Dick Pountain /Idealog 352/ 06 Nov 2023 12:56
I’ve had a vague intuition that Android might become the number one OS in the world – simply because of its ubiquity on smartphones – but I wasn’t prepared for the actual market shares recently announced: Android 42%, Windows 28%, iOS 17%, macOS 7%, ChromeOS 1.3% and desktop Linux 1.2% (as of April 2023).
This being so I wasn’t too surprised to read last week that Lenovo is teaming up with Android specialist Esper to revamp its ThinkCentre M70 line into an all-in-one desktop Android PC, using Intel Core processors all the way from an entry-level i3 up to i9s. I’ve made no secret in this column that nowadays I use a Chromebook rather than a Windows PC, but what I’ve not emphasised is that in effect it’s an Android laptop. ChromeOS offers a pleasant enough basic cloud file system, but ChromeOS apps are largely rubbish and its Web Store is a joke. Apart from Google Docs, in which I’m writing this, everything I do is done via Android apps. Strictly speaking of course Android runs inside ChromeOS on top of Linux, but I rarely go there, so let’s not.
It all works remarkably well and the common fallacy that there aren’t any grown-up Android apps is just not true (though admittedly it’s taken me a while to find them). Apart from Docs I now have an excellent photo-editor, draw/paint apps, MIDI editor and DAW that serve very well in place of Office, Photoshop and Ableton. Freedom from Windows upgrades and malware horrors is delightful, and backup ceases to be a nightmare, except…Except, I’m so paranoid by temperament that although everything is ‘safe’ in Google’s cloud, I want it local too. Hence I keep a tiny 128Gb USB stickette permanently occupying one port and write all my data – not apps – to that. (A couple of times a year I also copy this stick to a separate hard-drive for archive). Google wouldn’t approve, but it keeps me happy. This does somewhat restrict my choice of Android apps to only those grown-up enough to recognise external drives, and it complicates my mental image too because now there are three separate memory spaces to consider: the Cloud, the Chromebook’s internal memory and the USB. Such triplicity turned around to bite my hand, albeit mildly, recently. I’d started getting messages that the computer was running low on space, and the Files app did indeed show that only around 30Mb of the 24Gb internal memory were free. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that most of the space was being eaten up by Android apps, which appear under a tree called Play Files (named after the Android Play Store). Within that tree 6.5Gb of the space was being consumed by the subfolder Android/data, and when I peeked in there I felt a familiar creeping spine-shiver – familiar because it reminded me of years of trauma in the dank, dripping Windows Registry. It seems that most Android apps you install create their own subtree there, but few remove it fully, or indeed at all, when you uninstall them. And it was then that I discovered you can’t delete folders in Play Files using the Files app, because you lack the Linux permissions.
After an exciting couple of days where I saw ChromeOS naked, not a pretty sight, an alternative file manager called Cx File Explorer told me that Play Files is really called system/storage/emulated/0/ and the USB drive is called system/storage/7875C92D409CB3B4F21633193CC4E1DFSAE2FAB7 (system programmers are a curious breed, a bit like that bloke in The Hurt Locker). It also let me delete most of the cruft, with much pondering over which might still be important. One alone, DCIM, the digital camera folder, still resisted deletion and reported its size as 635Gb, clearly absurd. Eventually I nuked that one from orbit using the Linux console and nothing broke: photos now arrive in Downloads just fine and I can keep a workable 6Gb of free internal memory.
The moral of this story? I still like Android a lot, it’s an excellent cushion-cover for the prickly horror that is Linux, and I’ve even acquired the ability to write GUI apps in Python for it. What’s more I’m not ashamed of my belt-and-braces affection for local storage and hope that perhaps Lenovo’s partnership with Esper might prod Google into completing the proper integration of ChromeOS with Android that it promised back in 2015 but never delivered. Given Microsoft’s never-ending nightmares with post-10 Windows versions, and given a whole generation reared on Android phones, Lenovo could be onto a winner if it dares go beyond its stated targets of the retail, hospitality and healthcare industries and tests whether keenly-priced Android PCs could become giant killers.
[Dick Pountain sometimes feels his own internal memory is down to 30Mb]
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