Guys, Got the News?
Android O is coming and it's on the way. I bet you want to know about its
new features. So, hope on the Ride and
we will take you a tour about the new version.
LIST OF
ANDROID VERSION
ANDROID O: LATEST
NEWS AND FEATURES
o 01 - Alpha
o 02 - Beta
o 03 - Android 1.0 (API
1)
o 04 - Android 1.1 (API
2)
o 05 - Android 1.5
Cupcake (API 3)
o 06 - Android 1.6 Donut (API 4)
o 07 - Android 2.0 Eclair (API 5)
o 08 - Android
2.0.1 Eclair (API 6)
o 09 - Android
2.1 Eclair (API 7)
o 10 - Android 2.2 Froyo (API 8)
o 11 - Android 2.3 Gingerbread (API 9)
o 12 - Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread (API 10)
o 13 - Android 3.0 Honeycomb (API 11)
o 14 - Android 3.1 Honeycomb (API 12)
o 15 - Android 3.2 Honeycomb (API 13)
o 16 - Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (API 14)
o 17 - Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich (API 15)
o 18 - Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (API 16)
o 19 - Android 4.2 Jelly Bean (API 17)
o 20 - Android 4.3 Jelly Bean (API 18)
o 21 - Android 4.4 KitKat (API 19)
o 22 - Android 4.4W KitKat, with wearable extensions
(API 20)
o 23 - Android 5.0 Lollipop (API 21)
o 24 - Android 5.1 Lollipop (API 22)
o 25 - Android 6.0 Marshmallow (API 23)
o 26 - Android 7.0 Nougat (API 24)
o 27 - Android 7.1 Nougat (API 25)
o
28 - Android 8.0 "O" (API 26)
Android Nougat was officially released eight months ago, in
August 2016, and we've been seeing a continuous rollout on Android
flagships ever since. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Google has been
working on the next Android 8.0 update. Its features have been announced,
and the second developer preview and public beta are available. During and
after Google I/O 2017, we got new details on features. Google has just
released the second Android O developer preview during Google I/O. We’re working on a video, but
you can read text versions of what’s new below. Like last year, Google dropped
the first preview build for the upcoming Android version a couple of months
ahead of I/O. The post that follows is divided up between all the new Android O
features in the second dev preview, followed by what was new in the initial
alpha preview in the second half. As always, we’ve been busy and have
brought together all the changes, features and things you should know about.
What’s
new in Android O developer preview 2:
o
Fluid Experiences
Announced
at Google I/O 2017, Fluid Experiences is Google’s way of helping you be more
productive and enjoy multi-tasking tools in your everyday use.TensorFlow Lite
is a new scaled-down version of Google’s machine learning tool, Tensor Flow.
The new tool assists lower powered devices to keep up with the today’s
demanding processes. Tensor Flow Lite uses techniques like LSTM to improve your
experience. Android O has a new framework from Android, it will hardware
accelerate neural network features, helping keep some of the AI components on
device, avoiding the need to find an online server to compute things like
actions on text selections. Watch for these features in a later update to
Android O.There are actually a few cool tools
within this grouping, including Picture-in-Picture, Smart Text Selection,
Auto-Fill and Notification Dots with long-press actions on the Home screen.
Let’s explore:
1) Picture-in-Picture
A familiar phrase and tool in many
televisions, within the YouTube app on Android and, yes, in iOS. Google is
adding a Picture-in-Picture mode to Android O. With a YouTube video playing,
just tap the Home button and the video will pop into a small window that can
remain on screen as you navigate other apps on your device. You can slide the
video around for best placement, then simply slide it off the screen to
terminate. Available now in the Android O Beta.
2) Notification Dots
Many custom Launcher users already know the power of a
notification icon on top of an app icon on your Home screen. We even used
Tasker to build our own once, but now Google is building it into Android.
Android O users will see a small dot that appears over top of their app icons
with active notifications. This is where the magic starts, now that your app
has an icon, new tools are available – Long-press the app icon with
Notification Dot to get a short list of immediate short link actions you can
perform. This includes viewing the notification itself right there in a tiny
pop-up window. The long-press functionality is not yet available in Android O,
watch for it coming soon in a future beta release.
