David:
00:00:02
Hello, and welcome to Android bites powered by Esper I'm David Rudick and each week I'm joined by my co-host Michelle ramen. As we dive deep into the world of Android. And this week, I won't begin with any long preamble. We have a very special guest series of guests actually. Um, we have two guests now, but, uh, yeah, Michelle, we have somebody very special. So go ahead. Let you make intros.
Mishaal:
00:00:24
Yeah. Thanks David. So I'm sure all of you. At one point, I've had an opinion on what the ideal smartphone should have, but there's no true one size fits all device out there. Every device lacks something that's important to someone out there. And if there's enough, someone's out there to demand that something, then there's an opportunity for a new product to be made that meets that demand. For those of you who follow tech news a couple of weeks ago, the founder of pebble actually made headlines. When he started an online petition for people to sign onto, to say, Hey, we want a iPhone minis size Android phone. There were about 50,000 people sign onto the petition. And of course, you know, if you're familiar with online petitions, they usually don't really do anything, but still like he wanted to show the world. He wanted to show that there are enough people who actually want a small Android phone. Unlike most people out there, founder of pebble, he actually has the money, connections and experience in the industry to make his dream a reality. But of course he's not the only one who has all three of those things to do that. Recently there's been not one, but two smartphone companies that have launched or at least one will be launching their product soon. The other is awesome and we've invited two very special people from the company to join us on the Android bites podcast, to talk about their first smartphone product. So we've invited Jason Keats. Who's the founder and CEO and Gary Anderson. Who's the chief product officer onto the show. So thank you for joining us, Jason and Gary.
Jason:
00:01:48
Hey, thanks for having us excited to be here. Letting chat with you guys about building Android devices. Yep. Happy to be
Gary:
00:01:53
here too. Uh, looking forward to telling you
Mishaal:
00:01:55
about saga. Hey listeners, before we get too far, I wanna let you know that our interview went pretty long, so we'll be splitting it up into two episode. In this first episode, we are focusing a lot on building up the Android experience that Austin wanted to have. There's also plenty of insight, Gary and Jason share as to how a lot of these aspects worked out when their team was part of essential. And then in our next episode, we'll turn to how they plan to keep their OS updated and then dive into some of how the salon mobile stack will work. But let's first get started with part one. So right off the bat, why don't we just dive into the product that you're launching and the company that you found at Jason? So for those of you don't know, Jason was the head of R and D at essential, another smartphone startup that produced the now discontinued essential phone. I don't really wanna, re-litigate what happened to essential because that's kind of old history and you can just pretty much just Google it and look up what happened. So why did you decide to found awesome after leaving essential? Like what did you feel was lacking in the Steve smartphones release in 2020. Led you to want to make your own? Well,
Jason:
00:02:52
there are two parts to that. Number one is there was a real need and demand for a smartphone that was a quality bill, premium materials, excellent device, but it needed to answer some question. And I think that was the biggest thing missing from essential. You could look up all the different details about why essential one enter. But ultimately my viewpoint was that there wasn't really a reason for it to exist. It was like we're building a cool thing for the sake of building a cool thing. And when we started awesome, we kind of sat down and said, what do we wanna build? How do we wanna build it? What are we trying to answer? And the first thing we came to was there is an extreme lack of privacy and people do care about it and are willing to put money behind it. And so that was the ethos behind starting the company. The other side of it was when Andy told me essential was shutting down, it was like, okay, well I can go make big bucks at apple or Google again, if I want to. And in no way, did that sound entertaining to me or fun to me and starting a company it's very, very difficult. There are so many challenges. Probably the hardest thing is hiring. And yet here I had the opportunity to hire a team of people that I've worked with. And we've been through the trenches together with that. We know how each other works and how each other behaves and they were all available. So it was a fairly simple move to go, Hey guys, let's stick together. I'll put my money where my mouth is and let's try to go and do this. And it would be actually super interest to hear Gary's side of this convers.
Gary:
00:04:14
Yeah, I think after the shutdown of, of essential the engineers, right. We're thinking where, where they could go lo and behold, Keith's, you know, we get a call from Jason here and he reaches out and says, Hey, I have a crazy idea and continues to pitch the idea to us and told us what was missing from essential and kind of what that would change into here at awesome. So privacy being our north star and then some of the stuff that we'd be doing. In terms of not only working in a different environment, which encouraged collaboration and a lot of communication with the CEO, but also a lot of different types of things that we truly believed in on a personal level and things that was kind of kind of rapidly growing in, in the, you know, sense of the markets in the EU and, uh, us and then things that are interesting, getting a lot more attention in different countries.
Mishaal:
00:05:04
I think it's quite interesting, or at least like incredible that the two of you and like, you know, the rest of the, the higher ups of the, the founders of awesome were able to convince so many former ex essential engineers to immediately join on board with you guys. Because after this company goes down to start up making a smartphone company, a lot of these ex engineers have a lot of built up experience in the industry. They could have gone to apple, they could have gone to Google. They could have gone to some of the more established brands, but. They had enough trust in your expertise and your idea to want to say, I wanna do this again. I want a second shot at this to go with another startup. So I think that's pretty impressive that you guys manage to scoop up so many former employees and start a new smartphone brand.
Jason:
00:05:45
I appreciate that. There has been a lot of negative things said about Andy in the press. And I gotta say one of the things that he did amazingly well was attracting just the best people in the industry to come and work for him. And for whatever reason, I, I don't know if there's like some, we all have the same mental defect or whatever you wanna call it, a willingness to chew glass and keep fighting and working together. And we. Like you said, it takes a matter of comradery or friendship to go through one startup, have it fail and just immediately sign up to do it again with the expectation that things will be different and making the changes at a, at a institutional level to see that those changes are implemented. And I cannot stress enough how amazed I am and how proud I am of this team that I have with me and who are on this adventure with. So
David:
00:06:38
I do wanna ask a hardware question, Jason, because I know we're gonna talk a lot about software today. The pH one really wasn't like any other Android phone before, or since I would say in terms of materials, design, even the aesthetic of the phone was markedly different. There was always something clearly very special about the engineering talent at essential on the hardware side. What do you think made it possible for you all to build what everybody else looks at? The big manufacturers, even, you know, the big conglomerates out of China, like oppo BBK group, and they say, okay, you have the scale, you can do this. You can make something really incredible. They always shy away, go back to like 7,000 series, aluminum standard glass materials, the same kind of bill that everybody goes for. Do you really think it is just money and that your freedom that you've given your team that enables you to make those Boulder choices? Or is there something like more systemic there?
Jason:
00:07:35
You know, it, it's a really good question. Why don't they do that? Number one, I think big companies, all. A million voices and a million opinions. Google is probably the worst example of that. I mean, looking at their hardware, you can clearly see it was designed by like four people and not a single mind was melding it together. It's like, cool, you do the front and all to the back and we'll just glue them together and we'll call it a day. There's part of that. And then partly, you know, what I've seen in my career from a hardware perspective is when I'm sitting in China, I have seen so many vendors just get abused by engineers from different companies and like, just get treated like. My thing has always been to treat everybody respect and love and show a measure of comradery for everybody. And what that means is when I have something that's stupid or crazy, like machining ceramic on the back of the essential pH one, the 0.02, five millimeter tolerance to get the SI beam chip to work means that they were willing to work with me and go like, cool, Jason's a crazy bastard, but let's work with him cuz he's a lot of fun. I've maintained that relationship with all the vendors and all the suppliers, which has allowed us to play at a level that no startup should be able to play at. I mean, we called Foxcon. We called all the big tier one developers and manufacturing houses. We're like, we're gonna do this. And I'm like, cool, whatever you need, we got you. I don't think anybody could do that today. I, I know for a fact that, uh, one of the other brand new phone companies needed my help to get intros at that. And
Mishaal:
00:08:59
he shouldn't have, um, said phone company will remain unnamed just to be clear. Yes So, um, exactly the topic of this discussion is mostly about building Android and shipping, Android onto a device. And I promise we're gonna get to that, but I wanted to first give you an opportunity to talk about the end result, the actual product that you guys are releasing next year. So can you tell us a bit, Jason and Gary, about the Solana saga? What sets it apart from other flagship Android phones?
