In a discovery that's equal parts fascinating and eerie, researchers have found that artificial intelligence can spontaneously develop…

21 Nov 2025 7:30am GMT

Grab a huge saving on Narwal's 2025 lineup of robot vacuums and wet-dry cleaners

20 Nov 2025 6:45pm GMT

Posted by Alice Yuan - Senior Developer Relations Engineer

Welcome to day 4 of Performance Spotlight Week. Now that you've learned about some of the awesome tools and best practices we've introduced recently such as the R8 Optimizer, and Profile Guided Optimization with Baseline Profiles and Startup Profiles, you might be wondering where to start your performance improvement journey.

We've come up with a step-by-step performance leveling guide to meet your mobile development team where you are-whether you're an app with a single developer looking to get started with performance, or you have an entire team dedicated to improving Android performance.

The performance leveling guide features 5 levels. We'll start with level 1, which introduces minimal adoption effort performance tooling, and we'll go up to level 5, ideal for apps that have the resourcing to maintain a bespoke performance framework.

Feel free to jump to the level that resonates most with you:

• Level 1: Use Play Console provided field monitoring

• Level 2: Follow the App Performance Score action items

• Level 3: Leverage local performance test frameworks

• Level 4: Use trace analysis tools like Perfetto

• Level 5: Build your own performance tracking framework

Level 1: Use Play Console provided field monitoring

We recommend first leveraging Android vitals within the Play Console for viewing automatically collected field monitoring data, giving you insights about your application with minimal effort.

Android vitals is Google's initiative to automatically collect and surface this field data for you.

Here's an explanation of how we deliver this data:

1. Collect Data: When a user opts-in, their Android device automatically logs key performance and stability events from all apps, including yours.

2. Aggregate Data: Google Play collects and anonymizes this data from your app's users.

3. Surface Insights: The data is presented to you in the Android vitals dashboard within your Google Play Console.

The Android vitals dashboard tracks many metrics, but a few are designated as Core Vitals. These are the most important because they can affect your app's visibility and ranking on the Google Play Store.

The Core Vitals

The core vitals include user-perceived crash rate, ANR rate, excessive battery usage and the newly introduced metric on excessive partial wake locks.

User-Perceived ANR Rate

You can use the Android Vitals ANR dashboard, to see stack traces of issues that occur in the field and get insights and recommendations on how to fix the issue.

You can drill down into a specific ANR that occurred, to see the stack trace as well as insights on what might be causing the issue.

Also, check out our ANR guidance to help you diagnose and fix the common scenarios where ANRs might occur.

User-Perceived Crash Rate

Use the Android vitals crflevelash dashboard to further debug crashes and view a sample of stack traces that occur within your app.

Our documentation also has guidance around troubleshooting specific crashes. For example, the Troubleshoot foreground services guide discusses ways to identify and fix common scenarios where crashes occur.

Excessive Battery Usage

To decrease watch face sessions with excessive battery usage on Wear OS, check out the Wear guide on how to improve and conserve battery.

[new] Excessive Partial Wake Locks

We recently announced that apps that exceed the excessive partial wake locks threshold may see additional treatment starting on March 1st 2026.

For mobile devices, the Android vitals metric applies to non-exempted wake locks acquired while the screen is off and the app is in the background or running a foreground service. Android vitals considers partial wake lock usage excessive if wake locks are held for at least two hours within a 24-hour period and it affects more than 5% of your app's sessions, averaged over 28 days.

To debug and fix excessive wake lock issues, check out our technical blog post.

Consult our Android vitals documentation and continue your journey to better leverage Android vitals.

Level 2: Follow the App Performance Score action items

Next, move onto using the App Performance Score to find the high leverage action items to uplevel your app performance.

The Android App Performance Score is a standardized framework to measure your app's technical performance. It gives you a score between 0 and 100, where a lower number indicates more room for improvement.

To get easy wins, you should first start with the Static Performance Score first. These are often configuration changes or tooling updates that provide significant performance boosts.

Step 1: Perform the Static Assessment

The static assessment evaluates your project's configuration and tooling adoption. These are often the quickest ways to improve performance.

Navigate to the Static Score section of the scoreboard page and do the following:

1. Assess Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) Version.

2. Adopt R8 Minification incrementally or ideally, use R8 in full mode to minify and optimize the app code.

3. Adopt Baseline Profiles which improves code execution speed from the first launch providing performance enhancements for every new app install and every app update.

4. Adopt Startup Profiles to improve Dex Layout. Startup Profiles are used by the build system to further optimize the classes and methods they contain by improving the layout of code in your APK's DEX files.

