Here’s some big news breaking out on a quiet Friday afternoon. The folks over at Android Police are reporting on a rumor from one of their sources about what we may be seeing in the next version of Android. It appears that Google is looking to shake up the home screen, notification shade and the recents menu, just to name a few items. Now we might see this at Google I/O next month and we may see it in the fall. I’m leaning towards the fall seeing as that’s when Google usually puts out their bigger Android updates.
Starting out with the notification shade, it will still be accessed with a swipe down from the top, but it will be in two parts. A low priority and a high priority section. The high priority notifications will show up first, but a swipe up will show your low priority notifications. Which in the mockup that Android Police put together, it looks the low priority ones would be persistent notifications like being connected to Glass, or Battery Widget reborn, etc.
Then there’s the new recents menu, which appears to be the primary input into the launcher now. It appears that you could swipe down on an action bar in an app to enter multi-tasking which would be really cool. And easy to get into multi-tasking. It appears to be experimenting in a few of Google’s apps, but not all of them just yet. Now onto the app grid, it appears that Google is looking to get rid of the app drawer in favor of an app grid similar to iOS, or Huawei and BLU’s custom user interface. Which means all of your apps would be on your home screens. I’m not sure how many people would like that. It also appears that Google is playing around – a lot – with the notification shade. It’s going to be getting a huge stylistic overhaul, and look even more like Google Now. The notification shade will also great you with a phrase, dependent of the time of day, as well as your next alarm and the current weather.
These changes are definitely interesting, and feel free to check out Android Police’s mockups over on their site – check out the source links below – Google I/O is going to be pretty exciting this year.