Jason:
00:09:27
Right now what we're doing is from a hardware perspective, it is a top flight, absolute flagship Android device of which there aren't that many left anymore. You have Samsung, and I don't know what's in the pixel seven, to be honest, but certainly the last couple pixels weren't flagship in terms of mechanical hardware spec, their software has been tremend. So what we are doing is a true flagship device that can compete on specs alone with Google or Samsung. What's different about it is we are trying to give users. Everything we do is all about providing consumer choice and choice and control over how their data is handled, which goes to the awesome privacy ethos, but also now how they control, interact with their digital assets, which is where the salon mobile stack comes in on saga. And we can spend quite a bit of talking about the relationship between awesome and saga right now. What it really comes down to is both a Toley who's the CEO and co-founder of Solana. And I have in common is that we did see this incredible opportunity where they wanted to build some hardware for the future of web three to be developed with. And we've seen for years that mobile is the leader, not desktop. And yet in the crypto space, desktop was ex or like they were developing exclusively for desktop, which made no sense. What we're doing is building a home for web three developers to build onto mobile hardware, which really is what most people use day to day. And from a software perspective, I'll hand it back over. Yeah,
Gary:
00:10:49
I think what we're gonna end up seeing is there's gonna be a difference from our device and how it evolves versus some of the other ones that are made by these mega corporations. Right? So there's gonna be stuff that's leaning heavily into what web three and decentralization at its core is meant to provide as well as taking a lot of and leaning into the open source community. Right? So I think having amending those two together on a flagship device, I'm more excited about the evolution. And this being a flagship phone and hardware to how that evolving software, I think that's what we're most excited to
Mishaal:
00:11:25
see. Thank you both for that. It's really important for any new phone on the market to stand out. And this partnership with Solana, I'm sure many people have differing opinions on cryptocurrency, web three NFTs, et cetera. Yeah, to say the least, there's certainly many heated opinions on them. And I don't really wanna Wade into those differences of opinions, but it is well, let, let very unique aspect, wait in our answer to
Jason:
00:11:48
that really quickly. Is that again, I keep reiterating it's all about choice. If a user doesn't want to use the crypto features, there is no obligation to use them. There is no forcing function. There is nothing there that requires it. If you just want a premium Android experience on a premium flagship device. The Sal salon of saga is a perfect device. It just gives you more options and
Mishaal:
00:12:08
more control. And that's exactly what I'd like to see. A lot of times I see a company release a product that focuses exclusively on the gimmick, but they don't really bother with all the other aspects. There might be some deficient aspects. I notice this a lot with gaming phones and for example, like they're highly optimized for gaming, but. They might sacrifice intentionally one or two aspects, which just didn't get around to actually bothering with the other aspects of making a smartphone, a usable smartphone. And, uh, yeah, the one that
Jason:
00:12:36
always good to hear cracks me up to your point is both on gaming phones and some of the like security minded phones that people have tried to release. They kind of suck as an actual phone, their connectivity is terrible. They've sacrificed antenna quality for various reasons. And we went into this with, we need to build a flagship phone. This needs to be a great phone first and foremost. And then we're gonna add to that. Yeah.
David:
00:13:02
And I think that one example you might be citing there is Blackberry, which I think we can say, because I mean, it's functionally dead anyways. As far the smartphone company. Yeah, TCL owns the rights, but they get phones made for the India market that are rebranded there. So yeah, they're doing some really interesting stuff, but yeah, I always felt that they tried to sell that security image and I think it came down to, they had a password protected folder function, basically. yeah. And they did some hand waving about how secure their boot was. Like, it, it, it just did not do anything to sell the product and it didn't help that the phones were.
Jason:
00:13:38
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, there are two far more niche devices that people have mentioned in conjunction with us as a privacy company that I know for a fact, so less than a thousand devices totaled because we all use the same vendors, right. Everybody uses the same vendors for like speakers and stuff like that. Apple included, well, vendors are under NDAs. They tend to share a lot. So, uh, I know for a fact that like one of the speaker vendors is like, we only shipped a thousand speakers total to that company. And so it goes to your point, right? They. Some cool stuff, but they forgot the key point is it needs to be a great phone to start. And it's one of the lessons we learned a lot when we left essential was okay. We better make sure the camera's fantastic. So literally one of the first calls I made was to some of the tuning houses where I just said, just give me a number and we'll make sure this camera experience is fantastic.
Gary:
00:14:24
And on top of that, I think giving people the choice and control people will still have all of the stuff that they're used to using on their Android device. I just wanna make that crystal clear, right? We're adding stuff. In addition to complimenting a lot of stuff that Google's doing already in the privacy space, we're not stepping on their toes. We're kind of building alongside. Of things that only an OEM can build. And that has been our main focus is, is doing that a community should definitely know that, that they're not giving up anything, Google service related. They may have more control over controlling what their device can do at that point, but out of the box, taking what people loved about the essential pH one and making sure that that kind of reflected into the awesome device and experience as well,
Mishaal:
00:15:05
was really important to. Part of what separates an Android phone from the realm of obscurity to mainstream is whether or not it chips with Google mobile services. And that's just, unfortunately, the way things are because Google play store is the ubiquitous Android app repository for Android devices. Google play services is used by tens of thousands of apps for push notifications and other APIs. And so that's why when I was reading the soak announce. I was wondering, will this ship with Google mobile services? And the answer seems to be yes, according to the webpage, and I'm sure you both can confirm that now for us, if you can. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Right. And I also wanted to ask a bit about the software experience on the device. Like, can you tell us anything about it? Would you describe it as stock? Like, or will it be like a lot of heavy customizations on top?
Gary:
00:15:51
Yeah. So this is something we contemplated early on in the development. We strictly talk about something privacy or security related. I think it goes really hand in hand with a stock, like feel with what people expect out of that experience. And again, I think that's something that our essential fan base really loved about our phone is having that stock feel, not string too far away, you know, not adding too many gimmicks on top of when inevitably will lead to like a longer lead time into merging security patches potentially, or migrating from one OHS to another. So right now, out of the box, we are leaning heavily to provide a stock like feel. So you manage the UBI, the outof box, experience, the launcher, the font, all things that you would feel Android 12 and. Eventually 13 will offer we're leaning pretty heavily. As Solana has a pretty strong brand presence. There are opportunities to create those branded moments. So you can think of things like boot, animation, charging animation sounds. We may even contemplate putting in some icon packs and potentially some Easter eggs in there as well. But generally, I don't think we'll stray too far away from, from stock Android and especially an initial V1 release. Yeah. And just
Jason:
00:17:01
to add on to that, one of the things that I tasked the team with was making sure. Even the menus felt familiar so that if you use an Android device, this should feel everything. We add. All the privacy features we add should feel like they're almost stock. I am genuinely concerned that at some point, somebody go like, wait a second. This isn't just stock vanilla, Android. This is something somebody else built. And then we have to explain to them so, uh, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Mishaal:
00:17:27
Yeah. It's always hard to tell people because the term stock Android is kind of meaningless. Because people kind of assume it means AOS P but nobody actually runs peer a S P on their device. They're actually running, always something on top of it, including GMs, usually when they include, when they say stock Android.
Jason:
00:17:45
Yeah. They're, they're really referring to GMs, Android, not AOSP. Right.
