WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:12.280 Yes, so let me just reiterate what I just said for those people, listen to the recording 00:12.280 --> 00:13.280 later on. 00:13.280 --> 00:20.240 So a quick look at released names, tags and build numbers, and I'll try and describe how 00:20.240 --> 00:24.600 they all knit together. 00:24.600 --> 00:29.600 So we're going to be looking at the major versions, the code names, the API levels, the 00:29.600 --> 00:35.720 quarterly platform releases, build IDs, and I'll have a quick look at, get branches 00:35.720 --> 00:39.520 and tags. 00:39.520 --> 00:42.800 So the first bunch are relatively straightforward. 00:42.800 --> 00:49.800 So starting with the major version, by this, I'm talking about things like Android. 00:49.800 --> 00:53.480 5.0 or 16.0, which is the latest of whatever. 00:53.480 --> 00:59.560 So this is the official name of Android, and this is the name or the number used by 00:59.560 --> 01:01.280 the marketing department. 01:01.280 --> 01:04.280 So we all know that. 01:04.280 --> 01:07.160 Next there is the code name. 01:07.160 --> 01:17.360 So ever since Android 1.5, which was called Cupcake, every Android release has had a code name, 01:17.360 --> 01:22.480 do not throw you a current member of the exact sequence, slightly pop was one of them, and 01:22.480 --> 01:26.840 they're being alphabetically incrementing more or less. 01:26.840 --> 01:41.720 So the code name is important because this is the name used by the Android developers. 01:41.720 --> 01:48.020 So they will refer to Android U, Android T, or whatever, being the first letter of the code 01:48.020 --> 01:50.520 name. 01:50.520 --> 01:52.600 And then there's the API level. 01:52.600 --> 01:59.120 So the API level is a number which describes the version of the Android API used by 01:59.120 --> 02:02.360 application programmers. 02:02.360 --> 02:09.160 It started with one, and we're currently up to 36. 02:09.160 --> 02:15.320 So whenever there was a change of the Android API, they have to increment the API number. 02:15.320 --> 02:20.200 Usually by one, but not always, as we'll see in a minute or two. 02:20.200 --> 02:24.640 And this is the identifier used by app developers. 02:24.640 --> 02:27.960 So already you can see the three different ways that three different groups of people are 02:27.960 --> 02:32.200 referring to Android. 02:32.200 --> 02:37.640 Next I want to talk about the quarterly platform release or QPR. 02:37.640 --> 02:44.640 This came about year with Android 12, and the idea is that there are four quarterly platform 02:44.640 --> 02:49.960 releases per year called, well, so we have the major release. 02:49.960 --> 02:53.480 And then that's followed by actually three quarterly platform releases to give you four 02:53.480 --> 02:59.000 or together, and these are QPR one, two, and three. 02:59.000 --> 03:01.720 And originally they were sequence like this. 03:01.720 --> 03:08.240 So the major release would be in quarter three, typically September. 03:08.240 --> 03:12.400 And then the QPR's would be in quarter four, and then quarter one and quarter two over 03:12.400 --> 03:15.280 the next year. 03:15.280 --> 03:22.320 For reasons, Google decided with Android 16 to change that, so everything jumped forward 03:22.320 --> 03:24.160 one quarter. 03:24.160 --> 03:30.280 So with Android 16, the major release was in quarter two, which was may, I think. 03:30.280 --> 03:39.080 And then the QPR's are in quarter three, four, and then quarter one the next year. 03:39.080 --> 03:43.680 And then looking at the API level, so the API level, remember, has to be bumped every 03:43.680 --> 03:48.720 time they change or extend the Android API. 03:48.720 --> 03:54.800 So it used to be that the API level was only bumped on the major release. 03:54.800 --> 03:57.520 But once again, with Android 16, that changed. 03:57.520 --> 04:04.520 So now there's an API bump on both the major release and the QPR-2 release. 04:04.520 --> 04:10.360 So roughly six months apart. 04:10.680 --> 04:14.840 No, down to the bottom here, there were some minor releases. 04:14.840 --> 04:18.640 So there was a 5.1 and 8.1 and the 12.1. 