3) Smart Text Selection
We’ve all seen the basic text highlighting features, the
copy/paste dialogue in Android, but now there’s more. With Android O,
highlighting text includes further features, using Google AI to intelligently
act on the words. For instance, if you highlight a phone number, you can just
tap to dial. If you highlight an address, a single tap will start navigation.
Best of all, highlighting is more intelligent itself, selecting phrases or full
addresses, for example, instead of just single words.
4) Auto-Fill
For your most used apps on your device, Android O will
help quickly log into services. The Auto-Fill feature needs to be coded in by
the app developers, but once installed, Android O will remember your usernames,
and in some cases your password, to quickly and easily jump into apps on your
device.
5) Vitals
Who wants better battery life? Android O will soon
include features under the banner Vitals, including security tools, OS
optimizations and tools for developers to better suite your device usage. At
Google I/O 2017, the Android team announced Google Play Protect, think of it as
a virus scanner for Android apps. So far, the team reports having scanned over
50 billion app installs every day. You’ll see an entry in your Google Play app
update window, showing your most recent scan and if there were any issues found. Optimizations in the OS have the
team reporting that Pixel devices are booting up in nearly half the time as
before. This speed bump goes for apps as well. Extensive changes to the
runtime, including things like concurrent, compacting garbage collection and
code locality, but in Google’s words, your apps just run faster. More on this
later. Wise Limits will apply to background services, preventing apps from
running in the background for too long. The goal is to dramatically reduce
battery consumption, keeping you up and running through your day. Play Console
Dashboard is a new developer tool that provides analytics on app device usage.
Developers will be able to see live results of their app running on any Android
device – this may not eliminate the need for developers to test their app on
most major phones, but it certainly will help them narrow down an issue if a
device is acting up. Best of all, the in-depth tools provide insight on how
devs can adjust their applications to reduce battery consumption and speed up
execution on various devices. You obviously won’t see these as a feature on
your Android O device, but you will certainly enjoy the improved performance. These
and more great new features announced at Google I/O 2017.
6) Other stuff
There’s plenty of other stuff
worth noting too, but a lot of which we can’t see in effect yet. Android O adds
font support so app developers can define font style and weight. This could
either be a great development or a cluster font if you’ll pardon my language. Wi-Fi Awareness allows your
Android O device or app to communicate with other devices and apps in the
vicinity over Wi-Fi without requiring an actual internet connection. There are
also some major optimizations to the Android Run-Time (ART) responsible for
handling your apps and Web View has also seen some enhancements you’re unlikely to ever even notice.
7) Notification handling
As for notification handling, there’s some familiar stuff
going on as well as some new options. If you long press on a notification
you’ll see a toggle for Notifications, allowing you to disable all future
notifications from that app (when notification channels are fully introduced
you’ll also have access to them here, but more on that below).However, if you
swipe a notification to the side a little, you’ll get two icons: one for
accessing the Notifications toggle and a clock icon for snoozing the
notification. If you tap the clock you’ll automatically snooze for 15 minutes
but you can open the drop-down menu to snooze for 30 or 60 minutes instead or
to disable snooze.
8) Quick Settings
When you open up the Quick Settings screen, you’ll see we
still have different color schemes for the Pixels compared to Nexus devices.
Nexuses get that same dark blue-gray background with aqua accents while the
Pixels maintain the near-black and bright blue accent scheme. Looking at the
Quick Settings themselves, Google has changed things up yet again. In Android
O, the Quick Settings with a line underneath (Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, Do
Not Disturb) have a double function. You can tap the icon to toggle the setting
on and off, but if you tap the word underneath the toggle, you’ll open up the
mini settings menu instead. The non-underlined toggles just enable a feature
like the flashlight or cycle through modes like for data saver no matter where
you tap them. Just like in Nougat, you can tap the pen icon to edit the order
of the Quick Settings or add another page and you’ve got the same shortcut to
add a guest or switch between use
9) App badges
Android O finally adds native support for app
badges. They’re the little number bubble that shows up on an app icon to show
you your unread notification count and are yet another custom launcher feature
being absorbed into stock Android. Of course, you’ll have complete control over
these at the flick of a toggle in the individual app notification settings.
10) Settings menu
The
Settings menu is where most of the visual changes look to be taking place in
the Android O release. For starters there’s a new color scheme: both the Pixels
and Nexus devices get a black and white approach but you’ll still see their
individual blue tones used for accents here and there.
