EffortlessSteven - Executive Strategy and Product Design Insights
Strategy
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Analysis: How even Huawei's use of AOSP may be in jeopardy with the US-China trade war
The common understanding is that since AOSP is open source, Huawei cannot be blocked from using it. I am here to tell you that, unfortunately, is not true.
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Excessive Lag Time Between Device Announcement and Release is Killing Excitement
Too much hype can be problematic, but so can a lack of it. We take a look at how lag time between reveal and release destroys public public interest.
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Benchmark Cheating Strikes Back: How OnePlus and Others Got Caught Red-Handed (and What They've Done About It)
OnePlus and Meizu have been caught cheating on benchmarks. XDA investigates how it happened, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again.
Product
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A Note on Google Assistant's Fluidity and Speech Recognition
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Google Now's voice commands (or rather Google Assistant as it is now called). I love the idea of what it will be able to do one day, and I love what it can do when it works. If it works. And therein lies the hate. That
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Facebook Announces Messenger Lite For Older Devices and Emerging Markets
Facebook just announced Facebook Messenger Lite, a new low-resource version of Facebook Messenger (much to the disdain of the developers of Lite Messenger for Facebook), joining Facebook Lite in their portfolio. Facebook Messenger Lite is a cut down version of Facebook Messenger, weighing in at under 10 MB. It is designed to be fast to
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How Allo and Duo Want to Complicate Messaging by Fracturing the Market
Allo and Duo introduce more messaging applications to contact your friends through. Do we need more fracturing, and are its features worth the trouble?
Systems
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Flutter 1.5 Bridges the Gap, Adding Support for Web, Embedded, and Desktop
Google announces Flutter 1.5 at I/O 2019, expanding its cross-platform UI toolkit to support web, embedded systems, and desktop applications beyond mobile.
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Project Treble Brings Extended Linux Kernel Security Support to Combat Fragmentation
One of the major issues for Android over the years has been device fragmentation. The Android version and Linux kernel version a device are on can have a massive impact on the device's security and usability, and Google is making a concerted effort to improve Android's update lifecycle with Project Treble.
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An Introduction to Software Licensing
A comprehensive introduction to software licensing concepts, open source licenses, and contributor license agreements presented at the Toronto Android Developers Meetup.
Infrastructure
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Proactively Augmented Generation (PAG): When the Harness Steers Retrieval
PAG is a flow-scoped context pattern where a harness—request routing, analyzers, and a packet builder—decides what an LLM sees. Unlike auto-context that heuristically grabs nearby files, PAG uses a curated spec-first library with deterministic rules and auditable receipts to reduce AI hallucination and prevent Process Confabulation.
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iOS 11 and Android Spearhead Universal Support For Opus Audio Codec, MP3's Overdue Successor
It has been 24 years since MP3 originally released, and despite many efforts by various groups over the years to replace it (with attempts such as Vorbis, AAC, WMA, and others), no one has succeeded yet, but that may be changing. Unlike with video codecs, people are no longer directly searching for a royalty free
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Sony IMX378: Comprehensive Breakdown of the Google Pixel's Sensor and its Features
We reached out to Sony to try to learn a bit more about the IMX378 sensor that is used by the upcoming Google Pixel and Pixel XL phones. Learn all about it!