A Developer’s guide to the features of the new Android “O”
Google, during the same time, last year unanticipatedly announced the preview of Android Nougat. Yesterday, Google revealed the preview of the next version of their Android Mobile Operating System- Android “O” (We guess it’s going to be Android “Oreo” upon release, let’s gulp the Oreo shake, already ;) ).
Google usually has this habit of speculating much about the names of their Android versions (at least for the last 3 updates) where Android “N” which people thought was “Nutella” and it was named “Nougat”. This time too, Google has made it a point to create a buzz among the masses to de-code “O” and it has named the Developer Preview of its new Mobile OS- code named “O”.
The Oreo is ready but where is my shake?
Yes, we all have to wait and Google made Nougat available to anyone with a compatible device by releasing an early Android Beta Channel. Most of the previous versions were stable & functional (almost) during the Beta launch itself. But, the “O” has been made available for Developers with Nexus devices (5X, 6P, Player) or Pixel devices (XL or C) only. The super excited and adventurous android developers have to manually download this preview of “O” and flash their devices to get their hands on the brand new OS.
“For this release, we wanted to focus on giving developers time to test for compatibility, explore new features and send feedback which will help make Android O a great platform,” a Google spokespersonsaid.
How good is “O” going to taste, anyway?
As far as we know at the moment, Android “O” is a bit of a letdown for all the hype. Google is known to tweak all the core features of all the OS that they work on, but so far we see only minor upgrades. A quick UI refresh is something to look forward to that “O” has in its kitty.
Let’s get into the “features” of “O” now-
There are many features that Google has planned to enhance in Android through “O”. Let us now look into the most interesting features that is probably going to earn Google few brownie points (pun not intended)-
Notifications- Finally! Somebody heard about the second by second notification buzzes by almost all the apps (arrrghh..). Now, Developers are free to create “Notification Channels” which enables users to group the notifications from their apps into groups, for example- Notifications from “The Washington Post” can be grouped into “Politics” or “News”.
Picture in Picture- Picture in Picture is a feature that enables Video apps on Android O to automatically drive themselves to keep playing the videos even if the user switches to a different app. So, all of us can take a deep breath, our videos are still going to be buffered/loaded even when we chat with someone else in the meantime.
Multi-display support- An interesting feature, as Google is now giving importance to newer kind of devices as well as for Android apps on Chrome OS. The user is empowered to operate the OS from remote devices through this extended support to multiple displays.
Background limits- Who doesn’t want better battery life? Well, Google has come up with limitations that restrict the apps running in the background. Android “O” will now restrict the background activities of apps (Location based activity or background services) and thus the apps will consume relatively less battery.
But, Google really wants the developers to go through the documentation about these changes to make it bug-free.
New Wi-Fi features- While Wi-Fi improvements are common in every update, Android “O” will extend its support to modern networks like NAN (Neighborhood Area Networks) and will further increase the receiving speed of the adapter.
There are many other features to Android “O” like adaptive icons, support for wide gamut-color capable displays, support for high quality Bluetooth audio codecs (Indication of Google or its partners looking to get rid of the headphone jack just like apple) and much more.
Google also said that Android “O” will support various other new Java language APIs to improve Android Runtime.
As of now, there aren’t any “Out of the box” features yet. But, this new approach of asking developers to spend more time on it, send feedback and report bugs is something that is surely going to bring out some amazing feature whenever Google proposes to launch Android “O”. While the approach of Google to collaborate is right, but monopolizing this development only on Google Devices is a bit sad.
Hopefully, this time around, OEMs will all ship their new phones on the latest Android version and support its updates.
Looking to know more about Android “O”? Have a glance through our in-depth analysis on the features of Android O
Disclaimer- Originally published by Sri Krishna Ananthan on LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/srikrishnawritesalways/