However, most home networks typically don’t have a DNS server. When you want to access the web interface of, say, a 3D printer, a Synology NAS, or Raspberry Pi on your local home network, your device will similarly need an IP address to actually connect to it. Using the Linux “ping” and “ping6” commands to resolve to an IPv4 and IPv6 address respectively. That IP address identifies a unique device connected to the Internet, which in this case is one of many servers owned by Google that handle its search engine website. Your device will then query a DNS server - usually your ISP’s default one - which then translates the name into an IP address. Without getting too technical, mDNS basically makes it possible to connect to devices on a local network using human readable names, similar to how DNS makes it possible to connect to servers over the Internet using a human readable name.įor example, when you want to access Google search on the web, you just type into your browser and hit enter. The mDNS protocol is defined in full in the IETF’s RFC 6762 document, but the most relevant part is Section 5.1 – One-Shot Multicast DNS Queries, as it’s what Android’s DNS resolver implements. It stands for multicast domain name system, and it’s how hostnames are resolved on local networks without their own DNS server. If you aren’t familiar, mDNS is a protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization that oversees the technical standards that comprise the Internet. Every week, my Android Dessert Bites column will share the latest news about the Android platform that matters to system engineers, app developers, and power users. Thanks for signing up for The Android Edge newsletter. local resolution, solving a long-standing feature request from IoT and home networking enthusiasts. Through an update to the DNS Resolver Mainline module, Android finally added support for mDNS. The feature actually rolled out as part of the Google Play System Update for November 2021, but it was never mentioned in any blog post, changelog, or other medium, which is why I’m doing this post. That brings me to the crux of this post: support for a very basic but handy networking feature finally made its way into Android, years after it was made available on all other major platforms, but hardly anyone knows about it. An online support page lists some of the changes introduced in each Mainline update, but it doesn’t list everything nor does it go into any kind of detail. While it’s great that Mainline makes it easier to release out-of-band updates to core system components, Google has struggled to communicate to users what each “Google Play System Update” actually brings. There are nearly two dozen modular system components as part of Project Mainline, with more to come as part of the upcoming Android 13 update. With Android 10 in 2019, Google introduced Project Mainline, an initiative that modularized multiple system components so they could be updated in a manner similar to standard app updates. many system apps and libraries can’t be updated outside of full OS updates, Android updates aren’t.īecause of the way Android is distributed, Google had to modularize it to make it more easily updatable so it wouldn’t take forever for new features and security fixes to make their way to users. While iOS updates are still monolithic, ie. It’s fair to say that Apple is ahead of the competition when it comes to software support length, but if you know more than the average person does about Android versus iOS updates, then you know that it’s not an apples-to-apples (no pun intended) comparison. If you know even a little about Android versus iOS updates, then you can probably guess without opening the post that Google doesn’t come out looking too good in the comparison. The post compares the “supported lifespan” of Apple and Google smartphones, specifically how many years of major OS updates each phone receives. While I was browsing through Reddit earlier this week, I stumbled upon this post over on the DataIsBeautiful subreddit.
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