Today, Google launches the developer build of its upcoming mobile operating system, code-named Android O.
Developers who own a Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus, Pixel, Pixel C or Pixel C (or want to use a simulator) device can download and flash devices instead. Google will open enrollment into O through Android Beta after doing a little bit testing with developers.
Android O is in the Android Beta channel. Google wants to focus on giving developers time to test compatibility, discover new features, and send feedback to make Android O a good platform.
In this launch, Google added a new feature called notification channels. This means that developers can group messages from their applications into groups so users can manage messages based on those channels. Besides, Android O also comes with Picture-in-Picture mode, allowing you to you’re your videos while browsing through other apps (just like YouTube did when it hit back while watching a video).
Multi-display support is one of the exciting features and one of many new features that seem to target Android devices on Chrome OS. So, developers can launch an activity on a remote screen. Keyboard navigation is a feature for Android Apps on Chrome OS and will allow developers to better support arrow, tab navigation in their apps. Google says the launch of Android Apps on Chrome OS and other great form is showing a resurgence of using keyboard navigation right within Android applications.
Recently, Android O has focused on improving battery life by setting automatic limits on what an application can do in the background. This automatic limit focuses on: latent broadcast, background service, and location updates. Android O is adding support for new Wi-Fi with some new (relatively) connectivity features. The updated operating system will support many Wi-Fi Aware features such as Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN) that make it easy for applications and devices to talk to each other without a central internet access point.
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Android O makes it easier to make phone calls to talk to each other and make calls through carrier network Developers can use the new telecommunications framework to build a separate user interface for placing calls and calls will be displayed and controllable via Bluetooth devices with display in your car.
Others features include adaptive icons, support for rich color display, support for high quality Bluetooth audio codecs, new audio APIs, better font support, and improved WebView with multi-mode enabled by default. Android O will support some new Java language APIs and speed up the Android runtime.