04:18.640 --> 04:23.040 And in each case, there was an API bump with each one of those. 04:23.040 --> 04:24.360 But they don't happen every year. 04:30.360 --> 04:31.840 And then we have the build ID. 04:31.840 --> 04:38.880 So the build ID is an alpha numeric string, which uniquely identifies this build from 04:38.880 --> 04:44.480 the Android development teams build service. 04:44.480 --> 04:53.760 So a build ID looks like that number up there, VP4, a dot, something, dot something. 04:53.760 --> 04:57.760 And there's a description here, which I got actually from the build numbers page, which 04:57.760 --> 05:04.280 says, what those various bits mean. 05:04.280 --> 05:10.880 So now we can put that all together in this wonderful table, which is matching the 05:10.880 --> 05:18.240 version number, the code name, the QPR, the year, the quarter, the API and the build ID. 05:18.240 --> 05:21.120 So a couple of things to note here. 05:21.120 --> 05:27.040 First of all, then, looking at the build ID, it used to be that the first letter of 05:27.040 --> 05:31.080 the build ID matched the Android code. 05:31.080 --> 05:37.400 So T for T are a messu, U for upside down cake. 05:37.400 --> 05:43.560 Then things fell apart a little bit when we got to Android 15. 05:43.560 --> 05:55.000 So notice here then that things changed, things changed in the first quarter of 24. 05:55.000 --> 05:59.480 So we went from U something to A something. 05:59.480 --> 06:06.680 So at this point they decided to reset the build ID, and as this says down here, from 06:06.680 --> 06:12.560 this point onwards, the first letter of the build ID actually isn't the code name of 06:12.560 --> 06:16.640 the Android, it is in fact the year number. 06:16.640 --> 06:21.400 So A is 24, B is 25, et cetera. 06:21.400 --> 06:27.360 And then the digit following that, so we have some of that AP something, the digit is the 06:27.360 --> 06:28.360 quarter number. 06:28.360 --> 06:34.000 I'm actually going to just hold this, really don't work too well. 06:34.000 --> 06:45.360 So now we have AP1, AP2, AP3, AP4, so 1, 2, 3 and 4 are the quarters in the year, remember 06:45.360 --> 06:53.720 A is 24, so those are quarters in 24 in that particular case. 06:53.720 --> 07:05.440 Then things kind of synchronize up a little bit, so we go from AP4 to BP1, which is the 07:05.440 --> 07:09.680 first quarter of 25. 07:09.680 --> 07:18.160 And then when we got to Android 16, they decided to synchronize the code names with the 07:18.160 --> 07:19.680 build numbers. 07:19.680 --> 07:26.360 So that's why Android 16 is something being with B, the clover in fact, A got completely 07:26.360 --> 07:30.000 missed out, poor all day. 07:30.000 --> 07:35.120 So I assume that Android 17, which will come out quite soon, will have a name beginning 07:35.120 --> 07:36.120 with C. 07:36.120 --> 07:45.680 What else, oh yeah, the other way I think to notice here is that the APR level has always 07:45.680 --> 07:49.640 been essentially an integer, but now it's actually a float. 07:49.640 --> 08:04.760 It's actually 16, sorry, 36.1, okay, fair enough, why not, okay, what next? 08:04.760 --> 08:11.760 Now I want to relate this to the, to the Git repositories and how you use this information 08:11.760 --> 08:15.800 to get the version of the code that you actually want. 08:15.800 --> 08:25.240 So quick reminder, this is how you get Android, you do a repo in it, minus U and the URL 08:25.240 --> 08:31.880 to the manifest, minus B, the branch, or actually more likely a tag from the Git repositories 08:31.880 --> 08:42.080 that you want. 08:42.080 --> 08:47.120 So in order to get anywhere with this, then you need to do a mapping between the build 08:47.120 --> 08:48.400 ID that you want. 08:48.400 --> 08:52.800 So if from my previous chart you decided which build ID you want, you need to map that 08:52.800 --> 09:03.760 on to a Git tag, and that is done by this page here called build numbers. 09:03.760 --> 09:11.160 So this is at source.android.com, and you can see the build IDs, hmm, excuse me, and the 09:11.160 --> 09:13.520 corresponding Git tags. 09:13.520 --> 09:18.160 So these are the tags relating to Android 16. 