Gary:
00:17:48
Right. I think a S P is not usable in its natural state. There's no way, anyway, it's gonna run that without running a custom rom or some sort of launcher on top of it. So I think we could agree
Mishaal:
00:18:00
here that that's the. Which kind of brings me to the next topic that I wanted to dive into. How exactly does a company like awesome. Actually bring Android onto a prototype piece of hardware that you're developing on. So even if a phone ships with what looks like to be basically stock Android, which is how people would feel, the experience will be on the saga. A lot of effort actually goes into making that happen. So it's not just like companies go and download a SP from Google's get repositories. Then they customize a source code a bit, and then they compile and ship that bill onto devices. Because even though that would boot, that's basically just a GSI, a generic system image. If there's any individual hardware idiosyncrasies to deal with and you wanna ship GMs, then that's not going to work because you have to pass certification tests. You need to deal with extra drivers or any framework changes to enable extra hardware features so on and so forth. So there's like a lot of little things that have to happen, and it's not as simple as just, I'll take a O S P and I'll ship that onto a device with a few customizations. That's not how the vast majority of products are actually sold. Just to take a step back. I wanted to talk about the developments life cycle of an Android phone launch in, in general. So first thing that happens, companies come up with concepts of their phone design, what specs components they should source, what target, what price they're gonna target. And during this process, if you know, you're going to ship a consumer Android smartphone that you want people to actually buy, you know, you're going to want to license GMs at some point. And because of that, you have to be prepared well in advance for actually getting an approval for the license and actually passing the compatibility require. Surprisingly, there are very few hardware requirements in the Android compatibility definition document, but there are some, there's a
Jason:
00:19:45
that's now, and there were four years
Mishaal:
00:19:47
ago. Yeah. Just cause Android is a constantly evolving ecosystem. So Google's recognized devices can be bigger, smaller, they can be foldable. Right. So we gotta account for these changing times. But if you know, you're gonna bring a phone to market with GMs, then you have to talk to Google. At some point, talking to Google means literally filling out a form. Like they have a form on their website. That says, like, what's the product you're gonna launch? What Android version do you wanna launch it with? About how many products do you wanna sell? It's literally just a form. And then someone from Google will get back to you. And then along the process, you'll get lawyers involved, you sign a mobile application distribution agreement, and that motto of course is super confidential. So I'm sure I, I can't even bother. I'm not even gonna bother asking you to. What goes into that, because it's just, yeah. You can't talk about that. You
Jason:
00:20:33
know, honestly, it's a bit easier than that these days. I know for a fact that five, six years ago it was more difficult than it is today. Like you said, you start with just submitting a form. You get a call. Certainly we're a little bit different because we already had long established relationships with everybody over there. So it started with, Hey, uh, where do I sign up for this again? Like send an email before we sent the form and the motto is a lot less stringent than it used to be. Mostly because like you said, devices are changing. I remember when we did the essential phone, we added the notch, it was the first phone with the notch and it was a violation of Mo they're like, oh, you can't change the menu from the top too. And we're like, well, there's a hole in the top of our screen. Now it's changed a lot to accommodate for different form factors, different implementations. I think the gem phone, when we tried to build it at essential would not have been. There's no way they were gonna let it slide, but now it might be feasible.
Mishaal:
00:21:27
To return back to my point, though, that the motto is what actually is a legal agreement that allows an Android partner company like awesome to actually license and ship GMs on the products. And more importantly are equally as important to use the Android trademark in branding because, uh, for those of you don't know, Android. It's actually a trademarked term by Google. So like there's a O S P, which is an operating system. And then there's Android. And you can't say your product runs Android, unless it has a O S P with GMs on it. So it's a, it's a very sticky point, very minor thing. But that's how Google controls the terms of what companies can say. They're using Android. Of course, once you verify your hardware informed factor meets the compatibility requirements. And once you're sure you have a viable product, then you start securing components, designing prototypes, and developing software, all stuff that requires a lot of money and a lot of prep work to do, but here's one stickler in the process. So the software that you are developing for the device, it can't just be any arbitrary version of Android that you want and any arbitrary security patch level, because Google actually has requirements around this. If you were to launch a product without GMs, then you can do whatever you want with ASB. You could launch Android seven. If you wanted to on a new product, they wouldn't be able to control that. But if you wanna ship GMs, you have to abide by Google's requirements. And that means you have to actually abide by their launch approval windows for each version of Android. So what happens that if you try to submit a build for approval after the approval window for that version of Android is expired, then it won't be certified. So for example, In like two years from now, we try to send Google an Android 10 base bill for certification, they'll say, nuh, that approval windows expired. You can't launch that. The expiration for an approval window date kind of varies. And it's all like confidential. It's in like a timeline, but in general, the new software bills are updates are certified until two letter releases later. So for example, all Android, 12 based software releases. If an OEM wants to ship an Android tele based update, they can continue to do so until the launch of Android 14. So, this is kind of a way to ensure that OEMs are launching products with newer versions of Android and with newer security batch levels, which I'll get into in a little bit. So this sounds like a short timeframe for partners to actually develop their operating systems based on the platform release, which is why Google provides at least some of its partners with early access to the next platform release through the platform development kit or PDK for. And as I mentioned before, on top of the Android version requirement, Google also requires that if you're submitting a bill for approval, it has to have a security patch level. That's at most two months old at the time of submission. So because partners get security patches 30 days ahead of the public bulletin. So your, your security patch level has to be at most 90 days old from the latest partner patch. That was a lot to take in. I'm sure for some of our listeners, I kind want to ask you a bit here. This is, uh, not a question I had on the outline, but. I wanted to ask you your thoughts on like this approval window and like Google trying to keep manufacturers on an up to date version of Android and on an up to date, security patch level, like, is this a burdensome to manufacturers or do you think this is actually a good thing that most manufacturers are able to keep up with?
Jason:
00:24:31
So it's a yes and no question. Yes. I think it's a good idea and I really appreciate that they do it. And I think they're right to make sure that manufacturers are building with the latest and greatest. The thing that I don't agree with, and I'm sure every manufacturer of an Android device on the planet will agree. Being forced to use third party labs to do this certification rather than be able to do it. Direct thing of Google. And we are very, very fortunate when we were at essential because of Andy Rubin's obvious connection to Android. For those who don't know, he's the, basically the creator of Android. Who sold it to Google? Uh, so we did get some relatively special treatment which allowed us to do our security patches super, super quickly, because we were doing our own testing and submitting the results to Google directly. Unfortunately, we're not able to do that anymore and nobody is, and it, it is quite frustrating to use a third party, particularly when third priories don't move as fast as we do. So when we could do normally something in a couple of days, now it'll take a week or. I think
Gary:
00:25:29
everything's net positive in this regard. I think it is a burdensome a bit in terms of regulation and what they kind of put as requirements as any requirement would cause, uh, extension in, in the timeline that you're trying to launch a device, but I think overall getting it more cohesive, maintaining a certain level of functionality and future sets at minimum. Because Android, as we know, it is so fragmented and has been over a decade now for different OEMs. I think it does bring a net positive feel on having the latest and greatest security patches. Right. We could see that with other OEMs who used to take up to a year and rolling out a security patches now within a couple months timeframe. And I, I think that that's very, very invaluable, right. For anyone owning a device and it's. Almost a moral requirement to do so as well. Right. And for us, that was really important to us at essentials was rolling out those as soon as we had it going through and setting up a whole CTS setup within our office space. So that way our pre CTS setup was now our production CTS setup. And then we were able to get it out, have it ready? A lot of the times, as soon as Google devices had them. Yeah, there's a, a trade off between what Google has as part of their whole XTS suite of tests. That includes CTS VTS, GT. Its right. All those things kind of like meld into this whole test suite of millions of tests, but it's for the greater good, right. They want a certain bar met for Android devices that exist that people get their hands into. Right. We've seen it too often in movies where Android is a butt of a joke because of the less superior experiences that can happen, unfortunately, with, with other OEMs. So yeah, overall, it's, it's one of those things that we welcome. So
Mishaal:
00:27:13
both of you kind of touched upon topics. I wanted to explain a bit to our listeners room. If we may not be familiar, three PL the third party labs and CTS going on in the development life cycle that I've been talking about after the software has been developed to a state that's been near production ready, and then you've integrated the GMs using Google's provided packages and you verified the build is certifiable. Then it's time to actually validate that the build passes the various certification tests that you agree to run in order to ship GMs. These automated tests are installed on a PC and are run through a phone or multiple phones connected through ADB. And then after the tests run a report, that's generated with the results. So as Gary mentioned, there are a couple of tests starting with the broad compatibility test suite or CTS. Then there's a vendor test suite, which test vendor components. There's a mainline test suite. There's a CTS on GSI, which is the compatibility test suite on generic system image. Then underneath the broad CTS, there's also the compatibility test suite Verifi fire, which is a supplement to CTS with manual tests, such as those in another subset of tests called the image test suite, which test camera related stuff. So these tests that I mentioned are publicly available, but then there's also other stuff that Android partners have to run, including the bill test suite security test suite, which validates security patch, mergers. And then there's the Google test suite or GMs test suite, which test compliance with GMs requirements. You'll commonly see OEMs and Googlers refer to this whole entire series of tests as XTS, or like the X, like a lowercase X. And that's just like saying it's all the tests to keep things simple. So one thing I don't think many people are aware of or appreciate is just how big and comprehensive these automated test suites are. So in a recent blog post, when Google was announcing a new set of optional tests called CTS, D Google said that CTS today includes over 2 million tests. And that's just one of the test suites under XTS. I have heard that it takes a while to get through a full batch of tests, but I wanted to know, like, in your experience, just how long does it take to go through this process, actually doing a test.
