What’s new with Android O : Features preview

The Nougat age is almost over. Google has officially unveiled its new OS version named Android O for smartphones and tablets. Google has added a lot of new features for user and developers in Android O. Android O is under testing stage. The final API is expected to launch on mid of June 2017. The final release of Android O most likely in late of August or early September.

According to Android O Developers, the upcoming Android O will have better battery life and performance improvement.

As per the updates from Google, these are the additional features added in Android O.

1) Notification:

  In Android O, developers have mainly focused on user experience. In the Notification, they have included few more options like a reply, archive, snooze. The option changes based on the applications.

Android O introduces a variety of new features in the notification.

• Notification channel: Android O introduces notification channels to provide an unified system to help the user manage notification. It helps the user to setup most of the setting associated with notifications using a consistent system UI. For example: in the chat application, the user can add a conversation to notification channel. All conversation in a notification channel behaves the same.

The characteristic of the notification channel

Importance

Sound

Lights

Vibration

Show on Lock screen

override do not disturb

• Notification Badges: Google Android introducing the functionality to display notification badges on app icon in few supported launchers. Notification badges reflect the presence of notifications associated with an app, which the user has not yet dismissed or acted on. Notification badges show notification counts associated with notification channel in an app. Notification badges are also known as notification dots. The user should long-press on the app icon to view the notification in notification badges. The notification count will automatically reflex the change according to the user action.

• Snoozing: user can snooze the notification to reappear at a later time. By updating a change in snooze notification does not cause it to reappear.

These are some features in the notification that provides the user to set notification background, messaging style and notification timeout.

2) Picture-in-Picture mode:

in Android O, the screen can be launched in PIP mode. It is a framework for video app. PIP is a special type of multi-window, it helps to navigate elsewhere while watching the video. PIP mode lets apps run a video in the pinned window while we can perform another activity in the background.

3)Autofill Framework:

In the previous version of Android, we felt account creation, login and card transaction takes time and is prone to errors. To solve this, Android O introduces Forms such as login and credit card forms. It makes easier with the autofill framework. In Android O, it remembers our user name and even a password in some case, to quickly and easily to enter the app on your devices.

4) Adaptive Icon:

This feature allows the user to create “adaptive icon”. It makes the icon to change their shape according to the theme of the user.

5) Autosizing TextView:

Android O provides the facility for the developers to set a text to expand or contract automatically based on the textView. It makes much easier to optimise the text size for different screens.

6) Smart Text Selection:

                    In the previous os version, we can only have cut/copy/paste option by selecting a text. In Android O, highlighting or selecting a text includes the additional features tap to dial if it’s a phone number, tap to navigate if it’s an address and tap to mail if it’s an email. Other than this, highlighting is more intelligent itself, it automatically selects phrases or a full address when we tap.

7) Screenshots:

In Android O, there are lot options added in Screenshot. We can edit, share, crop after taking the screenshots. It helps in cropping specific portions.

8) Vitals:

Android O will have many features under the banner vitals, including the security tools, OS optimisations and tools that supports the developers in the betterment of the device usage. 

Ex: for developer tool – Play dashboard console.

With this, help developer can view the analytics results of their app running on other devices.

There’s plenty of other features too, but we won’t see it in effect. Android O supports a developer to improve the fonts style and weights. Still, there are chances to introduce new features. Only after the launch of Android O, we can explore it fully.

–
Saravanakumar.B
Android Developer Trainee,
Mallow Technologies.