The Settings menu itself has received a bit of a reshuffle as well. I
won’t bore you with what section moved into which other section, so take a
look at the screenshots below to see for yourself. The slide-out navigation
drawer and hamburger menu icon have both been removed in this developer
preview. The major change in Android O
is that the Settings menu is much shorter than it was in Nougat, with no
more umbrella categories like “wireless and networks,” “device,” “personal” and
“system”. Instead, Android O has more descriptive sections that cover more
ground, like “networks and internet,” “connected devices,” “apps and
notifications” and “security and screen lock”.
Generally speaking, everything is in the same place, but
a few changes are noticeable. For starters, in the Display settings, Pixel
devices have an option for “device theme” with two choices: Inverted or Pixel.
From what we can see right now all this does is change the Quick Settings area
from light to dark but it may evolve into the long-awaited system-wide dark
theme in later developer previews. The Pixels also show Night Light in the Display
settings while the Nexus does not. As you may remember, night mode made a brief
appearance on Nexus devices in the Android N preview builds, but was later
removed for failing to meet Google’s performance standards. Dark mode,
meanwhile, originally appeared in both the Android M and Android N previews,
but has still not made it to prime time on any device. Most sub-sections in the
Settings menu have also been overhauled visually. The battery and storage
sections are all-new and the app info pages have a new look too. A whole bunch
of stuff has now moved into the System sub-section, including languages and
input, date and time, updates, about phone and backup and rest option. Pretty
much everything you know from Nougat still exists in Android O, but you’ll have
to go digging to find where it now lives. On the plus side, I have to
congratulate Google for finally seeming to get things into places and groupings
that make sense, without breaking everything down into an interminable list.
11) System UI Tuner
As with Nougat, you can enable the System UI Tuner to
tweak certain things in Android O according to your personal preferences. To
enable the UI Tuner, swipe down the notifications shade or Quick Settings and
long-press the Settings gear icon. You’ll see it spin and feel a vibration when
the option has been added to the Settings menu.
12) Status bar
In Android O, System UI Tuner now lives under Settings
> System. It contains four areas (for now): status bar, do not disturb,
navigation bar and lock screen. Status bar still provides a list of toggles for
enabling or disabling which icons you see in the status bar, so you can remove
persistent Bluetooth or hotspot icons if you so wish. The option to display the
battery percentage inside the battery icon, which was a System UI Tuner option
in Nougat, is no longer available though. Enabling “Always show percentage” in
Android O will keep the battery percentage visible at all times in the status
bar, but it’ll be placed next to the battery icon, just like in the Quick
Settings view.
13) Do not disturb
Do not disturb simply shows two toggles: one for enabling
a do not disturb mode toggle under the volume slider and another for adding a
volume button shortcut so do not disturb turns on when you press the volume
down button once more after vibration only.
14) Navigation bar
Next up is the navigation bar, which adds a bunch of cool
options in Android O. There’s a layout option that lets you choose between
normal, compact, left-leaning or right-leaning (which will come in handy on
large-screened devices). You can also add additional buttons on the left and
right of the traditional on-screen navigation buttons. You can choose between
clipboard, key code or keyboard switcher. Clipboard lets you save something to
the clipboard and then simply drag it from the button in the nave bar anywhere
you want to drop it: a very handy trick for emails, phone numbers and other
frequently copy pasted items. The keyboard switcher doesn’t appear to work yet
but Keycode lets you assign a numeric key code to a button you can place on
either side of the nav keys. For example, if you want to add a left and right
cursor button for moving one character to the left or right rather than
awkwardly stabbing at the screen with your finger, then assign Key code 21 to
the left button and Key code 22 to the right. You can then assign them left and
right arrow keys and start editing your spelling mistakes like a pro.
