Finally, the Android O has been fully baked and rolled out for Google Devices. Google, at the launching ceremony, told that other handsets will also get the new Android O update by the end of this year. Android Oreo is a comprehensive version of Android as there has ever been and it is stable, functional and feature-rich.
There are more than tons of Android O features such as integrated instant apps, instant boc time, auto fill, picture-in-picture, Google play protect and more. This makes it as the most powerful Android OS till date. Now, we are going to see the new Android O features that will make huge impact on the android app development process and will also contribute in making the app smooth and efficient
New Autofill FrameWork
With the new autofill framework, there will be a reduction in app developer’s time consumption. This feature will manage the app’s password with the Android operating system so that the users can access them easily and just like we do with a thirty-party keyboard.
It is hard to type all information such as email ids, username, password and address over and over again across the different apps. But now, this feature in Android O makes it easier by allowing the operating system to auto-fill the user information.
Developers can register their app as an auto-fill provider with the system to seamlessly log the user in. It saves the android developer’s time, effort and the developer can also develop the app more efficiently.
Splash Screen API
There are multiple ways to develop a splash screen in Android OS. And the most common among all approaches is in which, a drawable, a custom theme, and a SplashActivity is used. Now in the new Android Oreo, Google has standardised the entire process by letting the developers take advantage of this new API.
In the Android Oreo, Google has made the process of developing a splash screen easier task. The new Splash screen API allows the developers to set a drawable resource or images as an app loading screen. This API will also make it easy for them to set a splash screen in between activities of your android app.
Background Limits
An Android app running in the background consumes the smartphone’s RAM. This results in inefficient user experience, especially when the user is running a high resource consuming app like streaming a high-quality video or playing a high-definition game. To improve the user experience and app performance, Google has imposed limitations on background functional activities of the app.
Before the new Android Oreo, developers were able to develop an Android app that listens to a range of system broadcasts. And whenever these broadcasts receive or occur, applications wake-up and impact on the system performance.
However, in Android Oreo, this is not going to happen. Now the developers have to use specific receivers and job scheduler to ensure that app running in the background wake up effectively to do its task. Besides this, Android O also knows which apps are running background services and are not connected to what user doing on the device. For example, for the News Feeds there is no need to refresh its feed in the background stage.
Notifications
Android Oreo brings three major changes in Notifications.
1) There are extra actions for notification shade.
2) There are new notification dots.
3) Android Oreo adds notification channels, which is a unified system to help the users to manage their notifications.
The notification shade has a number of performance improvements, visual changes, and practical. On the visual side, the media controls have been given a new colour tweak. Before Android Oreo, the media controls in the notification shade displayed the album cover image. With Android Oreo, the background of media control will change its colour according to the album artwork.
However, besides these general changes, notification has always been the most important feature for app developers as well as marketers. In the new notifications feature, the user can see channels as categories. These channels are planned to represent different categories of notification that an app can send.
For example, A Hotel/restaurant app can have different types of notifications such as promotions as well as important updates of a booking. Here, the developer can make the promotions in the hotel app as a promotion channel, and hotel booking related notifications as an update channel.
Apart from this, developers can also enable users to set a timeout on notifications or snooze them so that they can take a look at it later.
–
Saravanakumar B,
Android Team,
Mallow Technologies.