2) Only a small portion of Android phones are "flagship". The rest aren't. The crazy fragmentation of the Android ecosystem makes the real marketshare for something like this small and a long way away. Android phones are still at the mercy of carriers and OEMs. Google doesn't have the ability to push out the latest OS like Apple does.
I was looking for a technical answer instead of the same old rhetoric. Adding this additional functionality to Google Play Services and to the Support Library would make it available to all devices using GMS.
>Only a small portion of Android phones are "flagship"
This is a ridiculous statement. Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that only a small portion of Android phones are flagships? Any phone with an SnapDragon 8 series SoC, Exynos 8 series SoC, Kirin 9 series SoC would easily be able to handle this.
Fair enough. As far as I know, Android handsets should be able to do this as well. I’m mostly a layperson, so I don’t know what technical specifics separate the chipsets on each device.
My interpretation of “flagship” is the Pixel or (formerly) the Nexus lines. What Google considers the flagships. I could also be interpreting that incorrectly. I’m just used to Samsung, LG, and Moto having some level of control and obstruction on when their phones get OS-level updates. Not sure if the Play store apps have enough system-level permissions to implement whatever core services would be needed to support an SDK for other apps to use.
“Same old rhetoric” seems a bit unfair. It’s been my observation for a while now that you can’t rely on any given Android phone to have the latest OS installed. They usually don’t. (EDIT: And that usually means features can’t be relied upon for app developers, which is why it’s relevant here.)
A flagship phone in the Android world is anything that uses the latest and greatest SoC. And right now that's usually anything with an SD 835, Exynos 8895 and Kirin 960.
>It’s been my observation for a while now that you can’t rely on any given Android phone to have the latest OS installed. They usually don’t. (EDIT: And that usually means features can’t be relied upon for app developers, which is why it’s relevant here.)
The major features usually require an OS update, but Google has been compartmentalizing the OS for some time and making things downloadable from the Play store or available via Google Play Services. They also use a Support Library to backport new API's to older OS versions.
Those updates don't ship neither kernel nor driver updates, which are actually what matters in AR, given the sore state of OpenGL and Vulkan support across Android devices.
It doesn't matter what SoC a device has, if the OS only sees a buggy OpenGL ES 2.0 driver.
2) Only a small portion of Android phones are "flagship". The rest aren't. The crazy fragmentation of the Android ecosystem makes the real marketshare for something like this small and a long way away. Android phones are still at the mercy of carriers and OEMs. Google doesn't have the ability to push out the latest OS like Apple does.