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Comment by daddykotex | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible that their Audio API is much simpler due to the fact that they control all of the implementations (Hardware interface) of iOS?

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With Android the variety of customized android builds on various manufacturers does make this more challenging than it needs to be. As the article points out, many vendors simply break realtime audio by using slow drivers and slow paths.

However, as someone who has dealt with Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BB audio APIs, Android's audio API really is just amateur hour compared to Apple's, even to the present day. In older versions it was simply unusable for anything more complicated than playing a sound effect or fixed-length mp3 file. Today it functions for more use cases but still abstracts concepts (like codecs and container parsing) in flawed and inconvenient places.

Windows Phone and BB are still even worse though.

Do you think Ubuntu for Phones (or whatever it's called) will suffer from this too? Since Ubuntu is using a portion of Android.

I'm not that familiar with Ubuntu Phone, but from a look at the docs I am concerned that it may have some of the same media issues (or at least the same variations between vendors). According to the architectural overview in the porting guide[1] their Qt-based API sits on top of some abstractions of their own, which then sit on top of stagefright, OMX, and Android's HAL (and thus Android's drivers). Not reassuring.

I'd personally be much more at ease if I saw ALSA sitting directly under Qt, but I can understand why they'd want to leverage the huge Android hardware ecosystem.

1. https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/start/ubuntu-for-devices/por...

Not really. It's the same API they've been using on Macs since the PowerPC days, so they've implemented it for a bunch of different audio chips over the years and that includes a lot of common off-the-shelf solutions. The Hackintosh scene provides fully-capable drivers for all the audio chips you're likely to find in a PC today. Hardware selection or effort put into each driver are almost certainly not factors.

Considering OS X can run on regular old Intel PCs (including the Surface 2!), I'm going to guess that they just have a rock solid, low latency solution, and not something tied to a specific platform.

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