Surfing the code repositories at Google’s Android-Platform Google Groups is always a good idea if you’re looking to see what Google’s Android development team is working on. That’s what the fine folks over at Android World have been doing, and they stumbled upon a rather nice little tidbit of information concerning the quick settings toggles you can find when pulling the notification bar down. Someone submitted an issue request for Android L, specifically talking about the quick settings panel and how it’s useful but could be far more useful than it currently is by just allowing the user to customize it. A member of Google’s Android development team acknowledged the request just a few days later, so now it looks like this could be a feature the team would work on for the final release of Android L in the fall.
This is extremely similar to what we saw yesterday regarding Android L and SD Card usage, where the situation was acknowledged and responded to with the relevant new feature information. Customizing quick toggles isn’t anything new to Android, as we’ve been able to do it in CyanogenMod and other popular ROMs for Android forever, and even Samsung introduced quick toggle customization back in the Android 4.2 days, but this isn’t something built into Android just yet. This is similar to the Do Not Disturb feature that Google is finally building into Android as well, matching feature parity with that of OEMs that have already had this integrated for a long time now.
It’s just another set of efforts to bolster the baseline code of Android and make everyone’s experience that much more complete, so that users don’t have to worry about basic features like this not being on their phone of choice. Now we’re just left wondering if Google or any of these OEMs are going to match feature parity with what custom ROMs have had forever, and Apple integrated into iOS7 last year: a bloody flashlight toggle!