Tag: improvements

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Mobile Syrup

Android updates set to get faster with improvements to seamless updates

Android updates may soon get a little faster for people using devices that support seamless updates.

Seamless updates, for those unfamiliar with the feature, were introduced back in 2016. It manages updates across multiple partitions, allowing Android to download and install new updates in the background without disrupting the user. Once everything’s ready to go, users simply reboot the smartphone, and Android starts up on the new, updated partition.

Google’s Pixel phones use the seamless updates feature, but not every manufacturer has gotten on board. Notably, Samsung hasn’t adopted seamless updates.

Anyway, Esper senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman spotted some changes coming to the seamless update system that should help speed things up. Per Rahman’s tweets, Googe is moving the writing of COW operations to batches, which means they will finish faster. Second, seamless updates will start using two threads for running compression.

With those two pieces in place, seamless updates should happen significantly faster. For example, the installation time for a ‘full’ 2.2GB update would drop from 23 minutes to 13 minutes, while a smaller ‘incremental’ update sized at 376MB would drop from 22 minutes to 16 minutes.

Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear when these changes will hit Android devices. Regardless, it’s good to see Google improving on basic systems like this. These updates may not be flashy, but they’re important.

Source: Mishaal Rahman (Twitter) via: 9to5Google

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Google may expand Pixel Launcher search to include screenshots, widgets

Google is working on ways to improve the excellent new search features in the Pixel Launcher with capabilities like widget search and more.

The changes were spotted by Esper’s Mishaal Rahman (via Android Police). Rahman was able to enable hidden flags in the Android 13 Developer Preview 2 Pixel Launcher to turn on the new search capabilities.

With the capabilities, Pixel Launcher’s search can pull up widgets, screenshots stored in Google Photos, and display Google search suggestions.

Android Police notes that the screenshot results were rumoured to roll out late last year, but the rumoured release never happened.

Overall, the improvements look welcome — as things currently stand, finding widgets on your Pixel can be cumbersome. Finding screenshots this way seems neat, although I’m not sure how often I’ll need to quickly pull up screenshots from my app drawer.

As for adding Google Search suggestions, that’s mostly meaningless to me since I hardly use Google Search, but as long as it doesn’t bog down the Pixel Launcher search bar, I don’t mind the addition.

With the launch of Android 12, Google added a whole new system search to the app drawer in the Pixel Launcher. Powered by the ‘Android System Intelligence’ app, the system search is blazing fast and a great way to quickly find apps and, sometimes, the content within apps. For example, I often use the app drawer search bar to look up settings and jump straight to the one I want instead of scrolling around in the Settings app.

Unfortunately, these changes don’t appear to fix my biggest pet peeve with the Pixel Launcher: the Google Search bar pinned to the bottom of the home screen. There’s nothing wrong with the search bar per se, but I hate that it’s specifically a Google search and not the much-improved (and way more useful) system search.

Source: Mishaal Rahman (Twitter) Via: Android Police