5. Upgrade to the newest version of Jetpack Compose

Step 2: Perform the Dynamic Assessment

Once you have applied the static easy wins, use the dynamic assessment to validate the improvements on a real device. You can first do this manually with a physical device and a stop watch.

Navigate to the Dynamic Score section of the scoreboard page and do the following:

1. Set up your test environment with a physical device. Consider using a lower-end device to exaggerate performance issues, making them easier to spot.

2. Measure startup time from the launcher. Cold start your app from the launcher icon and measure the time until it is interactive.

3. Measure app startup time from a notification, with the goal to reduce notification startup time to be below a couple seconds.

4. Measure rendering performance by scrolling through your core screens and animations.

Once you've completed these steps, you will receive a score between 1 - 100 for the static and dynamic scores, giving you an understanding of your app's performance and where to focus on.

Level 3: Leverage local performance test frameworks

Once you've started to assess dynamic performance, you may find it too tedious to measure performance manually. Consider automating your performance testing using performance test frameworks such as Macrobenchmarks and UiAutomator.

Macrobenchmark 💚 UiAutomator

Think of Macrobenchmark and UiAutomator as two tools that work together: Macrobenchmark is the measurement tool. It's like a stopwatch and a frame-rate counter that runs outside your app. It is responsible for starting your app, recording metrics (like startup time or dropped frames), and stopping the app. UiAutomator is the robot user. The library lets you write code to interact with the device's screen. It can find an icon, tap a button, scroll on a list and more.

How to write a test

When you write a test, you wrap your UiAutomator code inside a Macrobenchmark block.

1. Define the Test: Use the @MacrobenchmarkRule

2. Start Measuring: Call benchmarkRule.measureRepeated.

3. Drive the UI: Inside that block, use UiAutomator code to launch your app, find UI elements, and interact with them.

Here's an example code snippet of what it looks like to test a compose list for scrolling jank.

4. Review the results: Each test run provides you with precisely measured information to give you the best data on your app's performance.

Common use cases

Macrobenchmark provides several core metrics out of the box. StartupTimingMetric allows you to accurately measure app startup. The FrameTimingMetric enables you to understand an app's rendering performance during the test.

We have a detailed and complete guide to using Macrobenchmarks and UiAutomator alongside code samples available for you to continue learning.

Level 4: Use trace analysis tools like Perfetto

Trace analysis tools like Perfetto are used when you need to see beyond your own application code. Unlike standard debuggers or profilers that only see your process, Perfetto captures the entire device state-kernel scheduling, CPU frequency, other processes, and system services-giving you complete context for performance issues.

Check our Performance Debugging youtube playlist for video instructions on performance debugging using system traces, Android Studio Profiler and Perfetto.

How to use Perfetto to debug performance

The general workflow for debugging performance using trace analysis tools is to record, load and analyze the trace.

Step 1: Record a trace

You can record a system trace using several methods:

• Recording a trace manually on the device directly from the developer options.

• Using the Android Studio CPU Profiler

• Using the Perfetto UI

Step 2: Load the trace

Once you have the trace file, you need to load it into the analysis tool.

1. Open Chrome and navigate to ui.perfetto.dev.

2. Drag and drop your .perfetto-trace (or .pftrace) file directly into the browser window.

3. The UI will process the file and display the timeline.

Step 3: Analyze the trace

You can use Perfetto UI or Android Studio Profiler to investigate performance issues. Check out this episode of the MAD Skills series on Performance, where our performance engineer Carmen Jackson discusses the Perfetto traceviewer.

Scenarios for inspecting system traces using Perfetto

Perfetto is an expert tool and can provide information about everything that happened on the Android device while a trace was captured. This is particularly helpful when you cannot identify the root cause of a slowdown using standard logs or basic profilers.

Debugging Jank (Dropped Frames)

If your app stutters while scrolling, Perfetto can show you exactly why a specific frame missed its deadline.

If it's due to the app, you might see your main thread running for a long duration doing heavy parsing; this indicates scenarios where you should move the work into asynchronous processing.

If it's due to the system, you might see your main thread ready to run, but the CPU kernel scheduler gave priority to a different system service, leaving your app waiting (CPU contention). This indicates scenarios where you may need to optimize usage of platform APIs.

Analyzing Slow App Startup

Startup is complex, involving system init, process forking, and resource loading. Perfetto visualizes this timeline precisely.

You can see if you are waiting on Binder calls (inter-process communication). If your onCreate waits a long time for a response from the system PackageManager, Perfetto will show that blocked state clearly.

You can also see if your app is doing more work than necessary during the app startup. For example, if you are creating and laying out more views than the app needs to show, you can see these operations in the trace.

