[HN Gopher] Back to Android for the time being
___________________________________________________________________
Back to Android for the time being
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-10-10 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (proxy.vulpes.one)
(TXT) w3m dump (proxy.vulpes.one)
| kop316 wrote:
| I really wish OP would try a distro other than Manjaro. But since
| they are, frankly, I am not at all surprised at stability issues.
| I do not think I have seen any of these issues on a non-Manjaro
| distro. For some more context:
|
| https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495274
|
| Manjaro consistently applies incomplete and WIP patches into
| their builds, causing that sort of instability. Every time I have
| had a strange issue filed in a program I maintain, it has been
| traced back to Manjaro doing something like that.
| jm4 wrote:
| Manjaro sucks. The thing is, it's really nice out of the box -
| frankly, it's probably the nicest OOB experience. Their desktop
| looks great and the layout switcher is cool. I also like the
| utility that lets you choose different kernel versions. The
| pamac package manager is great (if you ignore the fact that it
| has some problems with the way it works with AUR).
| Unfortunately, it has all kinds of problems under the hood that
| will eventually bite the kind of user Manjaro is trying to
| attract. It's a strange situation where one has to be familiar
| with Arch to understand why Manjaro isn't working.
|
| IMO, Manjaro should take the Endeavour route and just use the
| upstream repositories. Manjaro does a lot right and brings some
| good ideas, but they are really lacking on the reliability and
| professionalism fronts.
| stiray wrote:
| Unrelated to android, but I would just like to mention, that
| today best working implementation of linux on phones is Sailfish
| OS ( https://sailfishos.org/ - not connected with them all, but I
| use it as daily driver after years of searching; I was using
| angstrom distro on HTC Blueangel so you can imagine I have
| searched for long ). It would be really nice if the community
| would concentrate on one distribution instead supporting 674 of
| them and have none really usable.
| ngrost24 wrote:
| I'm not an expert in the area and hadn't heard about Sailfish
| before, so I took a look and stumbled on this article [0] of
| Rosteltelekom (Russian national company) acquiring majority in
| the company Jolla that produces Sailfish OS, which makes
| everything about Sailfish a bit less enticing from a security
| perspective.
|
| Another article [1] from a few months back says that
| Rosteltelekom owns about 45% and Jolla is trying to find
| another EU company to buy those shares, but didn't see anything
| more recent.
|
| [0] https://together.jolla.com/question/178875/rostelecom-
| acquir...
|
| [1] https://www.engadget.com/jolla-samuli-simojoki-post-
| russia-1...
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I would agree and I find it sad/odd that it never really
| managed to get any active developer community traction.
| RussianCow wrote:
| Sailfish isn't fully open source, which makes the comparison to
| other Linux distributions moot.
| stiray wrote:
| It works, which gives everything else that doesnt work a joke
| prefix.
|
| I am not here to support Stallman style political warfare
| "who is more open source and less working".
|
| I am just stating the obvious. Sailfish works. Everything
| else I have seen is a non working joke, that is unusable.
| Feel free to prove me wrong.
|
| Not with bullshit, downvoting and PRing. URL please.
|
| Not political BSing about which project is completely open
| source but no one sane would use as it is completely
| unusable. Which is actually the topic here.
|
| Open source is great but < working phone (less than 10 years
| old), with usable front and back camera, 4g, phone calls that
| don't reset your phone, SMS messages that are actually
| delivered and... oh... ah... Bruce Almighty... working
| fingerprint reader.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Why is the camera so bad? I know author says the sensor is bad
| but I suspect it is more than that. It amazes me to see what raw
| images look like coming off a CCD and then what software stacks
| like the one in the iPhone (and apparently Pixel) will do to get
| such an amazing final result.
|
| I think there is a lot of secret sauce that perhaps is lacking in
| the Pine software stack.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| > In addition, it'll crash while taking or making calls.
|
| Thanks for giving me flashbacks to my Hiptop days. I loved
| messing with the apps, and the camera. My friends pointed out
| that a phone that had a flip put keyboard and apps but often
| crashed while being a phone was not much of a phone. :)
|
| Luckily the Hiptop crew went on to make Android, which got to be
| rock solid, eventually!
