Android 9 (PIE): Neither Pancake Nor Pineapple, Say Hello to Pie
Google has finally announced the 9th Android OS version — P “Pie”. As per the latest release, Android 9 comprises the power of Artificial Intelligence. This will help an android phone to adapt to how a person uses it and behaves accordingly.
Let’s have a look at the updates and other useful APIs:
Adaptive Battery and Brightness
Adaptive Battery is under the hood of Machine Learning where it’s going to predict which apps you are going to use in next couple of hours and sustain the power for your favourite apps.
Adaptive Brightness is something which helps you in different lighting or different environment, and different settings and automatically adapts the required brightness.
Settings -> Recommendations to restrict apps which are using more battery power. You can control the apps according to their battery consumption.
This feature is with DeepMind, Alphabet’s AI-centric arm, through machine learning.
App Actions
This is one of the coolest features in this update. Your mobile is predicting which app you will use or which feature of a particular app, on the basis of your context (what you are currently doing) and displays on the screen.
Suppose you put your headphone than its going to suggest you play some music or say if you are using google maps daily in the morning then it will going to suggest you the maps.
Learn more from official documentations and session from Google I/O 18
For Android Developers: Add an Actions.xml file in your apk. Register those intents which your app is capable of and fulfill them using deep links. Here we are looking at how actions.xml file for Coursera looks like
Slices
This feature is just like getting your favorite slice of a pie; if you start typing the name of your favorite app in Google Search or general terms, it will going to give you the best action you would like to perform with a particular app. This year slices have come in Google Search.
Like here in the GIF, when you start typing the name of your favorite app example — “lyft” (name of an app) it shows you to book a cab from home to work directly. You can also type any general terms like “get a ride” it will give you a preferred slice.
Learn more from official documentations and session from Google I/O 18
For Android Developers: Slices are built into Android Jetpack. Take a look at SliceView API, and don’t forget to download and install the Slice Viewer which will help you to test your slices. To develop your first slice, you need to extend a class with SliceProvider and add the provider to manifest class under that particular activity. You also have to add the dependency in the gradle file.
Develop your first Slice here- Getting Started
Intuitive Navigation and Smart Text Selection
Intuitive Navigation is like Get a slice of a pie from any direction. If you hop between different apps very much then, this new design is going to help you a lot. Now, you can swipe up anytime, and you will get the recently used apps with full-screen previews.
Overview Selection is, now you can select any text from overview mode and get the suggestions like, if I select the name of a band then it may suggest you listen to songs or may give the links to their songs. You can also select an image and it will give you the share button. The best thing here is now you can also copy the text from an image.
Digital Wellbeing
Give your time to use the phone but not your precious time, So be a digitally well person with these new features. These features will help you not to be addictive to your phone unless you use them.
Dashboard
Now you have a dashboard where you can see how much time you are daily spending on a particular app and how much notifications you are getting.
Do Not Disturb
Do Not Disturb feature silents notifications sounds on your phone but now it also silents the visual interruptions which pop up on screen. You can get the calls from the starred contacts.
App timers
You can set the time limit for a particular app to be used. When the limit reaches, the app is no longer usable. The app icon turns grey in color.
Wind Down
You can schedule the bedtime and the feature “Wind Down” will turn on the DND and night light and also fades the screen to greyscale. You will have no colors on the screen so you can go to sleep.
Rotation
Rotate the screen when you need for a particular app. Previously, screen rotation is a bit irritating because sometimes we forget to toggle back to our default settings but now you can change the orientation and app will give you an option to rotate right on the screen.
The portrait mode has been renamed to rotation lock and it is active when auto-rotate is toggled off. Official Documentation Link
Text
Magnifier Class helps you to magnify the text on the screen. This class also works with other views like image, to magnify the content.
Multi-camera support
Now, you can get access to the stream of more than 2 cameras. There are some new parameters like Session parameters which helps to reduce capture delay and flash support on display based. Pie supports external USB/UVC camera.
Official Documentation — multi-camera API
Animation
Pie has a new class called AnimatedImageDrawable which support GIF and WebP animated images.
Display cutout support
Pie has a new API Display Cutout which can support the display cutouts, notches. Nowadays, new devices are coming with notches on display area and this API helps you to handle the window and display accordingly.
Notification
Now, you have an option to manage the notifications from a wide range of apps whether to receive the notification or not. When you swipe, it will ask to keep receiving the notifications from this app or not. Official Documentation Link.
Conclusion
Android’s ninth version, Pie, comes with such updates which are going to enhance the experience of an Android user and make the user feel more connected towards the device but not addictive.
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