09:18.160 --> 09:36.960 Okay, and you can see, so B is 2025, 2 is quarter 2, and then up there we have a BP3 and a BP4, 09:36.960 --> 09:44.280 which is in quarter 4, 2025. 09:44.280 --> 09:51.920 So to turn this into a suitable example, supposing I want to get the code for Android 16 09:51.920 --> 09:56.440 QPR2, how do you do this? 09:56.440 --> 10:05.640 So you need to work out what the build ID should be, so going back to here, 10:05.640 --> 10:16.480 to the QPR2, so I'm looking for this one here, so that is a BP4A something. 10:16.480 --> 10:19.120 So we need to find something that matches that. 10:19.120 --> 10:26.440 So looking in this, we see that the top there is a BP4A dot something, and that has the tag 10:26.440 --> 10:36.440 Android 16R4, so that is the code for QPR2. 10:36.440 --> 10:46.920 And so to get the code, you do this repo in here, blah, blah, blah, blah, minus B, Android 16R4. 10:46.920 --> 10:55.760 I was going to, well, yeah, there's been some issues with the regularity of releasing 10:55.760 --> 11:05.460 the code, the QPR, the Android 16 QPR1 code was not released for a long time, but the 11:05.460 --> 11:14.000 QPR2, I think, was released more or less on schedule, there we go. 11:14.000 --> 11:18.520 Find a thing I want to mention then, have a quick look at the security releases. 11:18.560 --> 11:25.520 If you look through the get tags, you'll see things like Android, that's security, that's 11:25.520 --> 11:29.160 something, for example, 16R1. 11:29.160 --> 11:37.200 So these security releases are based on the original major release of, in this case, Android 11:37.200 --> 11:41.840 16, and they have only the security bug fixes on top. 11:41.840 --> 11:45.520 They have no code changes apart from security fixes. 11:45.520 --> 11:50.320 So if you don't want to change functionality, but you just want to fix the CVEs, these 11:50.320 --> 11:54.760 would be the ones you go for. 11:54.760 --> 12:04.160 And if we look back to the build numbers slide here, we can see that there are actually 12:04.160 --> 12:12.880 three security releases, R1, R2, R3. 12:12.880 --> 12:19.360 And they have weird build IDs as well, instead of following the BP, whatever convention. 12:19.360 --> 12:31.160 They have some number, which I don't fully understand what the meaning of that number is. 12:31.160 --> 12:38.400 And, oh yeah, final thing. 12:38.400 --> 12:45.800 There has been changes over the last 12 months as to how often Google actually release 12:45.800 --> 12:49.440 code to their public get servers. 12:49.440 --> 12:56.280 So they use two push things on a regular basis to get, and you would see release numbers, 12:56.280 --> 13:02.800 so underscore R and some number, incrementing up to into the 50s and 60s and 70s. 13:02.800 --> 13:05.520 So there are a lot of releases. 13:05.520 --> 13:07.800 They don't really do that anymore. 13:07.800 --> 13:13.600 And in particular since the start of this year, there was a statement at source.android.com 13:13.600 --> 13:26.440 that says that we will publish the source code to in QT and Q4, in other words, the major 13:26.440 --> 13:28.960 release and the QPR2 release. 13:28.960 --> 13:30.320 That's all you get these days. 13:30.320 --> 13:32.440 Two code drops a year, nothing else. 13:32.440 --> 13:34.200 Well, it's not quite true. 13:34.200 --> 13:39.320 You still get the security updates every quarter, but remember, they don't contain functionality 13:39.320 --> 13:43.720 changes, they are just CV fixes. 13:43.720 --> 13:45.000 So this is where we are at. 13:45.000 --> 13:47.240 I'm nearly finished. 13:47.240 --> 13:51.920 The last slide, maybe I want to take a quick picture of this because it's only going 13:51.920 --> 13:57.080 to be on the screen for a moment or two, some links. 13:57.080 --> 14:03.800 The most important thing probably is feel free to meet us at Brudog this evening. 14:03.800 --> 14:08.280 In the middle of the clock, you'll have to buy your own beer, I'm afraid, but we have 14:08.280 --> 14:12.360 to get together and discuss all this further. 14:12.360 --> 14:13.360 Okay, that's me, Don. 14:13.360 --> 14:14.360 Thank you all very much.