It’s been just about a year since Google unexpectedly announced the first preview of Android Nougat. Today, the company is launching the first developer..
It’s been just about a year since Google unexpectedly announced the first preview of Android Nougat. Today, the company is launching the first developer preview of the next version of its mobile operating system, currently code-named Android O (but we’re really hoping it’ll become Android Oreo once it’s released).
One major difference between the early Android N and O previews is that Google immediately made over-the-air updates of Android N available to anybody who wanted to give it a try (and those early releases were surprisingly stable and functional). This time around, it’s not launching the new release into the Android Beta channel right away. Instead, developers who own a Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, Pixel, Pixel XL or Pixel C device (or want to use the emulator) will have to manually download and flash their devices. After a bit more testing with developers, Google will open enrollment into O through Android Beta.
“For this release, we wanted to focus on giving developers time to test for compatibility, explore new features and send feedback which will help make Android O a great platform,” a Google spokesperson told me when I asked why the company wasn’t releasing this version in the Android Beta channel.
As far as new features go, Android O is likely to be a bit of a letdown for many. At least for now, we’re not talking about a major UI refresh, for example. Instead, Google continues to tweak many of the operating system’s core features. Here are a few of the most interesting updates:
Notifications: Android O is adding a new feature called notification channels. As far as we can tell, this will give developers the ability to group notifications from their apps into groups (say you have a news app and want to group notifications by “politics” or “technology”). Users will then be able to manage those notifications based on those channels (which I think means that I’ll hopefully never have to get a notification from The New York Times about a sports event again).
Picture in Picture: Android O video apps will be able to put themselves into a Picture in Picture mode so that video will still play after you switch to a different app (similar to what YouTube does when you press the back button while you watch a video).