Gary:
00:29:19
So we do have the ability to set up a pre test and that even that the CTS D is made to enable OEMs to have that power internally. A lot of it it's back and forth. We go ahead and run that on a slew of devices. So we'll have like an array of 10 to 15 devices that essentially are, are constantly running this pre CTS in house. And it's a lot of back and forth will end up catching failures. At the end of the day, a bug tracking ticket within our system. And then it goes to our system engineers and they go and fix those issues. And before it even gets to the three PL services, we have a certain confidence level on us being able to pass those tests. And because CTS is always evolving in every Android release, there's only so much you can catch in your pre CTS tests before it goes in. At that point, it's probably like one or two more, three PL. Tests for us to go back and then fix those issues. But overall, we've seen a lot of improvement on turnaround, you know, using those three PL vendors and that's improved quite a bit, uh, just cuz things are a lot more streamlined these days. So those things can vary, uh, and take as long as it's an approved house by Google and, uh, recommended you can pretty much fit that into your schedule and, and determine, you know, how long that, uh, back and forth should. It's a necessary evil the way I see it. But overall, I think it's useful to make sure that our product out of the door, uh, the factory meets a certain quality
Mishaal:
00:30:42
level. So are we talking hours days? What's the time scale here? Back and forth. Probably be
Gary:
00:30:48
weeks. Yeah. Okay. Wow. And then, yeah, I mean, initially, right? So there'll be ones that you run to a lot, but the incremental ones fall into days, I would say. But initially when you're trying to release a V one product, the brand new processor brand new. Uh, things that, you know, do compliment the whole, uh, GKI initiative. Like those type of things help a bit in streamlining it, project trouble also, right? Like that whole introduction of things that we've seen over the past five years has made it. So it's more streamlined and we have a bit more granularly control in, into updating each one of these modules.
Mishaal:
00:31:23
All right. Thank you for that. So for those of you who didn't get Gary's explanation of three S or still unsure of what they. It stands for third party labs. And they're basically firms that Google contracts certification testing out to instead of OEMs all sending their bills and devices to Google for certification testing, Google outsources, that two, three PLS. Jason mentioned that they used to have a direct line to submit their certification role to Google. But most companies aren't able to do that. And as sta said, awesome, isn't doing that. Now, what happens is you submit your device and build to three PL testing. And they verify that the bill passes and with compatibility tests and it passes XTS. And then once that is approved and that build is validated as passing all the requirements, then that build information and that build fingerprint are submitted to Google to add to their database of CTS certified bills. This database is what is used by GMs to verify that it's installed in a valid certified build. So if you try to just take a fresh AOSP build and integrate GMs into it, and you try to run the Google play store, it's a no, we're not running on this device. It's not validated. That's why a lot of these custom ROMs, they kind of spoof the build fingerprint to use a, uh, previously validated one. And that's why a lot of these spoofs have a repository of fingerprints to use. The CTS verified build fingerprint is also, what's used by the safety and at station API, which is actually being deprecated in a few years by the play integrity API. Basically this certified build is what Google approves the ship GMs on a product. And any other build, like if, if you have to do an update to a build, it's gonna have a new build fingerprint. And then that has to be certified. As Gary mentioned, it's the process is going be a bit shorter, but you still have to run through this process of doing the test. Again, validating again, sending your bill to third party labs for results. Yeah. It's a long and arduous process that repeats every time you need to do an update, if you kind of brought this up already, Jason, but essential was rather famous for shipping day one updates. And you haven't told Andrew police an interview that you literally got yelled at by Google for rolling out updates too quickly. You mentioned that briefly a bit about how that's possible, that you were able to bypass three PLS for testing, but was there anything else that enabled essential to roll it up it so quickly? No,
Jason:
00:33:44
I mean, it was really the team and the connection looked at, you know, Andy could make a call that nobody else could. Um, and so we're left now with being like everybody else and we, we will do our best to be as quick as possible. It's obviously a priority for us more so than a lot of other companies, because we're, our entire ethos has built around privacy. So, uh, that's where we stand.
Gary:
00:34:06
Yeah. And as a remote company, you know, we are a little bit tied to these three PL labs initially. I mean, we still have that dream of having that streamlined process. I think we're one hire in an office space away from doing that with Google's approval. That's something that I hope we eventually get to back, like as well, old machine sometime in 2023,
Mishaal:
00:34:27
right. Unfortunately, from what you've told me, Your software build actually pretty lean and it's not heavily customized from AOS P. So that should help with actually bringing up new software releases and integrating patches. And also with all the initiatives that Google's been introducing over the years, like product tr will generic kernel image GF, which I'll talk about a bit later, like, you know, all this has become significantly less resource intensive to, I. But there is one thing I kind of glossed over in the development life cycle. And it's a point that many people love to bring up when they argue, why updates are so slow to roll out. And it's what happens when carriers get involved. So for those of you don't know, carriers can involve themselves in many different ways. Each of them have their own needs. Some of them will ask for full framework changes to accommodate their asks. They might ask for specific branding changes, they might ask for custom boot animation. They might ask for custom icons, they might ask. The logo to be on the status bar or others will ask to insert specific apps, which Google
Jason:
00:35:22
refers. Yeah. And when you don't, they're gonna go, Hey, we're also gonna, we're not gonna put as much marketing. We're not gonna meet our end of the contract. I'm trying to think of the non four letter version word. Of my response to anything involving the carriers. Uh, so there is a reason why we're open market. We will be certified to use on all us and Canadian and EU and UK carriers. However, we have zero ties to any specific carrier directly. This is such a complicated topic from a sense of language that it, I, I want to be careful of the words I use here. Uh, so I'll just say our devices will work on all networks. However, we are not selling through any carrier.
Gary:
00:36:00
I think one interesting thing to note is maybe five years plus ago, the majority of sales came through carriers, right? Cause there's a heavy dependency on OEMs to have that quick pro type of relationship with carriers. I think now with the world climate, the way things are evolving, I think it's direct to consumer having this B Y O D. That opportunity is now a bit open for us to move as many devices as we need to as a, a lean company in general. So that type of relationship. Yeah. A lot of the stuff with carriers, they put a lot of blot wear on your device. That was completely against all of our ethos and our beliefs in a device is you shouldn't have this thing that you can't uninstall, essentially like too many things on there. Right? There's those necessary ones where that's just the nature of how Android behaves. But if now these large telecom companies are forcing some stuff to exist on there. There is some good, right? They do like visual voicemail stuff or different apps, um, things like that. But you know that there are things that people generally complain about. And if it's been long enough for us to stray away from being
Mishaal:
00:37:06
carrier dependent, well, you both kind of already answered the question I was gonna ask, which is what are your thoughts on carriers being blamed for delaying software rollouts? And I think you both played that kind of clear with your, uh, opinions. So, uh, before we move on on, you're
undefined:
00:37:18
completely
Jason:
00:37:19
responsible for it. It are so responsible for delays off the record. Uh, pick I'll go back on the record for this great example of a carrier. Just being completely asinine. There was a carrier in Japan. I don't remember which Japanese carrier it was. But to pass their mechanical requirement, you had to drop the phone on its edge from six feet onto the sharp edge of an IV without any damage. I could literally take a block of titanium, just solid titanium, and it will show a mark if I do that drop test. And then when you fail that test, they go, ah, well you need a waiver. Well, we're gonna wanna take like 3% off all your. Uh, whoa. I was like, like, there's nothing that passed that test. It's not possible. And they were like, no, no, we're gonna that that's our requirement. I feel like it's a
David:
00:38:23
test written by their underwriters.
Jason:
00:38:25
Oh, I'm sure it was written by a lawyer. Somewhere was like, Hey, come up with some tests that are impossible to pass.
Mishaal:
00:38:31
Wow. And on that colorful note, we've just wrapped part one of our interview with Jason KES and Gary Anderson from awesome part two should be the next episode in this podcast feed. So make sure you give that a listen when you can. And if you're interested in building your own Android device for your business, come talk to us at ESER. We can help you work through how to choose the right hardware for your kiosk point of sale terminal or other fleet device, as well as how to remotely manage and keep them updated with our DevOps approach. Go to eser.io and schedule a chat with us today. We'd love to hear from you. And thanks for listening to this episode of Android bites.