Investigating Battery Drain & CPU Usage

Because Perfetto sees the whole system, it's perfect for finding invisible power drains.

You can identify which processes are holding wake locks, preventing the device from sleeping under the "Device State" tracks. Learn more in our wake locks blog post. Also, use Perfetto to see if your background jobs are running too frequently or waking up the CPU unnecessarily.

Level 5: Build your own performance tracking framework

The final level is for apps that have teams with resourcing to maintain a performance tracking framework.

Building a custom performance tracking framework on Android involves leveraging several system APIs to capture data throughout the application lifecycle, from startup to exit, and during specific high-load scenarios.

By using ApplicationStartInfo, ProfilingManager, and ApplicationExitInfo, you can create a robust telemetry system that reports on how your app started, detailed info on what it did while running, and why it died.

ApplicationStartInfo: Tracking how the app started

Available from Android 15 (API 35), ApplicationStartInfo provides detailed metrics about app startup in the field. The data includes whether it was a cold, warm, or hot start, and the duration of different startup phases.

This helps you develop a baseline startup metric using production data to further optimize that might be hard to reproduce locally. You can use these metrics to run A/B tests optimizing the startup flow.

The goal is to accurately record launch metrics without manually instrumenting every initialization phase.

You can query this data lazily some time after application launch.

ProfilingManager: Capturing why it was slow

ProfilingManager (API 35) allows your app to programmatically trigger system traces on user devices. This is powerful for catching transient performance issues in the wild that you can't reproduce locally.

The goal is to automatically record a trace when a specific highly critical user journey is detected as running slowly or experiencing performance issues.

You can register a listener that triggers when specific conditions are met or trigger it manually when you detect a performance issue such as jank, excessive memory, or battery drain.

Check our documentation on how to capture a profile, retrieve and analyze profiling data and use debug commands.

ApplicationExitInfo: Tracking why the app died

ApplicationExitInfo (API 30) tells you why your previous process died. This is crucial for finding native crashes, ANRs, or system kills due to excessive memory usage (OOM). You'll also be able to get a detailed tombstone trace by using the API getTraceInputStream.

The goal of the API is to understand stability issues that don't trigger standard Java crash reporters (like Low Memory Kills).

You should trigger this API on the next app launch.

Next Steps

Improving Android performance is a step-by-step journey. We're so excited to see how you level up your performance using these tools!

Tune in tomorrow for Ask Android

You have shrunk your app with R8 and optimized your runtime with Profile Guided Optimization. And measure your app's performance.

Join us tomorrow for the live Ask Android session. Ask your questions now using #AskAndroid and get them answered by the experts.

20 Nov 2025 5:00pm GMT

As AI tools slip quietly into our routines, a growing number of people are talking to ChatGPT as…

20 Nov 2025 4:30pm GMT

Posted by Don Turner - Developer Relations Engineer

Jetpack Navigation 3 version 1.0 is stable 🎉. Go ahead and use it in your production apps today. JetBrains are already using it in their KotlinConf app.

Navigation 3 is a new navigation library built from the ground up to embrace Jetpack Compose state. It gives you full control over your back stack, helps you retain navigation state, and allows you to easily create adaptive layouts (like list-detail). There's even a cross-platform version from JetBrains.

Why a new library?

The original Jetpack Navigation library (now Nav2) was designed 7 years ago and, while it serves its original goals well and has been improved iteratively, the way apps are now built has fundamentally changed.

Reactive programming with a declarative UI is now the norm. Nav3 embraces this approach. For example, NavDisplay (the Nav3 UI component that displays your screens) simply observes a list of keys (each one representing a screen) backed by Compose state and updates its UI when that list changes.

Figure 1. NavDisplay observes changes to a list backed by Compose state.

Nav2 can also make it difficult to have a single source of truth for your navigation state because it has its own internal state. With Nav3, you supply your own state, which gives you complete control.

Lastly, you asked for more flexibility and customizability. Rather than having a single, monolithic API, Nav3 provides smaller, decoupled APIs (or "building blocks") that can be combined together to create complex functionality. Nav3 itself uses these building blocks to provide sensible defaults for well-defined navigation use cases.

This approach allows you to:

• Customize screen animations at both a global and individual level

• Display multiple panes at the same time, and create flexible layouts using the Scenes API

• Easily replace Nav3 components with your own implementations if you want custom behavior

Read more about its design and features in the launch blog.

Migrating from Navigation 2

If you're already using Nav2, specifically Navigation Compose, you should consider migrating to Nav3. To assist you with this, there is a migration guide. The key steps are:

1. Add the navigation 3 dependencies.

2. Update your navigation routes to implement NavKey. Your routes don't have to implement this interface to use Nav3, but if they do, you can take advantage of Nav3's rememberNavBackStack function to create a persistent back stack.

