this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023

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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year 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"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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