00:00:02
Hello, and welcome to Android bites powered by Esper I'm David Rudick and each week I'm joined by my co-host Michelle ramen. As we dive deep into the world of Android. And this week, I won't begin with any long preamble. We have a very special guest series of guests actually. Um, we have two guests now, but, uh, yeah, Michelle, we have somebody very special. So go ahead. Let you make intros.
Mishaal:
00:00:24
Yeah. Thanks David. So I'm sure all of you. At one point, I've had an opinion on what the ideal smartphone should have, but there's no true one size fits all device out there. Every device lacks something that's important to someone out there. And if there's enough, someone's out there to demand that something, then there's an opportunity for a new product to be made that meets that demand. For those of you who follow tech news a couple of weeks ago, the founder of pebble actually made headlines. When he started an online petition for people to sign onto, to say, Hey, we want a iPhone minis size Android phone. There were about 50,000 people sign onto the petition. And of course, you know, if you're familiar with online petitions, they usually don't really do anything, but still like he wanted to show the world. He wanted to show that there are enough people who actually want a small Android phone. Unlike most people out there, founder of pebble, he actually has the money, connections and experience in the industry to make his dream a reality. But of course he's not the only one who has all three of those things to do that. Recently there's been not one, but two smartphone companies that have launched or at least one will be launching their product soon. The other is awesome and we've invited two very special people from the company to join us on the Android bites podcast, to talk about their first smartphone product. So we've invited Jason Keats. Who's the founder and CEO and Gary Anderson. Who's the chief product officer onto the show. So thank you for joining us, Jason and Gary.
Jason:
00:01:48
Hey, thanks for having us excited to be here. Letting chat with you guys about building Android devices. Yep. Happy to be
Gary:
00:01:53
here too. Uh, looking forward to telling you
Mishaal:
00:01:55
about saga. Hey listeners, before we get too far, I wanna let you know that our interview went pretty long, so we'll be splitting it up into two episode. In this first episode, we are focusing a lot on building up the Android experience that Austin wanted to have. There's also plenty of insight, Gary and Jason share as to how a lot of these aspects worked out when their team was part of essential. And then in our next episode, we'll turn to how they plan to keep their OS updated and then dive into some of how the salon mobile stack will work. But let's first get started with part one. So right off the bat, why don't we just dive into the product that you're launching and the company that you found at Jason? So for those of you don't know, Jason was the head of R and D at essential, another smartphone startup that produced the now discontinued essential phone. I don't really wanna, re-litigate what happened to essential because that's kind of old history and you can just pretty much just Google it and look up what happened. So why did you decide to found awesome after leaving essential? Like what did you feel was lacking in the Steve smartphones release in 2020. Led you to want to make your own? Well,
Jason:
00:02:52
there are two parts to that. Number one is there was a real need and demand for a smartphone that was a quality bill, premium materials, excellent device, but it needed to answer some question. And I think that was the biggest thing missing from essential. You could look up all the different details about why essential one enter. But ultimately my viewpoint was that there wasn't really a reason for it to exist. It was like we're building a cool thing for the sake of building a cool thing. And when we started awesome, we kind of sat down and said, what do we wanna build? How do we wanna build it? What are we trying to answer? And the first thing we came to was there is an extreme lack of privacy and people do care about it and are willing to put money behind it. And so that was the ethos behind starting the company. The other side of it was when Andy told me essential was shutting down, it was like, okay, well I can go make big bucks at apple or Google again, if I want to. And in no way, did that sound entertaining to me or fun to me and starting a company it's very, very difficult. There are so many challenges. Probably the hardest thing is hiring. And yet here I had the opportunity to hire a team of people that I've worked with. And we've been through the trenches together with that. We know how each other works and how each other behaves and they were all available. So it was a fairly simple move to go, Hey guys, let's stick together. I'll put my money where my mouth is and let's try to go and do this. And it would be actually super interest to hear Gary's side of this convers.
Gary:
00:04:14
Yeah, I think after the shutdown of, of essential the engineers, right. We're thinking where, where they could go lo and behold, Keith's, you know, we get a call from Jason here and he reaches out and says, Hey, I have a crazy idea and continues to pitch the idea to us and told us what was missing from essential and kind of what that would change into here at awesome. So privacy being our north star and then some of the stuff that we'd be doing. In terms of not only working in a different environment, which encouraged collaboration and a lot of communication with the CEO, but also a lot of different types of things that we truly believed in on a personal level and things that was kind of kind of rapidly growing in, in the, you know, sense of the markets in the EU and, uh, us and then things that are interesting, getting a lot more attention in different countries.
Mishaal:
00:05:04
I think it's quite interesting, or at least like incredible that the two of you and like, you know, the rest of the, the higher ups of the, the founders of awesome were able to convince so many former ex essential engineers to immediately join on board with you guys. Because after this company goes down to start up making a smartphone company, a lot of these ex engineers have a lot of built up experience in the industry. They could have gone to apple, they could have gone to Google. They could have gone to some of the more established brands, but. They had enough trust in your expertise and your idea to want to say, I wanna do this again. I want a second shot at this to go with another startup. So I think that's pretty impressive that you guys manage to scoop up so many former employees and start a new smartphone brand.
Jason:
00:05:45
I appreciate that. There has been a lot of negative things said about Andy in the press. And I gotta say one of the things that he did amazingly well was attracting just the best people in the industry to come and work for him. And for whatever reason, I, I don't know if there's like some, we all have the same mental defect or whatever you wanna call it, a willingness to chew glass and keep fighting and working together. And we. Like you said, it takes a matter of comradery or friendship to go through one startup, have it fail and just immediately sign up to do it again with the expectation that things will be different and making the changes at a, at a institutional level to see that those changes are implemented. And I cannot stress enough how amazed I am and how proud I am of this team that I have with me and who are on this adventure with. So
David:
00:06:38
I do wanna ask a hardware question, Jason, because I know we're gonna talk a lot about software today. The pH one really wasn't like any other Android phone before, or since I would say in terms of materials, design, even the aesthetic of the phone was markedly different. There was always something clearly very special about the engineering talent at essential on the hardware side. What do you think made it possible for you all to build what everybody else looks at? The big manufacturers, even, you know, the big conglomerates out of China, like oppo BBK group, and they say, okay, you have the scale, you can do this. You can make something really incredible. They always shy away, go back to like 7,000 series, aluminum standard glass materials, the same kind of bill that everybody goes for. Do you really think it is just money and that your freedom that you've given your team that enables you to make those Boulder choices? Or is there something like more systemic there?
Jason:
00:07:35
You know, it, it's a really good question. Why don't they do that? Number one, I think big companies, all. A million voices and a million opinions. Google is probably the worst example of that. I mean, looking at their hardware, you can clearly see it was designed by like four people and not a single mind was melding it together. It's like, cool, you do the front and all to the back and we'll just glue them together and we'll call it a day. There's part of that. And then partly, you know, what I've seen in my career from a hardware perspective is when I'm sitting in China, I have seen so many vendors just get abused by engineers from different companies and like, just get treated like. My thing has always been to treat everybody respect and love and show a measure of comradery for everybody. And what that means is when I have something that's stupid or crazy, like machining ceramic on the back of the essential pH one, the 0.02, five millimeter tolerance to get the SI beam chip to work means that they were willing to work with me and go like, cool, Jason's a crazy bastard, but let's work with him cuz he's a lot of fun. I've maintained that relationship with all the vendors and all the suppliers, which has allowed us to play at a level that no startup should be able to play at. I mean, we called Foxcon. We called all the big tier one developers and manufacturing houses. We're like, we're gonna do this. And I'm like, cool, whatever you need, we got you. I don't think anybody could do that today. I, I know for a fact that, uh, one of the other brand new phone companies needed my help to get intros at that. And
Mishaal:
00:08:59
he shouldn't have, um, said phone company will remain unnamed just to be clear. Yes So, um, exactly the topic of this discussion is mostly about building Android and shipping, Android onto a device. And I promise we're gonna get to that, but I wanted to first give you an opportunity to talk about the end result, the actual product that you guys are releasing next year. So can you tell us a bit, Jason and Gary, about the Solana saga? What sets it apart from other flagship Android phones?