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Well... rock solid, except that sometimes it crashes when
| trying to call emergency services.
|
| https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pixel-phones-struggling...
| pwinnski wrote:
| I really appreciate seeing people committed to the open source or
| free software causes so much that they accept very clearly
| inferior experiences.
|
| I also really appreciate seeing that for some people, there are
| limits to just _how_ inferior they are willing for those
| experiences to be.
|
| Very relatable. Thank you.
|
| _from my closed-source iPhone 14 Pro_
| pathartl wrote:
| Some people are willing to make that sacrifice because their
| limited feature set doesn't impede on their day-to-day use. I
| know quite a few people who use their phone for nothing but
| texting, a camera, and two factor auth.
|
| Hell, I, who would be considered a power user, spend 99% of the
| time on my phone browsing the web, Reddit, some Facebook, using
| a calculator, or taking photos. Most of my computing is done on
| an actual computer because the form factor of a phone just
| doesn't satisfy my needs.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| The reason why I'm on Android instead of a iOS 1200 euro
| Apple device with fancy sensors is because I don't give a
| shit about making pictures or videos.
| Semaphor wrote:
| For me, that is also why my phone was 200EUR
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Exactly, Android has phones in the under 400 euro range.
|
| I'm just not a cool person flashing expensive iPhone
| taking Instagram pictures. Drop the camera suite and
| image processing and you can cut half the cost of a
| smartphone!
| mellosouls wrote:
| To test your hypothesis I just googled the articles Pixel 2 vs
| it's competitor iPhone 8. In both the top two search results
| the Pixel (narrowly) bested the iPhone, so looks like maybe a
| bit of rose-tinted brand-owners perspective in your case?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| And now fast forward 5 years and the iPhone 8 is still
| getting full OS updates and the Pixel 2 stopped getting basic
| security patches 2 years ago.
|
| At this point I think I qualify as a career Android developer
| (did other stuff but just _a lot_ of time on Android) and my
| joking reply to anyone who asks why I use an iPhone is:
|
| > I'll switch back when Android can handle a screen rotation
| without blanking the screen.
|
| The thing is, the fact there's no smooth rotation isn't
| literally a blocker, but it's what such a subtle thing
| represents: Android apps are still living with the complexity
| of a situation that showed up because of the limitations of
| the 256 MB of RAM the Android G1 had in 2008.
|
| -
|
| They're still doing this messy state restoration stuff where
| the OS essentially has to kill part of your app to support a
| basic rotation, they never went back and fixed it as phones
| matured, bad configuration change handling easily causes
| hundreds of thousands of crashes a day for end users,
| constantly throws a wrench in development that Google has had
| to invent many different catcher's mitts for, drains
| resources that would be better used on improving the user-
| facing functionality of these apps.
|
| And this isn't the only feature like that. There are so many
| basic sharp edges of the OS UX-wise that will just seemingly
| never get fixed, and even if were fixed tomorrow, it'd be at
| least 6 years before those improvements represented even 90%
| of the Android userbase (something iOS tends to achieve
| within 12 months...)
|
| [and before the nitpickers show up, yes you can override
| configuration changes and manage that for your own app... no
| it doesn't scale for any "normal" app]
| gbil wrote:
| > I'll switch back when Android can handle a screen
| rotation without blanking the screen.
|
| hm, I don't have this experience, maybe last time you
| checked in an old android device or something ?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I've seen it on older apps and ones I've tried to make
| myself. The app where it's caused me the most grief is in
| AndFTP where rotating the screen will kill any in-
| progress file transfers. I've learned to just lock the
| screen rotation when I'm using that one, which definitely
| shouldn't be necessary but also isn't the end of the
| world.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's actually part of the (intentional?) design of the
| Android framework underneath. By default, if rotation is
| allowed, Activities (basically a "UI screen", but not
| exactly) are destroyed and recreated when the screen is
| rotated. If the data structures AndFTP uses to
| manage/track the download are stored in the Activity,
| then they'll be destroyed on screen rotation as well.
|
| This is something you learn _very_ quickly once you start
| building Android applications -- or, at least, I did when
| I started back in 2011 (I haven 't done much Android dev
| in the past decade since then). While I do think this
| behavior is a pretty terrible default behavior for the
| underlying UI framework, it's pretty bad that the AndFTP
| developers have not fixed this bug in their application
| -- and yes, it is a bug in their application.
