Google announced Google music on this years Google i/o conference, a launch that has been anticipated by the pundits for a long time. The service looks like it could be very big as it allows a maximum number of tracks instead of a maximum amount of storage to be uploaded. What was unexpected was the fact that, as Amazon had done before, Google launched without having a deal in place with the record labels. Google didn’t elaborate on this, but the general consensus seems to be that they probably don’t need a deal to begin with.
As the first invitations are pouring out (of course i have already applied for mine) I wondered how Google manages this. Google’s redundancy model usually protects against data-loss by mirroring your data across multiple datacentres. But even on Google scale, mirroring 20000 tracks per user (at 4-7 mb a pop) to 2 or more datacentres has got to hurt. Even if most users never come near the 20000 track limit, I cannot imagine Google engineers being happy about storing “Baby hit me one more time” 3 million times. So this got me thinking if Google maybe has some data de-duplication going on somewhere. Even more awesome would be if they were to include matching your content on your hard-drive against fingerprints stored online so that you wouldn’t need to upload your entire music collection. Oh well, one can dream..
So, last week I found myself immersed in Android again, figuring out for a client to what extend Android can support proxies. For future posterity, I’ve written this post to document what I found.
User-level proxy support
Proxy support under Android is somewhat of a mixed bag. What you will find is that is it possible to setup a proxy server for your 3G connection, but that it is not possible to setup a proxy connection for your WiFi or VPN connection. A system-wide proxy cannot be setup as well. Mind you, this is based on what is possible under the default Android settings. The Samsung Galaxy S, for example, does support the use of a system-wide proxy, but this is a Samsung-addition.
A 3G proxy can be set via the APN settings (Settings →Wireless Controls→Mobile Networks→Access Point Names, then select the active APN):
Edit APN settings
This does give you a proxy for the 3G connection you are currently using, but most probably you want to use a proxy for your WiFi. As of this moment (September 2010), this is not possible without rooting your handset. I won’t go into the details of that operation, as there are many sites dealing with that issue. Instead, I’d like to point you to Xda Developers, whose many forums are bound to contain rooting instructions for your particular Android handset.
If you do have a rooted phone, you can use a tool called.
It is possible to have a UI popup that handles the configuration of a proxy for wifi but the settings that it stores are harshly discarded by Android when it configures a network connection.
One thing is for certain: Google needs to step up to the plate to make Android proxy friendly if it wants to break into the enterprise market.