Jason:
00:09:27
Right now what we're doing is from a hardware perspective, it is a top flight, absolute flagship Android device of which there aren't that many left anymore. You have Samsung, and I don't know what's in the pixel seven, to be honest, but certainly the last couple pixels weren't flagship in terms of mechanical hardware spec, their software has been tremend. So what we are doing is a true flagship device that can compete on specs alone with Google or Samsung. What's different about it is we are trying to give users. Everything we do is all about providing consumer choice and choice and control over how their data is handled, which goes to the awesome privacy ethos, but also now how they control, interact with their digital assets, which is where the salon mobile stack comes in on saga. And we can spend quite a bit of talking about the relationship between awesome and saga right now. What it really comes down to is both a Toley who's the CEO and co-founder of Solana. And I have in common is that we did see this incredible opportunity where they wanted to build some hardware for the future of web three to be developed with. And we've seen for years that mobile is the leader, not desktop. And yet in the crypto space, desktop was ex or like they were developing exclusively for desktop, which made no sense. What we're doing is building a home for web three developers to build onto mobile hardware, which really is what most people use day to day. And from a software perspective, I'll hand it back over. Yeah,
Gary:
00:10:49
I think what we're gonna end up seeing is there's gonna be a difference from our device and how it evolves versus some of the other ones that are made by these mega corporations. Right? So there's gonna be stuff that's leaning heavily into what web three and decentralization at its core is meant to provide as well as taking a lot of and leaning into the open source community. Right? So I think having amending those two together on a flagship device, I'm more excited about the evolution. And this being a flagship phone and hardware to how that evolving software, I think that's what we're most excited to
Mishaal:
00:11:25
see. Thank you both for that. It's really important for any new phone on the market to stand out. And this partnership with Solana, I'm sure many people have differing opinions on cryptocurrency, web three NFTs, et cetera. Yeah, to say the least, there's certainly many heated opinions on them. And I don't really wanna Wade into those differences of opinions, but it is well, let, let very unique aspect, wait in our answer to
Jason:
00:11:48
that really quickly. Is that again, I keep reiterating it's all about choice. If a user doesn't want to use the crypto features, there is no obligation to use them. There is no forcing function. There is nothing there that requires it. If you just want a premium Android experience on a premium flagship device. The Sal salon of saga is a perfect device. It just gives you more options and
Mishaal:
00:12:08
more control. And that's exactly what I'd like to see. A lot of times I see a company release a product that focuses exclusively on the gimmick, but they don't really bother with all the other aspects. There might be some deficient aspects. I notice this a lot with gaming phones and for example, like they're highly optimized for gaming, but. They might sacrifice intentionally one or two aspects, which just didn't get around to actually bothering with the other aspects of making a smartphone, a usable smartphone. And, uh, yeah, the one that
Jason:
00:12:36
always good to hear cracks me up to your point is both on gaming phones and some of the like security minded phones that people have tried to release. They kind of suck as an actual phone, their connectivity is terrible. They've sacrificed antenna quality for various reasons. And we went into this with, we need to build a flagship phone. This needs to be a great phone first and foremost. And then we're gonna add to that. Yeah.
David:
00:13:02
And I think that one example you might be citing there is Blackberry, which I think we can say, because I mean, it's functionally dead anyways. As far the smartphone company. Yeah, TCL owns the rights, but they get phones made for the India market that are rebranded there. So yeah, they're doing some really interesting stuff, but yeah, I always felt that they tried to sell that security image and I think it came down to, they had a password protected folder function, basically. yeah. And they did some hand waving about how secure their boot was. Like, it, it, it just did not do anything to sell the product and it didn't help that the phones were.
Jason:
00:13:38
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, there are two far more niche devices that people have mentioned in conjunction with us as a privacy company that I know for a fact, so less than a thousand devices totaled because we all use the same vendors, right. Everybody uses the same vendors for like speakers and stuff like that. Apple included, well, vendors are under NDAs. They tend to share a lot. So, uh, I know for a fact that like one of the speaker vendors is like, we only shipped a thousand speakers total to that company. And so it goes to your point, right? They. Some cool stuff, but they forgot the key point is it needs to be a great phone to start. And it's one of the lessons we learned a lot when we left essential was okay. We better make sure the camera's fantastic. So literally one of the first calls I made was to some of the tuning houses where I just said, just give me a number and we'll make sure this camera experience is fantastic.
Gary:
00:14:24
And on top of that, I think giving people the choice and control people will still have all of the stuff that they're used to using on their Android device. I just wanna make that crystal clear, right? We're adding stuff. In addition to complimenting a lot of stuff that Google's doing already in the privacy space, we're not stepping on their toes. We're kind of building alongside. Of things that only an OEM can build. And that has been our main focus is, is doing that a community should definitely know that, that they're not giving up anything, Google service related. They may have more control over controlling what their device can do at that point, but out of the box, taking what people loved about the essential pH one and making sure that that kind of reflected into the awesome device and experience as well,
Mishaal:
00:15:05
was really important to. Part of what separates an Android phone from the realm of obscurity to mainstream is whether or not it chips with Google mobile services. And that's just, unfortunately, the way things are because Google play store is the ubiquitous Android app repository for Android devices. Google play services is used by tens of thousands of apps for push notifications and other APIs. And so that's why when I was reading the soak announce. I was wondering, will this ship with Google mobile services? And the answer seems to be yes, according to the webpage, and I'm sure you both can confirm that now for us, if you can. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Right. And I also wanted to ask a bit about the software experience on the device. Like, can you tell us anything about it? Would you describe it as stock? Like, or will it be like a lot of heavy customizations on top?
Gary:
00:15:51
Yeah. So this is something we contemplated early on in the development. We strictly talk about something privacy or security related. I think it goes really hand in hand with a stock, like feel with what people expect out of that experience. And again, I think that's something that our essential fan base really loved about our phone is having that stock feel, not string too far away, you know, not adding too many gimmicks on top of when inevitably will lead to like a longer lead time into merging security patches potentially, or migrating from one OHS to another. So right now, out of the box, we are leaning heavily to provide a stock like feel. So you manage the UBI, the outof box, experience, the launcher, the font, all things that you would feel Android 12 and. Eventually 13 will offer we're leaning pretty heavily. As Solana has a pretty strong brand presence. There are opportunities to create those branded moments. So you can think of things like boot, animation, charging animation sounds. We may even contemplate putting in some icon packs and potentially some Easter eggs in there as well. But generally, I don't think we'll stray too far away from, from stock Android and especially an initial V1 release. Yeah. And just
Jason:
00:17:01
to add on to that, one of the things that I tasked the team with was making sure. Even the menus felt familiar so that if you use an Android device, this should feel everything. We add. All the privacy features we add should feel like they're almost stock. I am genuinely concerned that at some point, somebody go like, wait a second. This isn't just stock vanilla, Android. This is something somebody else built. And then we have to explain to them so, uh, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Mishaal:
00:17:27
Yeah. It's always hard to tell people because the term stock Android is kind of meaningless. Because people kind of assume it means AOS P but nobody actually runs peer a S P on their device. They're actually running, always something on top of it, including GMs, usually when they include, when they say stock Android.
Jason:
00:17:45
Yeah. They're, they're really referring to GMs, Android, not AOSP. Right.
