you plug your phone somewhere else, but the only thing you need to pull down the notification bar and tap to allow the file transfer.

Like it notifies you when you plug it in, if you didn't notice it even once - how can it be not a skill issue?

> is it a skill issue that swiping from the left goes back to the previous page and swiping from the right also goes back to the previous page

... in what app? If this is Chrome then ask Google why. Or install Firefox, DuckDuckGo or whatever else.

> is it a skill issue that google translate requires me to have the google search app installed

Yes, Google tries to stick it's d** everywhere. Just like Apple, though you don't talk shit about Greatest Jobs' Company, because you like it.

BTW, I have an official Google Translate app and I don't have the Search bullshit on the home screen. I literally have nothing except DDG and Camera shortcuts. Android 12, Moto G8. Because you know, you can disable apps.

Anyway I could happily get a couple more years out of as a main PC, then it will probably have a few years in it as a hand-me-down or tv computer.

That said, I generally agree that, I mean, we’re going to get phones anyway so it is nice to get something useful out of them.

Who's having a CPU shortage? You know, factories can produce more CPUs?

Does anyone use DeX?

It’s what Stage Manager on iPads should have been: a regular, boring laptop mode to make multitasking on a large tablet screen usable without Apple unnecessarily trying to put their own unique spin on it.

Since I got my hands on a Daylight Computer, I have basically been doing the same thing but with a tablet Android environment instead of DeX. It's been nice, but I would love a nicer window manager when I have a keyboard and mouse connected.

I chose Motorola for the same reason (they have their own variant of dex which works smooth).

The whole point of having USB C phones is to connect to desktop docks and get full featured computers. Instead we have muzzled devices.

I would love something that I can use and maybe even use an RDP on, to function as a full desktop computer.

But like all common sense improvements, some come just too late after the boat has sailed.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum

But when you kill the non-PC platforms, you're just left with a reduced capability version of windows apps

The first modern thing like this that I can recall is the 2011 Android-based Motorola Atrix phone[1] that presented a DeX-like desktop (well before DeX!).

It used an Ubuntu-based desktop. It was really, really good, but never got traction.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G

I feel like this is something that could spur Windows/Windows Phone adoption in modern times.

>Use it as a desktop PC

> Connect your device to a monitor or TV, and it expands into a windowed desktop. Productivity like on a traditional PC.

  0: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-desktop-mode-leak-3550321/

I can’t imagine android going faster than chrome at a native level either.

Long story short is you can imagine in 2019 there was X amount of engineers, 95% on Android and 5% on what you'd call Fuchsia.

The central argument up top became about why the renegade band that split off from Android/Chrome etc. to do Fuchsia in...early to mid 2010s?...and if it was going to provide a significant step forward. This became framed in terms of "$ of devices shipped", in which case, there was no contest.

Funnily enough this very article is about N dominos down from there (de-investment in Fuchsia, defenestration of head software guy of Android/Chrome/Chrome OS etc., ex. Moto hardware guy is in charge now)

Don't read this comment too closely, I was not in the room. For example, I have absolutely no actual quotes, or relayed quotes, to 100% confirm some set of individuals became focused on # of devices shipped.

Just obsessive enough to track wtf was going on, and on big enough projects, and trustworthy and hard working, and clearly without party or clique, such that I could get good info when asked, as it was clear my only concern was making things that were good and making sure all of Google's products could be part of that story.

One part I find hard to reconcile with all of that is that even just looking at public facing stuff alone it seems to be under VERY active development.

I count 100 commits in just the past 24 hrs here: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+log and it’s been at that pace for a LONG time.

Which leads me to ask… what is up with it in your opinion because that’s hard to match up with DOA

Also I wasn’t making up the idea that they were in the process of bringing in this “microfuchsia” VM into Android although it’s purpose is unclear.

It's still shipping, successfully, on millions(?) of devices yearly via Nest Hubs and such. Never say never. But all public-facing signs are fairly clear, the big move is ChromeOS into Android, not Android onto Fuchsia - and note how invested Google is in the Nest Hubs (read: not at all, languished for years now)

(I'm also curious if we could get a stats-based thing on, say, 2019 vs. 2024, My out-of-thin-air prior would be 30% more activity in 2019 than now. But I also figured there was 10 commits a day now, not 100.)

(I tried checking out the whole repo, but then all the apps on my macbook informed me en masse there was 0 disk space left :X Doesn't look like there's a GitHub mirror)

(cheers btw, you're my kind of people, one of the more soul-sucking parts of Google was finding out that kind of person is few, and far between) (i.e. curious and into It, not just here to make your boss or partner happy)

Do you think it’s possible that thinking evolved slightly beyond the number of devices shipped in the meantime perhaps?

I’d always been on the opinion of even just assuming they got to a point where the whole starnix linux syscall compatibility layer thing (which is what I see a lot of recent commits pointing towards) to a good point and stopped that it would still make sense in so many use cases that it would have been justified.

It would also change the number of devices shipped question from 1 dying product line to billions overnight which certainly might change the conversation and furthermore would put them into a pretty unique commercial position for more high assurance computing given the security model which would have a lot of follow on effects presumably

Also thanks again for taking the time to answer, you’re right I am genuinely very curious about this.

Just one example article, using a chroot environment:

https://www.nextpit.com/turn-your-android-device-into-a-linu...

But Ubuntu touch, and other native linux phone installs have touted desktop mode over the years.

The h/w 10 years ago was marginal at performing this task, and the non-corporate OSes were, and are, actively suppressed by goggle and the rest of the corporate "phone" development industry. This is an almost identical scenario as M$ dominating the PC manufacturing business, even though they didn't make the h/w.

But this serves as another typical example of how long ago this type of feature could have been available if every new innovation didn't have to be vetted from the perspective of vendor benefit, instead of advancing on the basis of user benefit.

Indeed, the primary "core thing" missing is being manufactured and dictated to "the market" by a multi-billion $ monopoly...

> This happens all the time where stories get flagged for no reason.

It's not for no reason—it just feels that way when you see flags on an article that you think is a good one for HN.

Judging from what else the same users have flagged, along with the responses you got in this thread, my guess is that they thought the submitted article (https://www.squaredtech.co/googles-desktop-view-android-phon...) wasn't good enough for HN. Indeed, it has the markings of blogspam (content lifted from other sources).

Normally we'd leave the flags alone on a post like this, but the comments in this thread are surprisingly good, so I've turned off the flags and replaced the URL with an earlier article which has the same material and which in fact, it (almost?) looks like the other article was cribbed from.

I was asking if there is not an inverse function, which would be a higher karma unflag operation, on the assumption people who flag up are being somewhat incautious and a smaller set of people could say "no, this is worth seeing"

I have no problem with flagging per se, or with my own ability to see flagged content.

What I’d really like is a personal computer I can plug into a screen to work, then carry with me when I’m done. That would be a real step forward in personal computing. It would make laptops unnecessary.

https://www.androidpolice.com/android-15-linux-terminal-app/

As linked somewhere else in the thread, Google wants to extend it to run (non-Android) Linux desktop apps besides Android apps. So once this is refined, plugging in an Android phone will give you a general-purpose desktop.

Exciting times!

Something like a Steam Deck or RoG Ally could also fit the bill. Gaming handhelds seem to be turning into "phones but if they didn't suck" (i.e. didn't run Android/iOS).

Devices with hardware keyboards were easier to use for creation (especially writing) and more of the software was focused on creation because of the more limited media processing capabilities of those devices (e.g. less processing power, less memory, more restricted media codecs at that time).