Android : O & GO

With the Google I/O 2017 come and gone, the only thing that remains are the testing of the products that were launched. Out of the various features that were revealed at the event, the most waited for feature was the next Android update i.e. the Android O. Here, we discuss the features of the O in detail :

Android O: All the best features in Google’s latest OS update

Now in its second developer preview, Android O brings a number of performance improvements and new features. While many of these may just be small tweaks, collectively, they’ll make Android a lot more pleasant to use on the whole.

Picture-in-picture video

Android is getting proper support for picture-in-picture video – essentially a floating video window that will help make sure you never get any work done.

Though some manufacturers like Samsung have already added this feature, the feature is normally limited to just a few apps. Official Google support means much wider compatibility to come – and hopefully less performance overhead as well.

A bunch of notification improvements

Android O is changing notifications in a number of important ways, so we’ve grouped the most notable ones together:

• You can Snooze notifications and have them appear at a later time so you can focus on the task at hand without forgetting whatever you’re getting notified about.                                                  
• Notification channels allow developers to essentially have different notification categories within their apps. For example, in a news app, users could choose to only receive notifications on specific topics. Users can also modify properties such as alert tones, priority and whether notifications show up on your lock screen for each notification channel.                                               
• Developers can set background colors to help differentiate their notifications from the crowd.                                                                                                                                                               
• Notification badges/dots are exactly what they sound like, a little badge telling you there are unread notifications in a particular app. Unlike iOS, however, Android O doesn’t tell you how many unread notifications you have – only that you have them. Instead, you can long-press on an app icon to view your unread notifications.

Thankfully, you can also turn off the feature altogether if, like me, you find notification badges to be more distraction than they’re worth.

• Messaging notifications can now show more text before you need to enter an app.

Smart Text Selection

We’ve all seen the basic text highlighting features, the copy/paste dialogue in Android, but now there’s more. With Android O, highlighting text includes further features, using Google AI to intelligently act on the words. For instance, if you highlight a phone number, you can just tap to dial. If you highlight an address, a single tap will start navigation. Best of all, highlighting is more intelligent itself, selecting phrases or full addresses, for example, instead of just single words.

Auto-Fill

For your most used apps on your device, Android O will help quickly log into services. The Auto-Fill feature needs to be coded in by the app devs, but once installed, Android O will remember your usernames, and in some cases your password, to quickly and easily jump into apps on your device.

Vitals

Android O will soon include features under the banner Vitals, including security tools, OS optimizations and tools for developers to better suite your device usage. At Google I/O 2017, the Android team announced Google Play Protect, think of it as a virus scanner for Android apps. So far, the team reports having scanned over 50 billion app installs every day. You’ll see an entry in your Google Play app update window, showing your most recent scan and if there were any issues found.

Optimizations in the OS have the team reporting that Pixel devices are booting up in nearly half the time as before. This speed bump goes for apps as well. Extensive changes to the runtime, including things like concurrent, compacting garbage collection and code locality, but in Google’s words, your apps just run faster. More on this later.

Wise Limits will apply to background services, preventing apps from running in the background for too long. The goal is to dramatically reduce battery consumption, keeping you up and running through your day.

Android Go

Android Go is Google’s new Android fork that promises smoother performance and lower data usage on affordable devices, particularly in developing nations. It’s basically a lighter version of Android O with several optimizations to the kernel and Google’s native Android apps. It also emphasizes power-optimized apps in the Play Store.

Android Go will be the default OS for any device with 1 GB of RAM or less, though it’s possible we’ll see it appear on devices with more memory in the future.

All Android apps that run on any ‘regular’ Android O device will also run on Android Go devices, barring of course any apps that may not be compatible with your hardware or not available in your region, something that’s the case even today with Android N (or earlier).

The Play Store on Go devices will contain the whole app catalog - no restrictions, unless the developer has a restriction, but the developer can do that today anyway, but no restrictions from Google on the apps.

In other words, the Google Play Store on Android Go devices will include all Android apps, not just apps optimized for Android Go devices. The latter will, however, be highlighted by Google prominently within the Play Store on Go devices, which might make it worth the developers’ time to optimize their apps if they want to target this audience.

Author : Prashant Pandey