|
| The UI development paradigm has changed quite a bit over
| the life of Android, making "Fragments" more popular to
| use in some quarters than "Activities" as the "unit of UI
| screen" (though Fragments are still underpinned by
| Activities), but I believe the fundamental issue is still
| there: if you don't explicitly handle rotation properly,
| and store state in your Activity, it will get destroyed
| whenever the screen is rotated.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > The app where it's caused me the most grief is in
| AndFTP where rotating the screen will kill any in-
| progress file transfers.
|
| Imagine if every time you resized a window on your PC,
| the window got killed and restarted, and you see why bugs
| like that arise.
|
| It'd be one thing if it was when the app is backgrounded,
| but no, even if you have one app running on your entire
| device, the UI be torn down.
|
| It's insanity that in 2022 a major operating system is
| still doing that, and yet here we are with no end in
| sight.
| smoldesu wrote:
| There's a lot of insane things about modern operating
| systems. For example, some OSes don't even let you buy
| software without first paying the hardware manufacturer.
| Crazy stuff, we should really encourage regulators to
| bring these companies to their knees.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| It's certainly crazy if you don't know better. The 48
| billion in revenue the Play Store hit last year would
| tell you that regardless of security policy, people tend
| to use first party app stores on mobile.
|
| But you know what? Maybe instead we should _discourage_
| people from clumsily trying to push their pet agenda the
| moment their favorite sports team (erm excuse me,
| _Operating System_ ) is painted in a poor light.
|
| But we can't all get what we want can we?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Your device does it. These days it's hidden with clever
| animations so you don't literally see a blank screen, but
| the UI is being completely killed on each rotation.
|
| Android will kill the user-facing portion of the process
| ("Activity") and recreate it* if you rotate the screen.
|
| Devices have gotten fast enough to hide it with an
| animation, but it's still "kill UI, draw new UI".
| (specifically it's usually "render the UI to an image,
| squish it and rotate it, then show the new UI
| underneath".
|
| My problem isn't with the literal animation, it's what
| that mess of rebuilding the entire user facing UI because
| they rotated their screen represents.
|
| (* apps can opt out of this, but that's reserved for
| games and apps that render their own custom UI directly
| to a raw surface)
| pwinnski wrote:
| When I spoke of inferior experiences, I was referring to the
| Pine Phone, not the Pixel 2. I'm sorry that wasn't clear!
|
| That said, the iPhone 8 is still supported by Apple (probably
| for the last year), while the Pixel 2, like the Pixels 3, 4,
| and 5, are no longer supported by Google. This likely doesn't
| matter to someone not running standard Google-supplied
| AndroidOS, though!
|
| My use of the closed-source iPhone is not solely based on
| feature quality, and I've got no illusions that every feature
| is the best in class.
|
| P.S. Just before clicking the reply button, I decided to do
| the search myself, curious. The iPhone 8 was a weird model;
| that was the year they released both the iPhone 8 and the
| iPhone X, because (IMO) they lacked the courage to switch
| things up in their flagship product so much in one year.
| (Okay, and maybe also supply issues?) Still, when I DDG'd
| "pixel 2 iphone 8", I got results[0] that seem to not be the
| same as yours. The first doesn't really make any
| determination, the second is mealy-mouthed but seems to give
| an edge to Pixel 2 based primarily on price ("the Pixel 2 is
| a better value, starting out at about $50 and PS70 cheaper
| than the iPhone 8" vs "you'll actually get more bang for your
| buck with the iPhone 8"), and the third, well, it's right in
| the title: "iPhone 8 vs. Pixel 2: Why Apple Beats Google." So
| I don't know, I bought an iPhone X that year rather than an
| iPhone 8, and just replaced that with an iPhone 14 Pro this
| year after five years of faithful service. But choosing a
| 2017 phone today, either one, while very clearly a step up
| from Pinephone for all the of the reasons mentioned in the
| article, maybe still reflects a but of compromise in service
| of wanting to run LineageOS. In 2017, was photo quality the
| same when running LineageOS rather than Google's own camera
| software? Maybe it was after that they started to apply more
| and more AI to the photo-taking process, I'm not sure.
|
| 0. https://www.techradar.com/news/google-pixel-2-vs-iphone-8
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/iphone-8-vs-
| pixel-2-phone-c... https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-vs-
| pixel-2,review-4779...