3. Create classes to hold and modify your navigation state - this is where your back stacks are held.

4. Replace NavController with these classes.

5. Move your destinations from NavHost's NavGraph into an entryProvider.

6. Replace NavHost with NavDisplay.

Experimenting with AI agent migration

You may want to experiment with using an AI agent to read the migration guide and perform the steps on your project. To try this with Gemini in Android Studio's Agent Mode:

• Save this markdown version of the guide into your project.

• Paste this prompt to the agent (but don't hit enter): "Migrate this project to Navigation 3 using ".

• Type @migration-guide.md - this will supply the guide as context to the agent.

As always, make sure you carefully review the changes made by the AI agent - it can make mistakes!

We'd love to hear how you or your agent performed, please send your feedback here.

Tasty navigation recipes for common scenarios

For common but nuanced use cases, we have a recipes repository. This shows how to combine the Nav3 APIs in a particular way, allowing you to choose or modify the recipe to your particular needs. If a recipe turns out to be popular, we'll consider "graduating" the non-nuanced parts of it into the core Nav3 library or add-on libraries.

Figure 2. Useful code recipes can graduate into a library.

There are currently 19 recipes, including for:

• Multiple back stacks

• Modularization and dependency injection

• Passing navigation arguments to ViewModels (including using Koin)

• Returning results from screens by events and by shared state

We're currently working on a deeplinks recipe, plus a Koin integration, and have plenty of others planned. An engineer from JetBrains has also published a Compose Multiplatform version of the recipes.

If you have a common use case that you'd like to see a recipe for, please file a recipe request.

Summary

To get started with Nav3, check out the docs and the recipes. Plus, keep an eye out for a whole week of technical content including:

• A deep dive video on the API covering modularization, animations and adaptive layouts.

• A live Ask Me Anything (AMA) with the engineers who built Nav3.

Nav3 Spotlight Week starts Dec 1st 2025.

As always, if you find any issues, please file them here.

19 Nov 2025 8:02pm GMT

Posted by Dom Elliott - Group Product Manager, Google Play and Eric Lynch - Senior Product Manager, Android Security

In the mobile ecosystem, abuse can threaten your revenue, growth, and user trust. To help developers thrive, Google Play offers a resilient threat detection service, Play Integrity API. Play Integrity API helps you verify that interactions and server requests are genuine-coming from your unmodified app on a certified Android device, installed by Google Play.

The impact is significant: apps using Play integrity features see 80% lower unauthorized usage on average compared to other apps. Today, leaders across diverse categories-including Uber, TikTok, Stripe, Kabam, Wooga, Radar.com, Zimperium, Paytm, and Remini-use it to help safeguard their businesses.

We're continuing to improve the Play Integrity API, making it easier to integrate, more resilient against sophisticated attacks, and better at recovering users who don't meet integrity standards or encounter errors with new Play in-app remediation prompts.

Detect threats to your business

The Play Integrity API offers verdicts designed to detect specific threats that impact your bottom line during critical interactions.

• Unauthorized access: The accountDetails verdict helps you determine whether the user installed or paid for your app or game on Google Play.

• Code tampering: The appIntegrity verdict helps you determine whether you're interacting with your unmodified binary that Google Play recognizes.

• Risky devices and emulated environments: The deviceIntegrity verdict helps you determine whether your app is running on a genuine Play Protect certified Android device or a genuine instance of Google Play Games for PC.

• Unpatched devices: For devices running Android 13 and higher, MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY response in the deviceIntegrity verdict helps you determine if a device has applied recent security updates. You can also opt in to deviceAttributes to include the attested Android SDK version in the response.

• Risky access by other apps: The appAccessRiskVerdict helps you determine whether apps are running that could be used to capture the screen, display overlays, or control the device (for example, by misusing the accessibility permission). This verdict automatically excludes apps that serve genuine accessibility purposes.

• Known malware: The playProtectVerdict helps you determine whether Google Play Protect is turned on and whether it has found risky or dangerous apps installed on the device.

• Hyperactivity: The recentDeviceActivity level helps you determine whether a device has made an anomalously high volume of integrity token requests recently, which could indicate automated traffic and could be a sign of attack.

• Repeat abuse and reused devices: deviceRecall (beta) helps you determine whether you're interacting with a device that you've previously flagged, even if your app was reinstalled or the device was reset. With device recall, you can customize the repeat actions you want to track.

The API can be used across Android form factors including phones, tablets, foldables, Android Auto, Android TV, Android XR, ChromeOS, Wear OS, and on Google Play Games for PC.

