Yesterday, Google detailed some of the enhancements it’s adding to its Android operating system courtesy of Android P.
On the surface, 9.0 sees the company continue the job of refining an operating system that officially turns 10 later this year. Dig deeper, however, and P is likely one the most significant updates to Android in recent years. With the addition of gestures and an activity dashboard, the search giant plans to change, in a major way, how we interact with the world’s most popular mobile OS.
But forget for a moment about gestures, Slices, adaptive settings and the like, because Android P includes a host of other, smaller enhancements. In a developer-focused session called ‘What’s New in Android,’ the company’s Chet Haase, Dan Sandler and Romain Guy detailed some of those features.
Privacy
If there was a through-line during the “What’s New in Android” sessions, it was privacy.
Haase, Sandler and Guy used the session to emphasis the new privacy-related features that Google is adding to Android with 9.0; in fact, the three men joked that the P in Android P stands for privacy.
Once the OS is available to consumers, idling apps won’t be able to access either a device’s microphone or camera. Additionally, Google is limiting how much information apps working in the background can pull from the other sensors on your smartphone.
The company also stressed that it doesn’t want to see developers finding creative ways to circumvent Android’s new privacy guidelines. For example, in the past some apps would produce a white noise so that the operating system would treat them as an active app. “Don’t do that,” said Guy.
Other smaller, more security-focused features that will ship with P include an API that will allow developers to leverage the same consistent interface for biometric authentication, which in turn will help create a more unified interface for users.
Battery Life
Another major focus of the session was battery life. Here Google’s Chet Haase joked that all smartphone users are power users. To that end, the company plans to continue iterating on the battery-related features that were a major focus with Marshmallow and Oreo.
Specifically, Android P features a better system of “app standby buckets” for making decisions on when apps can access Android’s alarm, network and messaging features. Typically, these are some of the tasks that drain the battery the most on an Android device.
In addition, the operating system will do a better job of exposing apps that are behaving badly to the user, so that the user can then take action.
Display Notches
Google didn’t talk about display notches — seemingly everyone’s favourite topic these last couple of months — during the main keynote, but they were a major focus of the subsequent Android session.
In short, developers will have a variety of options when it comes to how their apps can handle display notices. Here, the presenters called on the cosmic brain meme to detail notched-related APIs Google is shipping with P. On the small brain side of things, for instance, developers will be able to mask the notch.
Based on just how much time and thought Google has clearly invested in thinking about how Android should handle notches, I think it’s safe to say at least one of the new Pixels will feature a display notch. Alternatively, the company expects even more third-party Android OEMs to add display notches to their upcoming devices.
There were a couple of other smaller — but still notable — tidbits shared during the session:
- Starting in August 2019, Google will require all developers to ship 64-bit apps (they’ll still have the option to continue to supporting 32-bit)
- Android P will include built-in support for HDR VP9.
- Moving forward, Android developers will be able to work on their apps in Chrome OS.
- You’ll be able to use USB cameras with Android. The team doing the presentation joked they weren’t sure why devs were asking for this feature, but the Android team went ahead and added it anyway.
As Google continues to work towards an official release of Android P, it’s likely we’ll see the company detail all of 9.0 features in more detail.
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