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| The pixel 4 is only losing support this month. Pixel 5 is
| supported til Oct 2023, and 5a til Aug 2024. Pixel 6 gets
| feature updates til Oct 2024 and security updates til Oct
| 2026.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So you realize how bad it is that a phone made by Google
| introduced in November of 2019 is losing support in 3
| years? iOS 16 supports the iPhone 8/iPhone 10 from 2017
| and the iPhone 5s from 2013 just got a security update
| August of this year.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It is indeed, terrible. That's probably why people want a
| phone running Linux, since it supports hardware even
| longer than the XNU kernel does.
| prange wrote:
| Semaphor wrote:
| > This likely doesn't matter to someone not running
| standard Google-supplied AndroidOS, though!
|
| It does a bit, actually. While we get many updates through
| generic Android, some are vendor patches which stop after
| support stops.
| [deleted]
| retskrad wrote:
| Android has lost the smartphone war. Apple has 40% of the used-
| phone market [1] and they have over 60% of the premium smartphone
| market. [2] When people think of smartphones, iPhone is the
| default. Androids are unironically seen as peasants...
|
| 1. https://www.ped30.com/2022/10/08/apple-dominates-
| refurbished...
|
| 2. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-s-share-of-the-global-
| pr...
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| >When people think of smartphones, iPhone is the default.
| Androids are unironically seen as peasants...
|
| Never encountered this?
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| I've only encountered this on HN, but I don't move in crowds
| that care about status symbols, so idk.
| [deleted]
| dsissitka wrote:
| There's the iMessage green bubble thing.
|
| https://archive.ph/s9oSm
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/v7a7s3/your_phone_s.
| ..
| stryan wrote:
| 60% of the premium smartphone market doesn't seem to mean much
| when Android has 70% of the entire market[1].
|
| 1. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-
| reports/smartpho...
| scarface74 wrote:
| 1. For profit companies are in business to make money, not
| "market share"
|
| 2. Having access to the premium market is important enough to
| Google for them to pay Apple $18 Billion a year to be the
| default search engine on Apple devices
|
| 3. Do you think developers are advertisers care more about
| "market share" or who has disposable income?
| smoldesu wrote:
| 1. For-profit companies are easier to hit with antitrust
| regulation than a variety of competing manufacturers.
|
| 2. Airing out Apple and Google's dirty laundry doesn't make
| _either_ of them look good. If anything, it just confirms
| that Apple is hopelessly addicted to advertising
| /promotional money and is willing to put a price on
| degrading the user experience and giving Google access to
| your data.
|
| 3. Developers care about money, same as Apple does. Long-
| term, they will not invest in a platform that fleeces them
| in one hand and exploits them with the other. There are
| dozens of pain-points where this is showing it's face
| (payment-processing, app distribution, browser control,
| file control, background process control, entitlement
| documentation, double-standards/undertable deals with
| FAANG, etc.)
|
| Even the web is a smarter target than a native iOS app,
| because at least you get to keep your profits. That's why
| the web is winning.
| scarface74 wrote:
| For #2 what would the alternative be? You definitely
| don't want an Apple search engine to replace Google's it
| would be a much worse experience. Although Apple does
| have its own search engine powered by AppleBot that is
| used in some parts of the interface.
|
| But it's not a general purpose search engine.
|
| > Even the web is a smarter target than a native iOS app,
| because at least you get to keep your profits. That's why
| the web is winning.
|
| This is a horrible take. It came out in the Epic trial
| that 80%+ of App Store revenue came from games an in app
| purchases from "whales". Not the poor little Indy
| developer.
|
| Most of the popular non game apps don't even allow in app
| purchases like Netflix and Spotify and others allow you
| to purchase the service either in or out of the App Store
| pwinnski wrote:
| In terms of units, no, but in terms of profit...
|
| I think the reason parent leaned on that sub-group is that it
| is easy to move a lot of units at the very low end with
| minimal or even negative profit, and that was definitely
| Samsung's (to name one company) approach in years past. They
| would sell many, many Android phones at something like $100
| each, in some cases losing money on every sale, and very,
| very few of the higher-margin profitable phones that most
| people on HN think of when they think of Samsung Android
| phones.
|
| That's how, for example, iPhone accounts for 75% of all
| profit in the smartphone market worldwide, despite a low 13%
| market share[0].
|
| When it comes to the big numbers, most people aren't really
| comparing Apples to apples.
|
| 0. https://www.imore.com/apple-takes-75-smartphone-profits-
| desp...
| mavhc wrote:
| Not sure how either of those things mean Apple has won. Samsung
| outsells Apple, which has only 20% of sales.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The average selling price of Samsung phones is around $250.
|
| https://www.sammobile.com/news/average-selling-price-
| samsung...
|
| The ASP of the iPhone for the same year was $800.
