The newly announced developer preview of Android O introduces some major changes compared to Android Nougat, but it also ships with a wide variety of smaller optimizations and performance tweaks that aren’t immediately apparent but will still change the way we interact with our Android smartphones on a daily basis. One of those changes is the way expandable quick settings in the notification bar work. In Nougat, users were able to quickly access an expanded list of settings pertaining to various system functions by bringing down the notification bar and tapping a corresponding icon. Accessing quick Wi-Fi, Location, Bluetooth, Flashlight, and other settings was as simple as tapping the corresponding icon in the expanded notification bar, while users were able to open the full Settings page of any function by long-pressing its icon.
As of Android O, that feature was tweaked to a degree and now requires users to tap the text below icons in the expanded notification bar. While this method of accessing expandable quick settings may not seem extremely intuitive at first seeing how few users would have guessed an ordinary line of text is actually a shortcut, the method seems to work well in practice. Shortcuts to full Settings pages of individual functionalities are still activated by long-pressing feature tiles in the notification bar, though that may also change by the time first stable builds of Android O start hitting smartphones and tablets. One thing that likely won’t change is the core functionality of the icons themselves seeing how tapping them still toggles corresponding features. You can see how the new expandable quick settings are accessed in practice by checking out the video below, courtesy of Android Police.
Google officially announced the first developer preview of Android O on Tuesday and detailed a broad range of new features that are debuting with the latest major iteration of its operating system. Android O is said to be specifically designed to improve battery life of devices by doing everything from limiting possible background activities of apps to preventing them from unnecessarily waking their host. More details on Android O are expected to follow in the coming weeks.