Google released a developer version of Android O, and here are some of our favorite features and why you should actually care.
An early version of Android O was released to developers with some potentially cool features.
It’s a fun day when the developer preview for an upcoming operating system is released. Whether you’re a developer or not you get a sneak peek at upcoming features that may soon be coming to your phone.
Google released Tuesday the developer version of its next Android OS currently called just O. Some of O’s most exciting features are better battery life, easier controls for notifications and picture-in-picture video for both phones and tablets. There’s no guarantee all these features will be in the full release some time later this year.
Improving the battery life is one of the biggest and most welcomed features of Android O. Similar to iOS, Android O will limit and manage what apps do in the background while multiple apps are open.
This is one of those “behind the curtain” features that you’ll appreciate even if you can’t see exactly how it works. For example, if you are using Instagram but have Google Maps open in the background, location services will update the location less frequently for Maps to keep it from draining your battery as fast.
Notifications have always been one of the perennial strong features of Android. In O, you can group your notifications into channels or as Google describes it: “app-defined categories for notification content”. So if you had a channel of apps that are all “news” related, you could interact and control notification settings for all the apps in the news channel at once.
