It didn’t take long for the team over at Paranoid Android to bring their ever so ambitious 4.5 Alpha 3 froward into beta status. It wasn’t an overnight process, sure, but these things seldom are and anyone can tell you that great things take time. This beta 1 of the 4.5 build, which adds in the Android L preview inspired recents menu to the ROM I might add, is a great thing not only for the PA team themselves, but for the community of ROM flashers as well as we’re bound to seem awesome new features(or at least one)and overall improvement. Let’s not forget that stability is a factor with the beta builds, stability being something that the Alpha builds aren’t as well known for as they are for having the latest features and being on the bleeding edge, which makes this more viable as a daily driver for those who are either considering making the jump to Paranoid Android or, may already be running an older beta build and have been waiting patiently to move forward.
First off, a big thank you to the Paranoid Android team for working diligently on this and bringing the new 4.5 tweaks to the beta community of the ROM. As always, PA shines where many others don’t. To start, the first change that the PA team points out is the improvement in the stability area for the recents menu. Not just more stable, but significantly more stable. They also fixed some bugs in this beta release related to recents, more specifically the clear all recents bug that some users may have been experiencing. Of course you’ll notice that the recents menu can now be viewed in a card stacks style just like in the 4.5 Alpha 3 build as stated above. There have been some CM changes made to the theme engine that PA had introduced to their ROM in an earlier release, and those changes are reflected in this week’s beta 1 release. If you use themes within Paranoid Android, this will likely be good news for you. It certainly is for me, as I recently fell in love with the Veu PA theme from Arz Bhatia and I welcome all new changes to the themes portion of the PA ROM. The team also points out that PA specific features work nicely on multi-user. If you’re eager to get your hands on the beta 1 release, you can do so by hitting the source link to the PA post from last night where they have the links for the download, or if you’re already running PA you have probably already gotten notifications from the Paranoid Android OTA app. As always, happy flashing and Stay Paranoid!