Thoughts and impressions on Android P
Android has seen its fair share of “milestone updates” over the past 10 years, such as the Android 4.0 Icecream Sandwich update back in 2011, which introduced the Tron (aka “HOLO”) theme. This was followed by the complete Material Design revamp with Android 5.0 Lollipop in 2014, bringing along with it a beautiful, fresh and modern design.
Now here we are in 2018 — the year of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, bezelless phones and notched displays. And with a pretty impressive I/O last week, Google gave us a preview of the next version of Android, yet to be named — Android P.
I’ve been using a clean, unrooted and unadulterated stock copy of the official Android P Developer Preview 2 on my Google Pixel XL for almost a week now, and here are some of my (unbiased) thoughts on it.
Animations & UI
Animations throughout the OS have received updates, all the way from opening and closing apps in the Pixel Launcher to launching different apps from within an app, to opening a new intent/activity of an app, to the new ripple effect when a UI element is clicked as well as the sleek new way in which notifications are presented to you.
Most of the new animations in Android P are really sweet, probably sweeter than an Oreo cookie with Nougats and Marshmallows and crushed Lollipops in between, making it a sweeter version of your traditional Icecream Sandwich (okay, sorry, I’ll stop here).
But unfortunately, there are two kinds of animations in particular which try very, very hard to mimic iOS 11: app opening animations and launching one app from another. I hope these are changed in future releases.
The overall UI is also more round, white and filled with Product Sans typography in various places, at least on the Pixel smartphones. I don’t hate it but it’s definitely not the best looking version of Android yet, although I guess it’s not bad for the sake of change.
The Gestures
One of the most controversial changes in Android P, gestures, are both good and bad, but they’re subjective to everyone — you really need to use them for a while in order to judge and decide for yourself.
Speaking solely about the good, the new gesture based system along with the app switching scrollbar is extremely fast to use. Switching between open apps is now faster and more fun than double tapping the recents key as we did before. It’s something that you need to use in person to learn and get used to, but once your muscles get the swipes registered in their memory, it’s really nice to use.
The gesture-based navigation isn’t just a blatant copy of the iPhone X as many people say, and neither is it all that complicated to use. It’s actually quite different in its own way, with a unique learning curve to it, but I feel Apple’s overall implementation is better and more complete.
The main problem with Google’s implementation is that it’s a sort of hybrid mix of buttons and swipes. The new pill-shaped home button still needs to be tapped to go home, and the back button still needs to be tapped to go back. But to get into multitasking, you either have to swipe up from the home button, or swipe right from it to get into the superfast scrolling menu. It’s not as bad as it sounds, but it can definitely be a whole lot better.
Another annoyance is in opening the app drawer, a unique feature every Android user is familiar with. To access the drawer in P, you have to swipe upwards from the same pill shaped home button so that the multitasking screen opens up. But you can’t let go just yet — you have to keep swiping all the way up to finally reveal the app drawer. It can be done either in two short swipes or a single long swipe, but is still annoying and more time consuming than traditional single swipe-ups from the good old days.
The other issue is that there’s no real need for this gesture based UI. I think it’s a good change and refreshment to the way we’ve been operating Android since 2011, but it doesn’t add more screen real estate or any real value, because the navigation bar is still out there taking up as much space as it did before. So the question still remains — what’s the point of having this anyway?
Notifications & Quick Settings
Android’s new notifications are even better now than what they’ve always been. They are smarter with an API for suggested replies, and are also a bit easier to operate and manage. They still have all of the powerful features that Android Oreo brought along (including notification channels), but are now easier for the general consumer thanks to some really eye-candy new animations.
Clicking on the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth text no longer brings up the nifty little menu to switch between networks though, which is a real bummer and I hope it’s just a bug. At least you can still press and hold the icon to get into the full Settings page of the respective feature.
The quick settings dropdown also looks a little cleaner, and they have indeed removed a few icons and shortcuts you may be used to having. But thankfully, the ugly translucency of Oreo is gone, and the entire dropdown menu is now either opaque white or opaque black, depending on the wallpaper set.
AI & Machine Learning
Android P is also the first version to have AI built-in, with some smart features like Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness. I like the way Adaptive Brightness works over traditional auto brightness settings, and if Adaptive Battery improves my battery life in any way, then I’m all in for it.
But, if this is the way Google is going, then it makes me even more excited for the next version of Android, which will probably improve upon the current gesture UX and hopefully add many more of these “Adaptive” machine learning features, not just two.
Conclusion
So there you have it — my thoughts on some of the major new changes and features in the P Developer Preview. Besides for the obvious things I spoke about, there are also many little-little tricks and treats you’ll notice throughout the OS, especially when coming from Oreo.
While I do like many of the changes, I also dislike a good amount of them — things that are casually copy pasted from the Apple world for no reason at all. I miss the old Material Design UI of Lollipop — the one with bold colors; and also miss how simplistic and minimal Android Marshmallow worked back in the day on my Nexus 5.
While this is still a beta build, I’m quite certain that most of the new features and decisions are here to stay. However, looking at Google’s previous track record of changing things within the Android system that people didn’t like (there’s a plethora of examples that I can’t remember as of now), I’m kinda hopeful that we’ll get back some things such as expanded quick settings, and, fingers crossed, Substratum theme support in future versions of Android.
You may have noticed the time in the status bar in Demo Mode (it’s on the left now, ya idiot!) being 10:10. That’s probably just Google being the nerdy troll that they are, because 1010 is the binary equivalent for the number 10. And Android P is likely to be version 10 for a good reason — not only to mark 10 years of Android, but also to mark a big design change as well as a fundamental change in the way we use our phones — with the injection of Google’s newfound love, Artificial Intelligence.