Make the most of Play Integrity API

Apps and games have found success with the Play Integrity API by following the security considerations and taking a phased approach to their anti-abuse strategy.

Step 1: Decide what you want to protect: Decide what actions and server requests in your apps and games are important to verify and protect. For example, you could perform integrity checks when a user is launching the app, signing in, joining a multiplayer game, generating AI content, or transferring money.

Step 2: Collect integrity verdict responses: Perform integrity checks at important moments to start collecting verdict data, without enforcement initially. That way you can analyze the responses for your install base and see how they correlate with your existing abuse signals and historical abuse data.

Step 4: Gradually rollout enforcement and support your users: Gradually roll out enforcement. Have a retry strategy when verdicts have issues or are unavailable and be prepared to support good users who have issues. The new Play in-app remediation prompts, described below, make it easier than ever to get users with issues back to a good state.

NEW: Let Play recover users with issues automatically

Deciding how to respond to different integrity signals can be complex, you need to handle various integrity responses and API error codes (like network issues or outdated Play services). We're simplifying this with new Play in-app remediation prompts. You can show a Google Play prompt to your users to automatically fix a wide range of issues directly within your app. This reduces integration complexity, ensures a consistent user interface, and helps get more users back to a good state.

GET_INTEGRITY automatically detects the issue

(in this example, a network error)

and resolves it.

You can trigger the GET_INTEGRITY dialog, available in Play Integrity API library version 1.5.0+, after a range of issues to automatically guide the user through the necessary fixes including:

• Unauthorized access: GET_INTEGRITY guides the user back to a Play licensed response in accountDetails.

• Code tampering: GET_INTEGRITY guides the user back to a Play recognized response in appIntegrity.

• Device integrity issues: GET_INTEGRITY guides the user on how to get back to the MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY state in deviceIntegrity.

• Remediable error codes: GET_INTEGRITY resolves remediable API errors, such as prompting the user to fix network connectivity or update Google Play Services.

We also offer specialized dialogs including GET_STRONG_INTEGRITY (which works like GET_INTEGRITY while also getting the user back to the MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY state with no known malware issues in the playProtectVerdict), GET_LICENSED (which gets the user back to a Play licensed and Play recognized state), and CLOSE_UNKNOWN_ACCESS_RISK and CLOSE_ALL_ACCESS_RISK (which prompt the user to close potentially risky apps).

Choose modern integrity solutions

In addition to Play Integrity API, Google offers several other features to consider as part of your overall anti-abuse strategy. Both Play Integrity API and Play's automatic protection offer user experience and developer benefits for safeguarding app distribution. We encourage existing apps to migrate to these modern integrity solutions instead of using the legacy Play licensing library.

Automatic protection: Prevent unauthorized access with Google Play's automatic protection and ensure users continue getting your official app updates. Turn it on and Google Play will automatically add an installer check to your app's code, with no developer integration work required. If your protected app is redistributed or shared through another channel, then the user will be prompted to get your app from Google Play. Eligible Play developers also have access to Play's advanced anti-tamper protection, which uses obfuscation and runtime checks to make it harder and costlier for attackers to modify and redistribute protected apps.

Android platform key attestation: Play Integrity API is the recommended way to benefit from hardware-backed Android platform key attestation. Play Integrity API takes care of the underlying implementation across the device ecosystem, Play automatically mitigates key-related issues and outages, and you can use the API to detect other threats. Developers who directly implement key attestation instead of relying on Play Integrity API should prepare for the upcoming Android Platform root certificate rotation in February 2026 to avoid disruption (developers using Play Integrity API do not need to take any action).

19 Nov 2025 6:11pm GMT

• Release announcement on itch.io

1 0

15 Oct 2025 11:31am GMT

This blog has been running more or less continuously since mid-nineties. The site has existed in multiple forms, and with different ways to publish. But what's common is that at almost all points there was a mechanism to publish while on the move.

Psion, documents over FTP

In the early 2000s we were into adventure motorcycling. To be able to share our adventures, we implemented a way to publish blogs while on the go. The device that enabled this was the Psion Series 5, a handheld computer that was very much a device ahead of its time.

The Psion had a reasonably sized keyboard and a good native word processing app. And battery life good for weeks of usage. Writing while underway was easy. The Psion could use a mobile phone as a modem over an infrared connection, and with that we could upload the documents to a server over FTP.

Server-side, a cron job would grab the new documents, converting them to HTML and adding them to our CMS.

In the early days of GPRS, getting this to work while roaming was quite tricky. But the system served us well for years.

If we wanted to include photos to the stories, we'd have to find an Internet cafe.