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/15379/iphone-asp/
|
| Who do you think has the better business model?
| Sunspark wrote:
| It hasn't won at all. One reason I use Android is because it
| has apps I use that don't exist on iOS. File explorer, h/w
| accelerated video player w/ codec support, manga reader, etc.
|
| iMessage doesn't mean anything to me anymore. Apple waited
| too long and didn't open it up when they should have, same
| mistake BlackBerry made.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| File explorer exists on iOS.
|
| Manga reader - there are options, but less convenient than
| on Android.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Did not know this - what limitations are there?
| nehal3m wrote:
| One reason I use Android that has no viable replacement on
| iOS is call recording. I deal with government officials a
| lot and I want to hold them accountable (I live in a nation
| with one-party consent laws, in the sense that I only need
| my own permission to record a conversation).
|
| iOS will not let you do this natively, you have to add a
| call recording service via a three-way call whereas I can
| do this out of the box with /e/OS on a Fairphone.
| pwinnski wrote:
| This is one of the best reasons I've ever heard for not
| running iOS.
|
| I completely understand why Apple won't allow it from a
| third party: that's a security and privacy nightmare.
|
| I even _somewhat_ understand why Apple hasn 't developed
| such a feature themselves: it's a very minority use case
| and has _some_ legal concerns in some jurisdictions.
|
| But the end result is, yes, iOS is not for anyone that
| needs to record calls like that.
| commiepatrol wrote:
| Interesting how this coincides with SwiftKey leaving iOS which
| was the only good option when it came to getting Dvorak.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Did you mean for this comment to be on the post about the
| Dvorak keyboard in iOS 16?
| simonh wrote:
| A lot of problems obviously, many of which would be deal breakers
| for anyone, but the author expresses a strong emotional bias
| towards the phone. Unfortunately they don't say why, I'd really
| be interested in knowing what the advantages are of the phone
| that make it so loved despite all these issues. After all, some
| of us might be interested in having one as an additional device
| either for fun or as for the additional utility it might provide.
| Roark66 wrote:
| I too have a (fairly) strong emotional bias towards pine
| products. I can tell you why. For one, pine is the only
| manufacturer I know of that managed to obtain and release real
| down to register level documentation for the hardware they use.
| We have very comprehensive documentation from rockchip (a lot
| of it in Chinese, but auto translation tools are good enough).
| They publish schematics for everything. They let you download
| source code for so called "proprietary" drivers that work with
| old versions of Linux kernel.
|
| All this means, for a tinkerer/hobbyist one can do stuff that
| is simply impossible on any other hardware that has comparable
| performance (basically modern 64bit embedded systems like those
| in newest mobile phones).
|
| Then there is all the time we(hobbyists/devs) spend tinkering
| with this hardware. When one invests so much time into some
| product it is hard to just let it go.
|
| However, having said all that I would never use an unfinished
| product as my main phone. If I had a pine phone I woukd
| probably carry it as a secondary, but those devices are nowhere
| near the state people can rely on them in case of emergency.
| [deleted]
| MikusR wrote:
| Looks to be an old article reposted with new date:
|
| >Even running on the latest Manjaro build, as of September 2019,
| the phone is just ... crashy.
| megous wrote:
| The phone's SW was unstable when not even developer editions
| were avialable in September 2019... :) Who would have guessed.
| [deleted]
| butz wrote:
| Android is steadily going downhill, even using older Android
| version on 3 year old device. I wanted to install an application
| from "external source", so I downloaded it from F-Droid and tried
| using Total Commander to install it, like I did some time ago (I
| rarely install new apps though, especially ones from external
| sources). And guess what? Total Commander removed install
| functionality, because of risk from being removed from Google
| Play Store. Just great, now this makes TC less useful and
| requires me to use Google's own "Files" application, which I had
| replaced with Total Commander... Not to mention how Google Play
| app UI has degraded: now half of app updates screen is taken up
| by unremovable banner asking me to enable automatic app updates,
| otherwise I might "lose your right to make legal claims".
