157: Star OS 4.0 (Part 1)

The press conference on April 27th didn't feature any heavyweight products; it was merely an upgrade from Xingyao OS 3.2 to Xingyao OS 4.0, adding some features and resource scheduling. Consequently, Red Star didn't choose a very large venue for the launch.

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April 27th, 2:00 PM.

798 Art Exhibition Center.

The venue, holding over five hundred people, gradually quieted down as everyone waited for the press conference to begin.

Many Red Star Mobile Phone users and tech enthusiasts had also opened their streaming apps early or were waiting in front of their computer screens for the live broadcast to start.

5! 4! 3! 2! 1!

As the countdown rolled on the screen and the stage lights began to Shine, this Red Star press conference officially commenced.

Chen Chen, dressed in a casual shirt, stepped onto the stage with a confident stride, and the audience below erupted into thunderous applause and cheers.

By now, Chen Chen might not be the single most popular head of a mobile phone manufacturer, but he was certainly one of them.

"Welcome everyone to our press conference."

"I am Chen Chen, and today I bring you a work of sincerity polished over three years—Xingyao OS 4.0."

Nowadays, besides the hardware, Starlight OS has gained a large following for being clean, smooth, and easy to use. It has even become a major factor for many users when choosing a Red Star Mobile Phone.

To improve user retention, Starlight OS added cloud services. Every user gets an initial 15GB of cloud storage. As long as they continue to buy Red Star Mobile Phones, their data doesn't even need to be manually downloaded; it can be seamlessly transferred to the new phone.

Then there's the Theme Store, modeled after Xiaomi's, offering a wide variety of themes for users to choose from—and the highlight is that they're free!

One should know that in Xiaomi's Theme Store, many high-quality themes cost money—some as cheap as 1 yuan, others ranging from 3 to 6 yuan. Xiaomi used this method to attract a large number of creators to develop for their store.

Red Star adopted a free strategy, bearing the costs for the users. Red Star would share revenue with creators based on the number of downloads. Overall, those creators' incomes were roughly the same as on the Xiaomi platform.

In Chen Chen's words: It's fine, we can afford this small expense, and embedding some ads in non-essential areas can also cover part of the costs.

After 328 days and nights, Xingyao OS 4.0 is here.

These words appeared on the stage screen, and accompanied by the audience's applause, Chen Chen began his presentation on the brand-new Xingyao OS 4.0.

"After 328 days and nights of hard work by hundreds of Engineers in our systems department, our brand-new Xingyao OS 4.0 is finally meeting you all today."

"The theme of Xingyao OS 4.0 is just one word: Fast!"

"Extremely fast."

"Fast might be a word that's hard for people to quantify."

"Our Engineers spent over 300 days and nights integrating all system resources and algorithms to elevate our daily user experience to a new level."

"First is system speed. We have re-optimized the underlying architecture of the Android System, making system resource allocation much more rapid."

"The best way to demonstrate system resource allocation is through app launching. We'll use two identical kunpeng phone 2nd generation units as a comparison so everyone can get a preliminary understanding."

"Please look at the big screen. The unit on the left is a kunpeng phone 2nd generation running Xingyao OS 3.2, and the one on the right has been upgraded to the latest Xingyao OS 4.0."

"Please watch the video."

Chen Chen couldn't explain the speed of this system upgrade with words alone; only through video and direct comparison could it be shown most intuitively.

Hearing Chen Chen say this, the audience focused their eyes on the stage screen, carefully watching the comparison video.

In the video, there were two identical Kunpeng mobile phone 2 units, installed with Xingyao OS 4.0 and Xingyao OS 3.2 respectively.

The first segment of the video compared the app opening speeds of the two phones. Each phone opened 20 different apps. The phone equipped with Xingyao OS 3.2 took 28 seconds to open all of them, meaning there was a delay of over 1 second for each app.

Meanwhile, the Kunpeng mobile phone 2 upgraded to Xingyao OS 4.0 shortened the time to open all apps to about 15 seconds, meaning it only took about 0.75 seconds to open one app.

From this comparison, one could see that Xingyao OS 4.0 made significant improvements in app resource allocation compared to Xingyao OS 3.2, which was the result of optimizing the android underlying structure.

The second segment of the video compared game loading times. The game chosen for the test was 'I Am MT'. During the loading screen, Xingyao OS 3.2 took 4.3 seconds to finish loading and enter the game.

The brand-new Xingyao OS 4.0 only took 3.1 seconds to complete the load and enter the game.

Finally, the video compared the time it took to display search results and refresh a web page in a browser. The old version, Xingyao OS 3.2, required 1.2 seconds to refresh, while the new Xingyao OS 4.0 only took 0.8 seconds.

Through the video comparison, the audience could finally feel that the Xingyao OS 4.0 system development team had made many changes in internal resource integration and scheduling.

These scenarios might not be strongly perceived in daily use, but once put side-by-side for comparison, the difference was immediately apparent.

"There is another very important point. As mobile apps become more numerous and larger, we often find ourselves playing a game when a message suddenly arrives or we need to open a different app."

"When we return to the app we were using, we find it has been killed in the background."

"This is another area where Xingyao OS 4.0 has improved: app compatibility and management."

One must realize that no matter how much RAM you have, it will eventually be consumed by even larger apps, forcing users to change phones. Two years ago, 1GB of RAM was considered quite large.

Yet in just over two years, a starting point of 2GB of RAM is barely enough; for long-term use, at least 3GB of RAM is needed.

As for Red Star, they had started the RAM race early. Chen Chen didn't know if this was good or bad; back then, stacking RAM was just about stacking specs.

Now, he was truly worried whether RAM would skyrocket to a starting point of 24GB by 2024.