Gary:
00:17:48
Right. I think a S P is not usable in its natural state. There's no way, anyway, it's gonna run that without running a custom rom or some sort of launcher on top of it. So I think we could agree
Mishaal:
00:18:00
here that that's the. Which kind of brings me to the next topic that I wanted to dive into. How exactly does a company like awesome. Actually bring Android onto a prototype piece of hardware that you're developing on. So even if a phone ships with what looks like to be basically stock Android, which is how people would feel, the experience will be on the saga. A lot of effort actually goes into making that happen. So it's not just like companies go and download a SP from Google's get repositories. Then they customize a source code a bit, and then they compile and ship that bill onto devices. Because even though that would boot, that's basically just a GSI, a generic system image. If there's any individual hardware idiosyncrasies to deal with and you wanna ship GMs, then that's not going to work because you have to pass certification tests. You need to deal with extra drivers or any framework changes to enable extra hardware features so on and so forth. So there's like a lot of little things that have to happen, and it's not as simple as just, I'll take a O S P and I'll ship that onto a device with a few customizations. That's not how the vast majority of products are actually sold. Just to take a step back. I wanted to talk about the developments life cycle of an Android phone launch in, in general. So first thing that happens, companies come up with concepts of their phone design, what specs components they should source, what target, what price they're gonna target. And during this process, if you know, you're going to ship a consumer Android smartphone that you want people to actually buy, you know, you're going to want to license GMs at some point. And because of that, you have to be prepared well in advance for actually getting an approval for the license and actually passing the compatibility require. Surprisingly, there are very few hardware requirements in the Android compatibility definition document, but there are some, there's a
Jason:
00:19:45
that's now, and there were four years
Mishaal:
00:19:47
ago. Yeah. Just cause Android is a constantly evolving ecosystem. So Google's recognized devices can be bigger, smaller, they can be foldable. Right. So we gotta account for these changing times. But if you know, you're gonna bring a phone to market with GMs, then you have to talk to Google. At some point, talking to Google means literally filling out a form. Like they have a form on their website. That says, like, what's the product you're gonna launch? What Android version do you wanna launch it with? About how many products do you wanna sell? It's literally just a form. And then someone from Google will get back to you. And then along the process, you'll get lawyers involved, you sign a mobile application distribution agreement, and that motto of course is super confidential. So I'm sure I, I can't even bother. I'm not even gonna bother asking you to. What goes into that, because it's just, yeah. You can't talk about that. You
Jason:
00:20:33
know, honestly, it's a bit easier than that these days. I know for a fact that five, six years ago it was more difficult than it is today. Like you said, you start with just submitting a form. You get a call. Certainly we're a little bit different because we already had long established relationships with everybody over there. So it started with, Hey, uh, where do I sign up for this again? Like send an email before we sent the form and the motto is a lot less stringent than it used to be. Mostly because like you said, devices are changing. I remember when we did the essential phone, we added the notch, it was the first phone with the notch and it was a violation of Mo they're like, oh, you can't change the menu from the top too. And we're like, well, there's a hole in the top of our screen. Now it's changed a lot to accommodate for different form factors, different implementations. I think the gem phone, when we tried to build it at essential would not have been. There's no way they were gonna let it slide, but now it might be feasible.
Mishaal:
00:21:27
To return back to my point, though, that the motto is what actually is a legal agreement that allows an Android partner company like awesome to actually license and ship GMs on the products. And more importantly are equally as important to use the Android trademark in branding because, uh, for those of you don't know, Android. It's actually a trademarked term by Google. So like there's a O S P, which is an operating system. And then there's Android. And you can't say your product runs Android, unless it has a O S P with GMs on it. So it's a, it's a very sticky point, very minor thing. But that's how Google controls the terms of what companies can say. They're using Android. Of course, once you verify your hardware informed factor meets the compatibility requirements. And once you're sure you have a viable product, then you start securing components, designing prototypes, and developing software, all stuff that requires a lot of money and a lot of prep work to do, but here's one stickler in the process. So the software that you are developing for the device, it can't just be any arbitrary version of Android that you want and any arbitrary security patch level, because Google actually has requirements around this. If you were to launch a product without GMs, then you can do whatever you want with ASB. You could launch Android seven. If you wanted to on a new product, they wouldn't be able to control that. But if you wanna ship GMs, you have to abide by Google's requirements. And that means you have to actually abide by their launch approval windows for each version of Android. So what happens that if you try to submit a build for approval after the approval window for that version of Android is expired, then it won't be certified. So for example, In like two years from now, we try to send Google an Android 10 base bill for certification, they'll say, nuh, that approval windows expired. You can't launch that. The expiration for an approval window date kind of varies. And it's all like confidential. It's in like a timeline, but in general, the new software bills are updates are certified until two letter releases later. So for example, all Android, 12 based software releases. If an OEM wants to ship an Android tele based update, they can continue to do so until the launch of Android 14. So, this is kind of a way to ensure that OEMs are launching products with newer versions of Android and with newer security batch levels, which I'll get into in a little bit. So this sounds like a short timeframe for partners to actually develop their operating systems based on the platform release, which is why Google provides at least some of its partners with early access to the next platform release through the platform development kit or PDK for. And as I mentioned before, on top of the Android version requirement, Google also requires that if you're submitting a bill for approval, it has to have a security patch level. That's at most two months old at the time of submission. So because partners get security patches 30 days ahead of the public bulletin. So your, your security patch level has to be at most 90 days old from the latest partner patch. That was a lot to take in. I'm sure for some of our listeners, I kind want to ask you a bit here. This is, uh, not a question I had on the outline, but. I wanted to ask you your thoughts on like this approval window and like Google trying to keep manufacturers on an up to date version of Android and on an up to date, security patch level, like, is this a burdensome to manufacturers or do you think this is actually a good thing that most manufacturers are able to keep up with?
Jason:
00:24:31
So it's a yes and no question. Yes. I think it's a good idea and I really appreciate that they do it. And I think they're right to make sure that manufacturers are building with the latest and greatest. The thing that I don't agree with, and I'm sure every manufacturer of an Android device on the planet will agree. Being forced to use third party labs to do this certification rather than be able to do it. Direct thing of Google. And we are very, very fortunate when we were at essential because of Andy Rubin's obvious connection to Android. For those who don't know, he's the, basically the creator of Android. Who sold it to Google? Uh, so we did get some relatively special treatment which allowed us to do our security patches super, super quickly, because we were doing our own testing and submitting the results to Google directly. Unfortunately, we're not able to do that anymore and nobody is, and it, it is quite frustrating to use a third party, particularly when third priories don't move as fast as we do. So when we could do normally something in a couple of days, now it'll take a week or. I think
Gary:
00:25:29
everything's net positive in this regard. I think it is a burdensome a bit in terms of regulation and what they kind of put as requirements as any requirement would cause, uh, extension in, in the timeline that you're trying to launch a device, but I think overall getting it more cohesive, maintaining a certain level of functionality and future sets at minimum. Because Android, as we know, it is so fragmented and has been over a decade now for different OEMs. I think it does bring a net positive feel on having the latest and greatest security patches. Right. We could see that with other OEMs who used to take up to a year and rolling out a security patches now within a couple months timeframe. And I, I think that that's very, very invaluable, right. For anyone owning a device and it's. Almost a moral requirement to do so as well. Right. And for us, that was really important to us at essentials was rolling out those as soon as we had it going through and setting up a whole CTS setup within our office space. So that way our pre CTS setup was now our production CTS setup. And then we were able to get it out, have it ready? A lot of the times, as soon as Google devices had them. Yeah, there's a, a trade off between what Google has as part of their whole XTS suite of tests. That includes CTS VTS, GT. Its right. All those things kind of like meld into this whole test suite of millions of tests, but it's for the greater good, right. They want a certain bar met for Android devices that exist that people get their hands into. Right. We've seen it too often in movies where Android is a butt of a joke because of the less superior experiences that can happen, unfortunately, with, with other OEMs. So yeah, overall, it's, it's one of those things that we welcome. So
Mishaal:
00:27:13
both of you kind of touched upon topics. I wanted to explain a bit to our listeners room. If we may not be familiar, three PL the third party labs and CTS going on in the development life cycle that I've been talking about after the software has been developed to a state that's been near production ready, and then you've integrated the GMs using Google's provided packages and you verified the build is certifiable. Then it's time to actually validate that the build passes the various certification tests that you agree to run in order to ship GMs. These automated tests are installed on a PC and are run through a phone or multiple phones connected through ADB. And then after the tests run a report, that's generated with the results. So as Gary mentioned, there are a couple of tests starting with the broad compatibility test suite or CTS. Then there's a vendor test suite, which test vendor components. There's a mainline test suite. There's a CTS on GSI, which is the compatibility test suite on generic system image. Then underneath the broad CTS, there's also the compatibility test suite Verifi fire, which is a supplement to CTS with manual tests, such as those in another subset of tests called the image test suite, which test camera related stuff. So these tests that I mentioned are publicly available, but then there's also other stuff that Android partners have to run, including the bill test suite security test suite, which validates security patch, mergers. And then there's the Google test suite or GMs test suite, which test compliance with GMs requirements. You'll commonly see OEMs and Googlers refer to this whole entire series of tests as XTS, or like the X, like a lowercase X. And that's just like saying it's all the tests to keep things simple. So one thing I don't think many people are aware of or appreciate is just how big and comprehensive these automated test suites are. So in a recent blog post, when Google was announcing a new set of optional tests called CTS, D Google said that CTS today includes over 2 million tests. And that's just one of the test suites under XTS. I have heard that it takes a while to get through a full batch of tests, but I wanted to know, like, in your experience, just how long does it take to go through this process, actually doing a test.