|
| Not sure what the future brings, but probably even more
| limitations. My next phone will probably be a "dumb phone", and
| all saved money I will spend on decent camera.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Files is an Android system app included in AOSP
| pooper wrote:
| You are both right.
|
| com.android.documentsui is included in AOSP.
|
| com.google.android.apps.nbu.files is Google's app on the play
| store.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I've had good luck so far with GrapheneOS. I still have Google
| Play but it only has normal app permissions, and it's in its
| own user profile that stays off unless I need to use an app
| that uses Google Play. I can install from external sources just
| fine, including the built in browser. Google Play Store is also
| an external source with Graphene's setup.
| butz wrote:
| Thank you for suggestion. I'll look into GrapheneOS, from
| first glance it seems to be something that I need.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Solid Explorer is a solid choice.
|
| I have never seen the whole automatic updates thing - what are
| you talking about there? Why would Google Play care about you
| making legal claims?
| m-p-3 wrote:
| > Total Commander removed install functionality, because of
| risk from being removed from Google Play Store. Just great, now
| this makes TC less useful and requires me to use Google's own
| "Files" application, which I had replaced with Total
| Commander...
|
| I guess the Solid Explorer's dev isn't concerned about that,
| because it still has that capability today.
| brnt wrote:
| For years the first thing I do is install LineageOS (I only buy
| devices they support) and everything is remarkable stable, in
| terms of not crashing and usability. Most of my apps come from
| Fdroid.
|
| Highly recommended. The irony is that Googles Pixel phones are
| great options.
| Roark66 wrote:
| The reason why modern smartphones have such good camera picture
| quality is primarily thanks to the ISP profiles developed by
| teams of people for the particular sensor in use. ISP is an
| imaging signal processor, a component of most mobile SOCs that
| sits between the camera and the rest of the system. It is a
| proprietary component that is essentially a black box controlled
| with a "profile" for specific camera chip. The profile specifies
| how to debayer, denoise, sharpen, color correct, adjust
| brightness and autofocus of the chip. Without a very good profile
| even a good camera sensor output will look like crap.
|
| I've spent few weeks of my (spare) time improving a Sony imx219
| driver for a Rockchip rk3566 cpu that is used in few pine devices
| I own. I needed high fps video (I managed to get 120fps 720p - I
| think I could push it further to 140 perhaps, but this was OK for
| now) and as low latency as I could get. I wanted <20ms as I could
| encode 720p h264 frames in 7ms,unfortunately I got stuck with ISP
| (image signal processor) adding 40ms of latency even when in pass
| through mode.
|
| The modern ISP is a "black box" even with source code for the
| drivers. In addition every single ISP has its own proprietary
| format for those profiles. There are OS projects that try to make
| universal camera sensor profiles that work with multiple ISPs
| (libcamera for one), but it is still early days.
|
| What we need is a truly programmable/flexible isp. As it stands
| the only way to get sub 40ms of latency from a camera for a
| hobbyist is to use an fpga...
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Can someone dive more deeply into this? I'm asking because it
| seems to me that there is more to this than what you just
| described. Sony AOSP is constantly upgrading the kernel, but
| the camera is always mediocre at best.
|
| If it was just the ISP there should have been a way in the past
| to take the ISP blob from similar chipset phones in the past
| and just use it with an updated base no? But that by itself
| doesn't seem to be enough to get the cam working decently.
| WithinReason wrote:
| From the pictures linked in the article it seems to be about
| more than just the ISP.
| Roark66 wrote:
| People don't realise how much stuff the ISP does. It took
| me over a week to make an extremely basic profile for a new
| camera chip. And I had all the tools and the documents OEMs
| use. There is a 100 page long procedure I had to follow
| taking multiple pictures of calibration standards
| illuminated with various calibrated lights. Then at the end
| it still looks like crap, but it is pretty true looking.
| Then the work to make it look good really starts. I had no
| idea before I started.