15) Lock screen
The lock screen in Android O
looks the same as in Nougat but you have options buried in the System UI Tuner
for mixing things up. Rather than the shortcuts in the bottom left and right
corners for voice assist and the camera, you can change these to whatever you
like. The list of options is absolutely huge, making us think it’s a definite
Android 8.0 feature. Since we’re
talking about the lock screen, Ambient Display has also been revised. While
this is more than likely just a developer preview issue, most of the time
Ambient Display will only display the clock and some tiny app icons for any
notifications awaiting you. With some app notifications, however, like Hangouts
for example, you’ll see more information displayed, but only when the
notification
16) Audio
Sony donated their LDAC codec to Google for inclusion in
Android O. That means if you have LDAC-equipped Bluetooth headphones you’ll get
much better quality in Android 8.0. But the fun isn’t just restricted to LDAC,
Android O also has support for apt X and apt X HD as well as SBC and AAC. There
are also settings for audio sample rates and bits per sample too, plus Android
O adds a native Audio API for apps that require high fidelity, low latency
audio.
17) Notification channels
These aren’t yet widespread in Android O, but notification channels are a way for apps to split their
notifications into various themes that you can choose to let through or block
individually. So instead of picking between receiving dozens of notifications
from Twitter every day or none at all, notification channels will allow you to
let through the direct reply channel, for example, but block likes and rewets. You’ll
be able to manage these on the fly by
long-pressing an app notification in the notifications shade or through the
individual apps and notifications section in the settings menu.
18) Physical keyboard support
Hardware keyboards are going to become a bigger and
bigger thing in Android as Chrome books now have access to all Google Play apps
and the mysterious Andromeda platform continues to lurk in the shadows. While
we weren’t able to test out Android O’s hardware keyboard navigation support in
any meaningful way, rest assured that Google is attempting to introduce more
predictable standards for what the tab and arrow keys do when a physical
keyboard is used to navigate Android.
19) Unknown sources
Adding apps from anywhere outside Google Play typically
just required you to hit your security settings and enable Unknown Sources. But
in Android O things get taken up a notch. You’ll now also have to grant
permission to the app you’re using to download the APK. For example, if you
want to download an APK via Chrome, you’ll first be prompted to give Chrome
permission to install other apps via the “trust apps from this source” toggle
in the special access section of the apps and notifications setting. You only
need to do this once per app however and you can always revoke permission at a
later date.
20) Background process limits
Google has been optimizing
Android more and more lately to limit the amount of battery drain and resource
use that apps are allowed to do in the background. As we’ve seen a lot lately,
advanced users will have control over exceptions to these rules, but by and
large, Android O will severely limit background processes to intermittent
windows of activity controlled by the job scheduler
21) Adaptive icons
Adaptive icons are a fancy way of saying that Google is
making an attempt to tidy up the hot mess of inconsistent app icons in Android.
They basically provide app developers with multiple shape templates for each
icon that adapt to the device they appear on. So if the default app icon shape
for your phone is a rounded square then that’s what you’ll see across the
board. Rock a Pixel with circular icons and you’ll no longer see weird square
icons mixed in with all the round ones. On that note, the nave buttons change
from white to black when opening the app drawer now too.
22) Auto fill API
The Auto fill APIs introduced with Android O simply try
to help apps manage passwords and form data better than in previous versions of
Android. As Google notes in its blog post, “Users can select an auto fill app,
similar to the way they select a keyboard app. The auto fill app stores and
secures user data, such as addresses, usernames, and even passwords”. We’ll
have to wait a little while until app developers make full use of the Auto fill
APIs in Android O, but we should see much more capable password managers in future
23) Wider color gamut for apps
Android O adds support for “wide-gamut color for apps”
which sounds a lot like native HDR support but which is actually just a larger
palette of supported colors for app developers. As Google notes in the blog
post, “Android developers of imaging apps can now take advantage of new devices
that have a wide-gamut color capable display. To display wide gamut images,
apps will need to enable a flag in their manifest (per activity) and load
bitmaps with an embedded wide color profile (Adobe RGB, Pro Photo RGB, DCI-P3,
etc.)”.
24) Is it daily driver worthy?
The first question on everyone’s lips is whether or not
Android O developer previews are daily driver material. In my experience with
the first alpha build I encountered very few problems, but it’s a
little too early to say how stable the second preview is. If you have a spare
phone that has a factory image out for Android O, then absolutely, flash it and
have a poke around for yourself. But I wouldn’t advise flashing this on your
primary device because this is still a long way from a stable public
release and so things will be broken somewhere or other. Just because I haven’t
encountered them yet does not mean this is a good bet for the phone you keep by
your side all day.
That's
all for now, Join us for more infos about the android and other mobile OS
version details as well as get to know a better world with Daily Blogs.
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