Gary:
00:29:19
So we do have the ability to set up a pre test and that even that the CTS D is made to enable OEMs to have that power internally. A lot of it it's back and forth. We go ahead and run that on a slew of devices. So we'll have like an array of 10 to 15 devices that essentially are, are constantly running this pre CTS in house. And it's a lot of back and forth will end up catching failures. At the end of the day, a bug tracking ticket within our system. And then it goes to our system engineers and they go and fix those issues. And before it even gets to the three PL services, we have a certain confidence level on us being able to pass those tests. And because CTS is always evolving in every Android release, there's only so much you can catch in your pre CTS tests before it goes in. At that point, it's probably like one or two more, three PL. Tests for us to go back and then fix those issues. But overall, we've seen a lot of improvement on turnaround, you know, using those three PL vendors and that's improved quite a bit, uh, just cuz things are a lot more streamlined these days. So those things can vary, uh, and take as long as it's an approved house by Google and, uh, recommended you can pretty much fit that into your schedule and, and determine, you know, how long that, uh, back and forth should. It's a necessary evil the way I see it. But overall, I think it's useful to make sure that our product out of the door, uh, the factory meets a certain quality
Mishaal:
00:30:42
level. So are we talking hours days? What's the time scale here? Back and forth. Probably be
Gary:
00:30:48
weeks. Yeah. Okay. Wow. And then, yeah, I mean, initially, right? So there'll be ones that you run to a lot, but the incremental ones fall into days, I would say. But initially when you're trying to release a V one product, the brand new processor brand new. Uh, things that, you know, do compliment the whole, uh, GKI initiative. Like those type of things help a bit in streamlining it, project trouble also, right? Like that whole introduction of things that we've seen over the past five years has made it. So it's more streamlined and we have a bit more granularly control in, into updating each one of these modules.
Mishaal:
00:31:23
All right. Thank you for that. So for those of you who didn't get Gary's explanation of three S or still unsure of what they. It stands for third party labs. And they're basically firms that Google contracts certification testing out to instead of OEMs all sending their bills and devices to Google for certification testing, Google outsources, that two, three PLS. Jason mentioned that they used to have a direct line to submit their certification role to Google. But most companies aren't able to do that. And as sta said, awesome, isn't doing that. Now, what happens is you submit your device and build to three PL testing. And they verify that the bill passes and with compatibility tests and it passes XTS. And then once that is approved and that build is validated as passing all the requirements, then that build information and that build fingerprint are submitted to Google to add to their database of CTS certified bills. This database is what is used by GMs to verify that it's installed in a valid certified build. So if you try to just take a fresh AOSP build and integrate GMs into it, and you try to run the Google play store, it's a no, we're not running on this device. It's not validated. That's why a lot of these custom ROMs, they kind of spoof the build fingerprint to use a, uh, previously validated one. And that's why a lot of these spoofs have a repository of fingerprints to use. The CTS verified build fingerprint is also, what's used by the safety and at station API, which is actually being deprecated in a few years by the play integrity API. Basically this certified build is what Google approves the ship GMs on a product. And any other build, like if, if you have to do an update to a build, it's gonna have a new build fingerprint. And then that has to be certified. As Gary mentioned, it's the process is going be a bit shorter, but you still have to run through this process of doing the test. Again, validating again, sending your bill to third party labs for results. Yeah. It's a long and arduous process that repeats every time you need to do an update, if you kind of brought this up already, Jason, but essential was rather famous for shipping day one updates. And you haven't told Andrew police an interview that you literally got yelled at by Google for rolling out updates too quickly. You mentioned that briefly a bit about how that's possible, that you were able to bypass three PLS for testing, but was there anything else that enabled essential to roll it up it so quickly? No,
Jason:
00:33:44
I mean, it was really the team and the connection looked at, you know, Andy could make a call that nobody else could. Um, and so we're left now with being like everybody else and we, we will do our best to be as quick as possible. It's obviously a priority for us more so than a lot of other companies, because we're, our entire ethos has built around privacy. So, uh, that's where we stand.
Gary:
00:34:06
Yeah. And as a remote company, you know, we are a little bit tied to these three PL labs initially. I mean, we still have that dream of having that streamlined process. I think we're one hire in an office space away from doing that with Google's approval. That's something that I hope we eventually get to back, like as well, old machine sometime in 2023,
Mishaal:
00:34:27
right. Unfortunately, from what you've told me, Your software build actually pretty lean and it's not heavily customized from AOS P. So that should help with actually bringing up new software releases and integrating patches. And also with all the initiatives that Google's been introducing over the years, like product tr will generic kernel image GF, which I'll talk about a bit later, like, you know, all this has become significantly less resource intensive to, I. But there is one thing I kind of glossed over in the development life cycle. And it's a point that many people love to bring up when they argue, why updates are so slow to roll out. And it's what happens when carriers get involved. So for those of you don't know, carriers can involve themselves in many different ways. Each of them have their own needs. Some of them will ask for full framework changes to accommodate their asks. They might ask for specific branding changes, they might ask for custom boot animation. They might ask for custom icons, they might ask. The logo to be on the status bar or others will ask to insert specific apps, which Google
Jason:
00:35:22
refers. Yeah. And when you don't, they're gonna go, Hey, we're also gonna, we're not gonna put as much marketing. We're not gonna meet our end of the contract. I'm trying to think of the non four letter version word. Of my response to anything involving the carriers. Uh, so there is a reason why we're open market. We will be certified to use on all us and Canadian and EU and UK carriers. However, we have zero ties to any specific carrier directly. This is such a complicated topic from a sense of language that it, I, I want to be careful of the words I use here. Uh, so I'll just say our devices will work on all networks. However, we are not selling through any carrier.
Gary:
00:36:00
I think one interesting thing to note is maybe five years plus ago, the majority of sales came through carriers, right? Cause there's a heavy dependency on OEMs to have that quick pro type of relationship with carriers. I think now with the world climate, the way things are evolving, I think it's direct to consumer having this B Y O D. That opportunity is now a bit open for us to move as many devices as we need to as a, a lean company in general. So that type of relationship. Yeah. A lot of the stuff with carriers, they put a lot of blot wear on your device. That was completely against all of our ethos and our beliefs in a device is you shouldn't have this thing that you can't uninstall, essentially like too many things on there. Right? There's those necessary ones where that's just the nature of how Android behaves. But if now these large telecom companies are forcing some stuff to exist on there. There is some good, right? They do like visual voicemail stuff or different apps, um, things like that. But you know that there are things that people generally complain about. And if it's been long enough for us to stray away from being
Mishaal:
00:37:06
carrier dependent, well, you both kind of already answered the question I was gonna ask, which is what are your thoughts on carriers being blamed for delaying software rollouts? And I think you both played that kind of clear with your, uh, opinions. So, uh, before we move on on, you're
undefined:
00:37:18
completely
Jason:
00:37:19
responsible for it. It are so responsible for delays off the record. Uh, pick I'll go back on the record for this great example of a carrier. Just being completely asinine. There was a carrier in Japan. I don't remember which Japanese carrier it was. But to pass their mechanical requirement, you had to drop the phone on its edge from six feet onto the sharp edge of an IV without any damage. I could literally take a block of titanium, just solid titanium, and it will show a mark if I do that drop test. And then when you fail that test, they go, ah, well you need a waiver. Well, we're gonna wanna take like 3% off all your. Uh, whoa. I was like, like, there's nothing that passed that test. It's not possible. And they were like, no, no, we're gonna that that's our requirement. I feel like it's a
David:
00:38:23
test written by their underwriters.
Jason:
00:38:25
Oh, I'm sure it was written by a lawyer. Somewhere was like, Hey, come up with some tests that are impossible to pass.
Mishaal:
00:38:31
Wow. And on that colorful note, we've just wrapped part one of our interview with Jason KES and Gary Anderson from awesome part two should be the next episode in this podcast feed. So make sure you give that a listen when you can. And if you're interested in building your own Android device for your business, come talk to us at ESER. We can help you work through how to choose the right hardware for your kiosk point of sale terminal or other fleet device, as well as how to remotely manage and keep them updated with our DevOps approach. Go to eser.io and schedule a chat with us today. We'd love to hear from you. And thanks for listening to this episode of Android bites.