|
| There are simple things like debayer, but even just talking
| about exposure and gain control based on illumination is a
| pretty complex subject in itself. First you need to define
| parameters when to change exposure and when to leave it
| alone and just use camera gain. Then you need a set of
| parameters for when to use analog gain and when to use
| digital gain as communicated to the sensor. Then you have
| another two sets of parameters one for adjusting gain on
| the ISP (as opossed to all the previous stuff that feeds in
| to the camera chip) and some ISPs I'm told also have more
| advanced builtin correction based on curves. All this and
| we haven't even touched on how you measure the Illumination
| of the scene. At the very least you need one profile for
| back-lit and one for front-lit scenes. Then you need
| parameters for how the isp decides which profile to apply
| automatically and so on.
|
| Mind that this is just brightness, we haven't even started
| talking about color correction, white balance, denoise,
| sharpen and 13 other ISP blocks that are there. BTW, you
| need another profile for every resolution your camera
| outputs too.
|
| I don't know a lot about different ISPs. I only worked with
| one, but it gave me enough of an understanding to know why
| there is no way one profile will work for two camera chips.
| Or one profile will not work with two different versions of
| ISP hw.
|
| That's why I hope libcamera succeeds. They try to
| standardise all the isp control, but it is a huge task
| especially when every single isp is different.
| megous wrote:
| The Pinephone Pro ISP is documented in RK3399 TRM (part3), and
| in various PDFs available online. It's not really a huge
| blackbox.
|
| It does not make the calibration (or preparation of profiles
| for various light conditions) easy though. There's a need for a
| bunch of HW tooling that is somewhat expensive for a hobbyist.
| And there's a lot of work and algorithm design that needs to be
| done outside of ISP for controling the autofocus, autoexpsoure
| and detection of type lighting in the scene and profile
| switching. None of this is particularly trivial.
| abxytg wrote:
| It's very clear he is talking about black boxes from the
| perspective of one trying to reverse one to fix pinephones
| isp...
| kop316 wrote:
| Respectfully, the person you are responding to knows what
| he is talking about: https://xnux.eu/log/
| Roark66 wrote:
| So they write a bunch of drivers and stuff for pine
| phone. As a pine fan I thank them, but this doesn't mean
| we can't have a difference in opinion what does it mean
| for some component to be a black box.
|
| If you compare with some other manufacturer that gives us
| absolutely no docs, then yes having register level docs
| and user side source is really nice. But if you want to
| do something unconventional (like switch the whole damn
| thing off and bypass its latency) not knowing how it
| works internally is still a black box. For example there
| is an irq that fires when the first component of the
| isp(MI-memory interface) sees a vsync signal for a frame.
| We know it exists. We know how to enable/disable that
| irq. We can write code that does stuff when it fires. But
| what we don't know is is this vsync signal fired truly at
| the input of the ISP? It's output? Or perhaps between
| some specific components? It turns out that vsync fires
| not when the isp sees the very first vsync what the
| location of the registers suggests, but after all the
| processing is done at the output buffer (40ms later
| usually), but one wouldn't be able to tell without a lot
| of profiling. This amongst other things is what I call a
| black box.
|
| However, compare it with let's say a raspberry pi, and at
| register level the documentation is much better (for the
| isp).
| Roark66 wrote:
| It's registers are documented yes, but from the point of how
| it actually works. How data flows, how it is buffered
| internally, how it is timed etc it is absolute mystery. Yes,
| you can configure various parameters, but you can't for
| example skip functional blocks and get data quicker. It is
| unknown if it is all done with hardcoded static logic blocks,
| some sort of purpose made vector cpu and firmware. No one
| knows(or those that do don't say).
|
| I worked with rk3566, but I believe rk3399 has the earlier
| version of the exact same isp. The version in rk3566 is 1.1.
| There are also versions 1.0 and just 1. All are documented in
| TRMs in the same way.
|
| Edit: BTW, if you need the tooling (Rockchips isp profile
| development tool v2.1 and the manual for it) please let me
| know and I'll send it to you.
| [deleted]
| pluc wrote:
| hedora wrote:
| People used to make similar arguments about injket printer
| drivers (where the computer does dithering, head scheduling,
| etc).
|
| Over time the open source crowd implemented the state of the
| art image processing techniques once, then pointed them at
| reverse engineered backend drivers for each model.
|
| The result was better than what the manufacturers (especially
| HP, but also canon, etc) could do.
|
| I'm hoping history repeats itself with these camera sensors.
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