The Top 5 Features of Android P Beta
Earlier this month, Google held its I/O 2018 Developer Conference keynote in Mountain View, California from May 8 to 10. The I/O Developer Conference brings together developers from around the world annually for talks, hands-on-learning with Google experts, along with the first look at Google’s latest developer products.
According to recent reports, Google is referring to Android P as Pistachio ice cream. But it still isn’t the final name. Along with the new Android version comes new features. Android P will also bring some very exciting new features with its launch. Today we are going to list down the top 5 Android P features.
1. Improvements in the notifications
Android P comes with support for more informative notifications. Every new Android version comes with improvements to the notifications. With the improvements in the notifications, you will now be able to see a preview of an attached image.
Along with that, you will also be able to see the last few messages in a conversation and you can also make use of Google Assistant to send replies from the notification shade. Android’s notifications are one of its strongest points. You can also see their influence in other operating systems, be it mobile or desktop.
2. Notch support
Android will now provide developers with tools to work around the notches. The notch isn’t really liked by a lot of people. But now that it is there, some software can be used to reduce the downside of it. The first thing that we notice is that the clock will be on the left side now. Things will be symmetrical around the notch. Developers can change the status bar height automatically. Developers can also define an area where the notch would be. This will avoid important things to be posted there.
3. Screen rotation
Android P brings with itself a new approach to control how you rotate the display, and we like it. Android P allows you to lock your rotation settings so that the screen remains vertical even if you tilt it all the possible ways. There will be a new button in the system bar. Using this button, you can change the things with just a simple tap. The addition of this new button makes auto-rotation very much easier. This new feature is really handy. It will be seen on the navigation bar when you rotate your phone in a position it’s not locked in.
4. Security tweaks
The new Android P is going to come with some fine, but still important security tweaks. You will see improvements to encryption and other technologies. Basically, there will be two features you will get to see.
The first feature is a unified fingerprint-authentication sensor. It is a minor thing, but you will be seeing the same screen encouraging you to enter a digit on the fingerprint scanner.
The second feature is about encrypted backups. This means that at the time of accessing backup information on your phone, you will be asked to provide a PIN or a design that you use to unlock your phone. This is a really good feature because it means that your data will remain safe wherever it is.
5. Locking the background
With Android O, we saw the limitations placed on what an app could do while running in the background. This was done in order to improve the battery and performance by limiting apps from being very active while they are not in view.
With the new Android P, Google has added a few restrictions relating to the background activities of an app. If apps are drawing continuous information from sensors, no event reports will be delivered to apps. This includes gyroscopes and accelerometers. So the apps will not receive information from these sensors while the apps are running in the background.
There will be no access to the microphone or the camera on an app running in the background. There is not much information on how exactly this is going to work, but it is going to be very interesting.
Wrap up
The best part about the I/O Developer Conference is that it provides us with hints on what we can expect when these exciting updates roll in. This information just scratches on the surface on the detailed list of changes that we are yet to get details of. All these new features need developers to update the apps in order to accommodate them. All the new changes are to be written with backward compatibility. This is done so that the users don’t have a poor experience with the apps.
Dhruvil is a Writer & Marketeer for Nimblechapps, joined in December 2014, based out of Sydney, Australia. He has worked briefly as a Branding and Digital Marketing Manager before moving to Australia. At Nimblechapps, he worked on Social Media Marketing, Branding, Email Marketing and Blogging. Dhruvil studies Business at University of Western Sydney, and also handles Operations for the company in Australia.