Gadgetory

hello I'm Gary Sims and this is Android authority and you may have heard of Android Go and how it started to appear on certain low-end Android devices for example I recently reviewed the Nokia one which is an Android device running Android Orio 8.1 Go Edition so that does lead us to the question what is the difference between normal Android and Android go well if you want to find out please let me explain ok the first thing I'll say about Android Go is it is actually Android it isn't a kind of cut-down version or a kind of a semi compatible version it is Android and you can actually when you go to the Play Store you have access to all the normal apps that your hardware could physically support obviously if you hasn't got a very good GPU or it hasn't got very good CPU performance and there gonna be some limitation to what it can do bring terms of compatibility it can run all the normal Android apps so from that point of view this is just Android but there are four things that we need to point out that tell us about the difference between standard stock Android and Android go the first one is about performance now Google spent a lot of time tweaking the Android go sources so that it works better on devices with one gigabyte of memory or even less they've also done a lot to make sure that the apps start up quicker that they are able to run with a reasonable performance on a low-end device so the first point is performance and Google Play itself will actually recommend for you light or kind of go apps including our Google's Android go apps apps are designed to run better on low-end devices in fact app developers have the option to provide two apk files as to application files to the Play Store one of them being tweaked and tuned specifically for running on low-end devices and Google Play will actually tell you about those our apps when you use the Play Store now it isn't only about performance it's also about storage so the second point is internal storage now many of these devices will come with either 8 or 16 gigabyte of internal storage now the Nokia one which I reviewed recently has gigabytes of internal storage now on a modern kind of phone from let's say Samsung or oneplus or Sony or someone like that that eight gigabytes will just be completely eaten up with to have Android and the pre-installed apps but Android Go does two things first of all there is a minimum number of pre-installed apps and secondly they've Google and a lot of work optimizing the space so that as little as possible is actually used by Android and by those apps so for example on the Nokia one although it's got 8 gigabytes 4 gigabytes of that is free for files and data and photos which is quite different to example my note 8 11 gigabytes I use just for the kind of Android and the system apps so they've really pared that down so the only four gigabytes are used which means that you know you get some free space on an 8 gigabyte device obviously a 16 gigabyte device would be even better and linked with that these Android go apps like Gmail go and maps go for example use much much less disk space than their counterparts for example you're talking just like 60 K or 70 K for one of these apps rather than two three four five six even higher megabytes that would be for the full versions and the third important thing is data saving many of these places where Android Go will be used people probably don't have access to high amounts of data in their cellular plan and so therefore Google offering various data saving features for example chrome itself can actually offer compression for it's downloading things from the internet and to do that it actually sends the data first of all to Google servers and then it compresses it and then sent it down to your phone and therefore saving your bandwidth when you're using 4G of course there are privacy concerns about that but Google are obviously saying that name storing of that data and it just gets streamed in a compress form down to your phone another data saving feature is that for individual apps you can specify whether they have access to the 4G LTE network or whether they should only work over Wi-Fi whether they can run in the background of Seoul and that allows you to pare down how much of your data plan is being used by the Android system and also the Android files Oh app that is part of Android Go has a really neat way of sharing files between two phones using Wi-Fi and actually I started using this myself even on a higher-end phone like the note 8 because it's a really quick way to copy file so recently someone went to a family event and we wanted to copy the files over and I said hey just install file to go which we did and then we were able to transfer these photos literally in seconds it was quite amazing because it's doing it at the full speed of Wi-Fi between these two very close devices so they're offering ways of saving data that doesn't mean if I send things up to the cloud and then back down again which of course could use up your data plan and the fourth thing to talk about is updates now I'm like let's say the Android that comes on a pixel device Android go does not come directly from Google it comes from the OEM so if you buy a device from Nokia or from any other device that's running Android Go the updates of the security patches and any updates of the operating system will come from the OEM and not directly from Google so on the Nokia one I was reviewing actually I reviewed it in April 2000 18 and actually the security update was only from January 2018 so there's already there we can see a lag in what comes out but that's the normal story that you get with Android and you have to see which manufacturers which OMS are actually providing more timely updates for their version of Android go and so they have it for things that make Android go different to stock Android first of all it's been tweaked for better performance on low-end devices secondly it's better at handling the storage and in fact the Android go versions of the apps are actually smaller thirdly there are these data saving functions that allow you to save data on your cellular plan and fourth it comes from the OEM and not from Google directly itself my name is Gary Sims and this is Andrew authority I really hope you enjoyed this video please you know what I'm gonna ask you to do give us a like do share this on social media do go down there into the comments and tell me what you think about Android go do also hit that Bell notification icon do you become part of our notifications squad okay well that's it I'll see you in the next one