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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Google Pixel 2 phones are doing this now as an out-of-the-box feature. It's continuously listening and the song name appears on your lock screen.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/19/how-googles-pixel-2-now-p...

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I wonder how much battery it drains.

Theres a whole bunch of crap Android phones do now in thr background like the "Ok/Hey Google" assistant voice shortcuts. I turn it all off. But supposedly it only uses a special lower power chip to do these passive listening actions. Not sure about music recognization though -- seems like it would involve a decent amount of memory even if performing a convolution..depends how much buffer time.

A new one for me the other day was "Google Nearby". Enabled by default and some company in the airport using it to push ads to your notifications. Disgusting and maybe the final nail in the coffin for Android for me. As a long time diehard android user, iPhone sounds better and better every day.

Could you please tell me which airport this was and if you remember the location and the ad?

Thanks a lot

It was either BWI or LAX and it said "Your ad here" with some url. I had no idea what it was so I long pressed on the notification and did some searching

Google Nearby is everywhere, I feel like I've seen it walking past Targets and a bunch of other places lately. Even small businesses

I've got a Pixel, won't be getting Pixel 2. My partner just got a OnePlus 5T though, and it looks very good. Definitely considering OnePlus as my next step.

OnePlus have always looked v good. But they don't work on Verizon so that's a non starter.

Why not just use a rom without all the bloatware and maybe even without google services alltogether?

My carrier forces all manufacturers to lock the bootloader. Also doesn't stuff like Google pay and netflix not work?

https://lineage.microg.org

discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619416

supported devices: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices

In case anyone's wondering more about how that store did that, here's the docs: https://developers.google.com/beacons/

Looks like they've optimized it fairly well to prevent battery drain: https://www.xda-developers.com/how-google-pixel-2-now-playin...

Personally I've only ever seen "Pixel Ambient Services" show up on my battery list once, and that was 1% usage after a fairly long day out.

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