The power menu is getting a boost with the Android 11 beta. As XDA’s Mishaal Rahman points out, the new power menu in the Android 11 beta will have a customization option for various actions.
What’s more is that Google will let you toggle on and off which ones you want to surface.
As it stands right now with Android 10 on the Pixel 4, the power menu brings up the screenshot, power off, restart, and emergency button as well as your cards and passes. With the cards and passes having recently been added in the last few months officially.
You can’t disable any of these options though. They stay there whether you want to see them or not. But in Android 11 that’s changing.
The Android 11 beta will let you enable/disable cards and passes in the power menu
Once Android 11 is installed on your device, you can turn cards and passes off. Under the gestures menu in settings, there’s a sub-menu for the power menu options that you can adjust.
In that you have two toggles. One of them is for cards and passes. In the screenshot below you can see that it’s set to on. But if you toggle it off then these will no longer pop up when hold the power menu down.
Though some people find it useful to have those there, some might find it a privacy concern. Which is likely why Google is making it possible to customize this option by allowing users to disable it altogether.
You’ll also be able to toggle and customize device controls
The second option for what you can customize here will be device controls. At the moment there aren’t any apps that can utilize this particular feature.
As no apps currently utilize the Controls API. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see this fully utilized by at least a few apps by the time Android 11 is rolled out to the public out of the beta state.
More than likely you’ll see some of Google’s own apps or services use this. If nothing else. An animation of what the device controls feature looks like is visualized in Rahman’s tweet below. It showcases the power button behind held down to bring up the power menu options.
After which a button (presumably a device control) is tapped and then the bulb in a lamp turns on. This is obviously just an example of what could be a very big list of actions that can be controlled from the power menu for quick access. But you get the idea.
Here’s the animation that plays on that page pic.twitter.com/hCmS8ShaO1
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) June 1, 2020