It is just about a year ago when Google announced the launch of Android Nougat. And this year in March Google launched the first developer preview build of the next major Android Operating system the Android O and later on Google releases the second developer preview of Android O at Google I/O conference 2017 last month.
A major difference between the Android N and O previews is that Google made over-the-air updates of Android N that is available to anyone who is willing to give it a shot. This time around, it has not launched the new release directly into the Android Beta Channel. Despite that the developers own Nexus 5X, Pixel XL, Nexus Player, or Pixel C device, they have to download and flash their devices manually.
As far as new features of Android O are concerned, following are the top 6 features that were announced at the launch of Android O developer preview 2 at Google I/O 2017.
1- Fluid Experiences
It won’t be wrong saying that fluid experiences are Google’s way of helping you to be more productive and make the most of the multitasking tools in your everyday use. Google’s machine learning tool, TensorFlow introduced its new scaled-down version called TensorFlow Lite. It is used to keep up the lower-powered devices with today’s demanding processes.
With the use of techniques like LSTM, TensorFlow Lite improves its users’ experience. Android O has a new framework that helps to keep some AI components on the device, hardware accelerates the neural network features, and avoid the need of finding an online service that may compute actions on text selections and more likely things.
2- Notification Dots
Many users of custom Launcher are already aware of a notification’s icon power on top of an app icon. Android O will make its users see a small dot that appears on top of application icons that show active notifications.
It is where the magic of Android O starts, when you long-press the app icon showing notification dot, it gets you a shortlist of immediate actions that you may perform. It also includes the viewing of notification in a tiny pop-up window.
3- Picture-in-Picture
Google has added a picture-in-picture mode to Android O. now, you can just tap the home button with even a YouTube video playing, and the video would pop into a small window while you can navigate through other apps on the device. You can slide that video around for your best place, and then similarly slide to terminate it off the screen. Now, the features are available in the Android O Beta.
4- Smart Text Selection
You would have seen the basic feature of text highlighting; in another sense, the copy/paste dialogue in Android. But now there is much more. The feature of highlighting text has been modified with Android O that you can use Google AI to act on the words intelligently.
For example, it allows you to tap to dial if highlighted a phone number, and a single tap starts navigation if an address is highlighted. Most of all, it has made highlighting more intelligent itself; like it selects the whole phrase or address rather than just a single word.
5- Auto-Fill
For the most frequently used apps on your device, Android O helps to log into the services quickly. The app devs must code in the feature of Auto-Fill, but once it is installed, Android O remembers your usernames and also password in some cases. Such a feature helps you jump into apps on your device easily and quickly.
6- Vitals
Who doesn’t want a better battery life? Android O includes an excellent feature under the banner of Vitals, which further offers security tools, OS optimization as well as tools for developers to better suit their device usage.
Optimization in the OS has a team reporting that the Pixel devices boot up in hardly half the time as before. Such speed bump goes for apps too. The prominent difference in the runtime includes things concurrent and compacting code locality and garbage collection. But in Google’s language, your app just runs much faster, and more later on.
Conclusion
From all the above discussion what we see so far is that Android O has shaped up a lot to follow the Nougat’s footsteps. It is completing some of the work that Nougat has started and more empowering the granular nature of control in Android.
User-facing notification has become a way better than ever before. Also, Android is intending to take more aggressive actions against the apps which treat valuable system resources with recklessness.