• To the Alps is a post from these times. Lots more in the motorcycling category

SMS and MMS

For an even more mobile setup, I implemented an SMS-based blogging system. We had an old phone connected to a computer back in the office, and I could write to my blog by simply sending a text. These would automatically end up as a new paragraph in the latest post. If I started the text with NEWPOST, an empty blog post would be created with the rest of that message's text as the title.

• In the Caucasus is a good example of a post from this era

As I got into neogeography, I could also send a NEWPOSITION message. This would update my position on the map, connecting weather metadata to the posts.

As camera phones became available, we wanted to do pictures too. For the Death Monkey rally where we rode minimotorcycles from Helsinki to Gibraltar, we implemented an MMS-based system. With that the entries could include both text and pictures. But for that you needed a gateway, which was really only realistic for an event with sponsors.

• Mystery of the Missing Monkey is typical. Some more in Internet Archive

Photos over email

A much easier setup than MMS was to slightly come back to the old Psion setup, but instead of word documents, sending email with picture attachments. This was something that the new breed of (pre-iPhone) smartphones were capable of. And by now the roaming question was mostly sorted.

And so my blog included a new "moblog" section. This is where I could share my daily activities as poor-quality pictures. Sort of how people would use Instagram a few years later.

• Internet Archive has some of my old moblogs but nowadays, I post similar stuff on Pixelfed

Pause

Then there was sort of a long pause in mobile blogging advancements. Modern smartphones, data roaming, and WiFi hotspots had become ubiquitous.

In the meanwhile the blog also got migrated to a Jekyll-based system hosted on AWS. That means the old Midgard-based integrations were off the table.

And I traveled off-the-grid rarely enough that it didn't make sense to develop a system.

But now that we're sailing offshore, that has changed. Time for new systems and new ideas. Or maybe just a rehash of the old ones?

Starlink, Internet from Outer Space

Most cruising boats - ours included - now run the Starlink satellite broadband system. This enables full Internet, even in the middle of an ocean, even video calls! With this, we can use normal blogging tools. The usual one for us is GitJournal, which makes it easy to write Jekyll-style Markdown posts and push them to GitHub.

However, Starlink is a complicated, energy-hungry, and fragile system on an offshore boat. The policies might change at any time preventing our way of using it, and also the dishy itself, or the way we power it may fail.

But despite what you'd think, even on a nerdy boat like ours, loss of Internet connectivity is not an emergency. And this is where the old-style mobile blogging mechanisms come handy.

• Any of the 2025 Atlantic crossing posts is a good example of this setup in action

Inreach, texting with the cloud

Our backup system to Starlink is the Garmin Inreach. This is a tiny battery-powered device that connects to the Iridium satellite constellation. It allows tracking as well as basic text messaging.

When we head offshore we always enable tracking on the Inreach. This allows both our blog and our friends ashore to follow our progress.

I also made a simple integration where text updates sent to Garmin MapShare get fetched and published on our blog. Right now this is just plain text-based entries, but one could easily implement a command system similar to what I had over SMS back in the day.

One benefit of the Inreach is that we can also take it with us when we go on land adventures. And it'd even enable rudimentary communications if we found ourselves in a liferaft.

• There are various InReach integration hacks that could be used for more sophisticated data transfer

Sailmail and email over HF radio

The other potential backup for Starlink failures would be to go seriously old-school. It is possible to get email access via a SSB radio and a Pactor (or Vara) modem.

Our boat is already equipped with an isolated aft stay that can be used as an antenna. And with the popularity of Starlink, many cruisers are offloading their old HF radios.

Licensing-wise this system could be used either as a marine HF radio (requiring a Long Range Certificate), or amateur radio. So that part is something I need to work on. Thankfully post-COVID, radio amateur license exams can be done online.

With this setup we could send and receive text-based email. The Airmail application used for this can even do some automatic templating for position reports. We'd then need a mailbox that can receive these mails, and some automation to fetch and publish.

• Sailmail and No Foreign Land support structured data via email to update position. Their formats could be useful inspiration

0 0

05 Jun 2025 12:00am GMT

The <video> element implementation in WebKit does its job by using a multiplatform player that relies on a platform-specific implementation. In the specific case of glib platforms, which base their multimedia on GStreamer, that's MediaPlayerPrivateGStreamer.

