Following the pattern which Google started with Android Nougat last year, the search engine giant has rolled out the developer preview for the next version of Android – Android O yesterday. The new update is only available for developers to test out, and we expect it to be a lot more unstable at the moment. However, Google will roll out the about four developer previews in future before the official stable release sometime in Q3 2017.
Well, we are not sure about the name yet, as Google has been very surprising in the past when it comes to Android names so it’s better to leave this question for later. Coming back to the new Android O developer preview, Google is largely trying to build on what it started with Android Nougat last year i.e. Battery. After improving Doze last year, Google seems to have included an advanced version of Background limits which will aggressively manage apps running in the background and hence, saving some juice for users. Explaining the process, Dave Burke (Android VP of engineering) said – “We’ve put additional automatic limits on what apps can do in the background, in three main areas: implicit broadcasts, background services, and location updates.”
We are too early in the process to comment on the possibilities of this new feature and hopefully, Android can go head-to-head with iOS this year, when it comes to battery management.
Another visible change in Android O is more control on the Notifications which pops up in the notification panel. Multiple notifications from the same App will be clubbed and users can actually customise how they want to see the notifications based on app preferences. Besides, the first version of Android O developer preview also introduces something called – Adaptive Icons, which basically makes the icon of any third party app to look like the stock Pixel launcher apps. Google is also working on something called ‘Picture-in-Picture’ mode which lets you watch a video or any other content from a particular app in a pop-up window while simultaneously navigating around other apps on your device. Apart from this, the new Android version brings a lot more changes baked into the OS which will hopefully bring some significant performance improvements in future.