On Tuesday, Google opened the flood gates for the latest version of Android, that being Android O which doesn’t officially have a version number just yet. Google has also announced a number of features that are available in Android O, as well as some changes to the system. Now these aren’t all of the changes in Android O, Google will still announce quite a few more at Google I/O in May. But these are some of the more key changes.
First up we have a new notification design. Google is allowing users to put apps into different notification channels. And these channels can all have different behaviors. Allowing you to pick and choose which apps need urgent attention when they notify you, versus others not really needing to notify you. Google is also changing up the way these notifications look, especially in groups. Allowing you to see, quickly, which notifications are in your notification shade and which need to be dealt with. For instance, you can see in the picture above that you can see that there are 10 notifications, but instead of taking up the entire shade, it just takes up the space of one notification.
Google is also bringing Picture in Picture to smartphones and tablets. This was previously available on Android TV with Nougat, but is now coming to smaller screens. Google is also releasing a new app overlay window and multi-display support for Android, building on the multi-window mode that was part of Nougat last year.
With Android apps now being available on Chrome OS, Google has decided to revamp the keyboard a bit, particularly when it comes to navigation. So they have now built in more predictable models for what the arrow and tab buttons would do for navigation. There is also now platform support for password manager apps. So you can choose a password manager app that will autofill spaces throughout the OS, by default, thanks to the new autofill APIs. There’s also a new wide-gamut color for apps, which developers can use in their apps, this is mostly for imaging apps. There’s a new accessibility feature in Android O, where it can respond to directional swipes on the fingerprint sensor. It’s tough to gauge what exactly these will do, or how they’ll work just yet.
Google is debuting adaptive icons as well in Android O. Simply put, this means that your app icon will now adapt to the skin that it is being used with. For instance devices like the new Huawei P10 use squircle icons, so the icon will adapt to being a squircle instead of a typical square or rounded icon like what the Pixel smartphones use.
Finally, Google’s big focus in Android O is actually having to do with battery life. Google is going to begin placing background limits on apps, a bit more aggressively. This is something that iOS already does – partly how the iPhone gets such great battery life with having such a small battery, compared to Android smartphones. What this is going to mean is that users will get even better battery life, particularly when they are not using their device.
These are all of the changes currently part of Android O. Google will likely debut more in the coming months before the final release comes. Google notes on their website that there will be about four developer previews, followed by the stable release in the third quarter of the year.