The player private can have 3 buffering modes:

• On-disk buffering: This is the typical mode on desktop systems, but is frequently disabled on purpose on embedded devices to avoid wearing out their flash storage memories. All the video content is downloaded to disk, and the buffering percentage refers to the total size of the video. A GstDownloader element is present in the pipeline in this case. Buffering level monitoring is done by polling the pipeline every second, using the fillTimerFired() method.
• In-memory buffering: This is the typical mode on embedded systems and on desktop systems in case of streamed (live) content. The video is downloaded progressively and only the part of it ahead of the current playback time is buffered. A GstQueue2 element is present in the pipeline in this case. Buffering level monitoring is done by listening to GST_MESSAGE_BUFFERING bus messages and using the buffering level stored on them. This is the case that motivates the refactoring described in this blog post, what we actually wanted to correct in Broadcom platforms, and what motivated the addition of hysteresis working on all the platforms.
• Local files: Files, MediaStream sources and other special origins of video don't do buffering at all (no GstDownloadBuffering nor GstQueue2 element is present on the pipeline). They work like the on-disk buffering mode in the sense that fillTimerFired() is used, but the reported level is relative, much like in the streaming case. In the initial version of the refactoring I was unaware of this third case, and only realized about it when tests triggered the assert that I added to ensure that the on-disk buffering method was working in GST_BUFFERING_DOWNLOAD mode.

The current implementation (actually, its wpe-2.38 version) was showing some buffering problems on some Broadcom platforms when doing in-memory buffering. The buffering levels monitored by MediaPlayerPrivateGStreamer weren't accurate because the Nexus multimedia subsystem used on Broadcom platforms was doing its own internal buffering. Data wasn't being accumulated in the GstQueue2 element of playbin, because BrcmAudFilter/BrcmVidFilter was accepting all the buffers that the queue could provide. Because of that, the player private buffering logic was erratic, leading to many transitions between "buffer completely empty" and "buffer completely full". This, it turn, caused many transitions between the HaveEnoughData, HaveFutureData and HaveCurrentData readyStates in the player, leading to frequent pauses and unpauses on Broadcom platforms.

So, one of the first thing I tried to solve this issue was to ask the Nexus PlayPump (the subsystem in charge of internal buffering in Nexus) about its internal levels, and add that to the levels reported by GstQueue2. There's also a GstMultiqueue in the pipeline that can hold a significant amount of buffers, so I also asked it for its level. Still, the buffering level unstability was too high, so I added a moving average implementation to try to smooth it.

All these tweaks only make sense on Broadcom platforms, so they were guarded by ifdefs in a first version of the patch. Later, I migrated those dirty ifdefs to the new quirks abstraction added by Phil. A challenge of this migration was that I needed to store some attributes that were considered part of MediaPlayerPrivateGStreamer before. They still had to be somehow linked to the player private but only accessible by the platform specific code of the quirks. A special HashMap attribute stores those quirks attributes in an opaque way, so that only the specific quirk they belong to knows how to interpret them (using downcasting). I tried to use move semantics when storing the data, but was bitten by object slicing when trying to move instances of the superclass. In the end, moving the responsibility of creating the unique_ptr that stored the concrete subclass to the caller did the trick.

Even with all those changes, undesirable swings in the buffering level kept happening, and when doing a careful analysis of the causes I noticed that the monitoring of the buffering level was being done from different places (in different moments) and sometimes the level was regarded as "enough" and the moment right after, as "insufficient". This was because the buffering level threshold was one single value. That's something that a hysteresis mechanism (with low and high watermarks) can solve. So, a logical level change to "full" would only happen when the level goes above the high watermark, and a logical level change to "low" when it goes under the low watermark level.

For the threshold change detection to work, we need to know the previous buffering level. There's a problem, though: the current code checked the levels from several scattered places, so only one of those places (the first one that detected the threshold crossing at a given moment) would properly react. The other places would miss the detection and operate improperly, because the "previous buffering level value" had been overwritten with the new one when the evaluation had been done before. To solve this, I centralized the detection in a single place "per cycle" (in updateBufferingStatus()), and then used the detection conclusions from updateStates().

So, with all this in mind, I refactored the buffering logic as https://commits.webkit.org/284072@main, so now WebKit GStreamer has a buffering code much more robust than before. The unstabilities observed in Broadcom devices were gone and I could, at last, close Issue 1309.

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16 Oct 2024 6:12am GMT

I've mentioned some of my various retronetworking projects in some past blog posts. One of those projects is Osmocom Community TDM over IP (OCTOI). During the past 5 or so months, we have been using a number of GPS-synchronized open source icE1usb interconnected by a new, efficient but strill transparent TDMoIP protocol in order to run a distributed TDM/PDH network. This network is currently only used to provide ISDN services to retronetworking enthusiasts, but other uses like frame relay have also been validated.

So far, the central hub of this OCTOI network has been operating in the basement of my home, behind a consumer-grade DOCSIS cable modem connection. Given that TDMoIP is relatively sensitive to packet loss, this has been sub-optimal.

