Proper use cases for Android UserManager isUserAGoat

Question

I was looking at the new APIs introduced in Android 4 2  While looking at the UserManager class I came across the following method    public boolean isUserAGoat         Used to determine whether the user making this call is subject to teleportations       Returns whether the user making this call is a goat    How and when should this be used

User · Answer

Google has a serious liking for goats and goat based Easter eggs. There has even been previous Stack Overflow posts about it.

As has been mentioned in previous posts, it also exists within the Chrome task manager (it first appeared in the wild in 2009):

<message name="IDS_TASK_MANAGER_GOATS_TELEPORTED_COLUMN" desc="The goats teleported column">
    Goats Teleported
</message>

And then in Windows, Linux and Mac versions of Chrome early 2010). The number of "Goats Teleported" is in fact random:

 int TaskManagerModel::GetGoatsTeleported(int index) const {
     int seed = goat_salt_ * (index + 1);
     return (seed >> 16) & 255;
 }

Other Google references to goats include:

The earliest correlation of goats and Google belongs in the original "Mowing with goats" blog post, as far as I can tell.

We can safely assume that it's merely an Easter egg and has no real-world use, except for returning false.

User · Answer

As of API 21  the first Android 5 0 Lollipop SDK   this detects whether the Goat Simulator app is installed          Used to determine whether the user making this call is subject to    teleportations         lt p gt As of   link android os Build VERSION CODES LOLLIPOP   this method can    now automatically identify goats using advanced goat recognition technology  lt  p gt         return Returns true if the user making this call is a goat      public boolean isUserAGoat         return mContext getPackageManager                isPackageAvailable  com coffeestainstudios goatsimulator        This should make it clear that djechlin s suggestion of using it as a warning-free if  false  is a potentially disastrous strategy  What previously returned false for every device now returns a seemingly random value  if this was buried deep enough in your code it could take a long time to figure out where your new bugs are coming from   Bottom line  if you don t control the implementation of a method and decide to use it for purposes other than stated in the API documentation  you re heading for trouble

User · Answer

This appears to be an inside joke at Google  It s also featured in the Google Chrome task manager  It has no purpose  other than some engineers finding it amusing  Which is a purpose by itself  if you will    In Chrome  open the Task Manager with Shift Esc   Right click to add the  Goats Teleported column  Wonder    There is even a huge Chromium bug report about too many teleported goats       The following Chromium source code snippet is stolen from the HN comments   int TaskManagerModel  GetGoatsTeleported int index  const     int seed   goat salt     index   1     return  seed  gt  gt  16   amp  255

User · Answer

Android R Update  From Android R  this method always returns false  Google says that this is done  quot to protect goat privacy quot          Used to determine whether the user making this call is subject to    teleportations         lt p gt As of   link android os Build VERSION CODES LOLLIPOP   this method can    now automatically identify goats using advanced goat recognition technology  lt  p gt         lt p gt As of   link android os Build VERSION CODES R   this method always returns      code false  in order to protect goat privacy  lt  p gt         return Returns whether the user making this call is a goat      public boolean isUserAGoat         if  mContext getApplicationInfo   targetSdkVersion  gt   Build VERSION CODES R            return false            return mContext getPackageManager                isPackageAvailable  quot com coffeestainstudios goatsimulator quot        Previous answer  From their source  the method used to return false until it was changed in API 21         Used to determine whether the user making this call is subject to    teleportations      return whether the user making this call is a goat      public boolean isUserAGoat         return false     It looks like the method has no real use for us as developers  Someone has previously stated that it might be an Easter egg  In API 21 the implementation was changed to check if there is an installed app with the package com coffeestainstudios goatsimulator        Used to determine whether the user making this call is subject to    teleportations         lt p gt As of   link android os Build VERSION CODES LOLLIPOP   this method can    now automatically identify goats using advanced goat recognition technology  lt  p gt         return Returns true if the user making this call is a goat      public boolean isUserAGoat         return mContext getPackageManager                isPackageAvailable  quot com coffeestainstudios goatsimulator quot       Here is the source and the change

User · Answer

There is a similar call  isUserAMonkey    that returns true if the MonkeyRunner tool is being used  The SDK explanation is just as curious as this one     public static boolean isUserAMonkey                Returns true if the user interface is currently being messed with by a monkey    Here is the source    I expect that this was added in anticipation of a new SDK tool named something with a goat and will actually be functional to test for the presence of that tool     Also see a similar question  Strange function in ActivityManager  isUserAMonkey  What does this mean  what is its use

User · Answer

It s not an inside joke  Apparently it s just an application checker for Goat Simulator - by Coffee Stain Studios  If you have Goat Simulator installed  you re a goat  If you don t have it installed  you re not a goat   I imagine it was more of a personal experiment by one of the developers  most likely to find people with a common interest

User · Answer

In the discipline of speech recognition  users are divided into goats and sheeps    For instance  here on page 89      Sheeps are people for whom speech recognition works exceptionally well  and goats are people for whom it works exceptionally poorly  Only the voice recognizer knows what separates them  People can t predict whose voice will be recognized easily and whose won t  The best policy is to design the interface so it can handle all kinds of voices in all kinds of environments   Maybe  it is planned to mark Android users as goats in the future to be able to configure the speech recognition engine for goats  needs   -

User · Answer

Complementing the  djechlin answer  good answer by the way    this function call could be also used as dummy code to hold a breakpoint in an IDE when you want to stop in some specific iteration or a particular recursive call  for example     isUserAGoat   could be used instead of a dummy variable declaration that will be shown in the IDE as a warning and  in Eclipse particular case  will clog the breakpoint mark  making it difficult to enable disable it  If the method is used as a convention  all the invocations could be later filtered by some script  during commit phase maybe       Google guys are heavy Eclipse users  they provide several of their projects as Eclipse plugins  Android SDK  GAE  etc   so the  djechlin answer and this complementary answer make a lot of sense  at least for me

User · Answer

There s a funny named method constant whatever in each version of Android    The only practical use I ever saw was in the Last Call for Google I O Contest where they asked what it was for a particular version  to see if contestants read the API diff report for each release  The contest had programming problems too  but generally some trivia that could be graded automatically first to get the number of submissions down to reasonable amounts that would be easier to check

User · Answer

Funny Easter Egg   In Ubuntu version of Chrome  in Task Manager  shift esc   with right-click you can add a sci-fi column that in italian version is  Capre Teletrasportate   Teleported Goats    A funny theory about it is here

User · Answer

I don t know if this was  the  official use case  but the following produces a warning in Java  that can further produce compile errors if mixed with return statements  leading to unreachable code    while  1    2       Note that  if  is treated differently     System out println  Unreachable code        However this is legal   while  isUserAGoat          System out println  Unreachable but determined at runtime  not at compile time        So I often find myself writing a silly utility method for the quickest way to dummy out a code block  then in completing debugging find all calls to it  so provided the implementation doesn t change this can be used for that   JLS points out if  false  does not trigger  unreachable code  for the specific reason that this would break support for debug flags  i e   basically this use case  h t  auselen    static final boolean DEBUG   false  for instance    I replaced while for if  producing a more obscure use case  I believe you can trip up your IDE  like Eclipse  with this behavior  but this edit is 4 years into the future  and I don t have an Eclipse environment to play with

[java] Proper use cases for Android UserManager.isUserAGoat()?

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