Ask HN: Why is there no major push towards Android for Servers and Desktops?
15 by eternityforest | 21 comments on Hacker News.
Servers are dominated by Linux. But Linux DevOps is hard work. Any update of anything is liable to break complex applications. Meanwhile, over on Android, we are running dozens of apps of varying quality, all updating all the time, and phones have very high reliability anyway. On Android you don't need all kinds of containerization nonsense with 100MB packages for even the tiniest things. Nor do you get a nightmare of broken dependencies. The OS gives you one consistent API level, and it's consistent on any device. Permissions and security are pretty much solved, or as close solved as they can possibly get right now, you can't stop people from giving location access to everything and still claim people own their devices. On servers, we have a nightmare tangle of Microservices and crap. On Android, we have a really nice design pattern where the OS pretty much provides everything, and stuff you might want to swap out can be done with a service provider app of some type. It's not hard to imagine extending that model to cover things like databases. Why should we have a 50 step process to install every app, when the app can just say "Hey, I need to make a database, I can use postgres or SQLite, put my stuff in whatever provider is configured, and don't ask for a password, I already have the permission."? It's just... so much more sane and structured. There's already lots of Linux userland on Android projects, no real blocking issue there in being able to migrate legacy stuff. There's performance issues with complexity, except.... not really. Apps use things far slower than Dart and Kotlin and Android API calls all the time. And Android is efficient enough to run on a phone at just a few watts, while still rendering modern websites, so it seems like they're doing something right. What gives? Why are we not managing our web apps by uploading a single APK file and a settings.ini with the permissions we want to give it? Why is the Steam Deck Linux based while Android hardly has any decent games?
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