Luckily some of my old friends at noris.net have agreed to host a new OCTOI hub free of charge in one of their ultra-reliable co-location data centres. I'm already hosting some other machines there for 20+ years, and noris.net is a good fit given that they were - in their early days as an ISP - the driving force in the early 90s behind one of the Linux kernel ISDN stracks called u-isdn. So after many decades, ISDN returns to them in a very different way.

Side note: In case you're curious, a reconstructed partial release history of the u-isdn code can be found on gitea.osmocom.org

But I digress. So today, there was the installation of this new OCTOI hub setup. It has been prepared for several weeks in advance, and the hub contains two circuit boards designed entirely only for this use case. The most difficult challenge was the fact that this data centre has no existing GPS RF distribution, and the roof is ~ 100m of CAT5 cable (no fiber!) away from the roof. So we faced the challenge of passing the 1PPS (1 pulse per second) signal reliably through several steps of lightning/over-voltage protection into the icE1usb whose internal GPS-DO serves as a grandmaster clock for the TDM network.

The equipment deployed in this installation currently contains:

• a rather beefy Supermicro 2U server with EPYC 7113P CPU and 4x PCIe, two of which are populated with Digium TE820 cards resulting in a total of 16 E1 ports

• an icE1usb with RS422 interface board connected via 100m RS422 to an Ericsson GPS03 receiver. There's two layers of of over-voltage protection on the RS422 (each with gas discharge tubes and TVS) and two stages of over-voltage protection in the coaxial cable between antenna and GPS receiver.

• a Livingston Portmaster3 RAS server

• a Cisco AS5400 RAS server

For more details, see this wiki page and this ticket

Now that the physical deployment has been made, the next steps will be to migrate all the TDMoIP links from the existing user base over to the new hub. We hope the reliability and performance will be much better than behind DOCSIS.

In any case, this new setup for sure has a lot of capacity to connect many more more users to this network. At this point we can still only offer E1 PRI interfaces. I expect that at some point during the coming winter the project for remote TDMoIP BRI (S/T, S0-Bus) connectivity will become available.

18 Sep 2022 10:00pm GMT

Almost one year after my post regarding first steps towards a V5 implementation, some friends and I were finally able to visit Wobcom, a small German city carrier and pick up a lot of decommissioned POTS/ISDN/PDH/SDH equipment, primarily V5 access networks.

This means that a number of retronetworking enthusiasts now have a chance to play with Siemens Fastlink, Nokia EKSOS and DeTeWe ALIAN access networks/multiplexers.

My primary interest is in Nokia EKSOS, which looks like an rather easy, low-complexity target. As one of the first steps, I took PCB photographs of the various modules/cards in the shelf, take note of the main chip designations and started to search for the related data sheets.

The results can be found in the Osmocom retronetworking wiki, with https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/Nokia_EKSOS being the main entry page, and sub-pages about

• Node Control Unit

• 16x BRI Uk0 Line Card

• 32x POTS Line Card

• Line Measurement Unit

• Shelf

In short: Unsurprisingly, a lot of Infineon analog and digital ICs for the POTS and ISDN ports, as well as a number of Motorola M68k based QUICC32 microprocessors and several unknown ASICs.

So with V5 hardware at my disposal, I've slowly re-started my efforts to implement the LE (local exchange) side of the V5 protocol stack, with the goal of eventually being able to interface those V5 AN with the Osmocom Community TDM over IP network. Once that is in place, we should also be able to offer real ISDN Uk0 (BRI) and POTS lines at retrocomputing events or hacker camps in the coming years.

08 Sep 2022 10:00pm GMT

If you have ever worked with Digium (now part of Sangoma) digital telephony interface cards such as the TE110/410/420/820 (single to octal E1/T1/J1 PRI cards), you will probably have seen that they always have a timing connector, where the timing information can be passed from one card to another.

In PDH/ISDN (or even SDH) networks, it is very important to have a synchronized clock across the network. If the clocks are drifting, there will be underruns or overruns, with associated phase jumps that are particularly dangerous when analog modem calls are transported.

In traditional ISDN use cases, the clock is always provided by the network operator, and any customer/user side equipment is expected to synchronize to that clock.

So this Digium timing cable is needed in applications where you have more PRI lines than possible with one card, but only a subset of your lines (spans) are connected to the public operator. The timing cable should make sure that the clock received on one port from the public operator should be used as transmit bit-clock on all of the other ports, no matter on which card.

Unfortunately this decades-old Digium timing cable approach seems to suffer from some problems.

08 Sep 2022 10:00pm GMT