Android 11 has enough previews to date, as Google decides to unveil the official Android 11 Beta 1 today. Since February, Google let developers check the build-in preview modes and find out bugs to be solved. And, now it’s official to be given away to users like us. While you must be having the latest high-end phones to get this in the initial phase, know what it got until you receive it.
Google states the new Android OS is tuned to focus on three major categories, viz People, Controls, and Privacy. Let’s see what they meant;
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1. People
Conversation Notifications and Bubbles
Google wants you to notice and respond to important conversations immediately, and also access them easily. For this, it now lets you bring your top conversations up in the notification panel so that you notice the importance chats first.
Editor’s Pick: 5 most important features in Android 11
Further, now you can converse with you contacts in means of chat bubbles. This is same as Facebook’s Messenger Bubbles hovering on the screen, movable and closeable. Developers of any chat apps have to embed Bubble API to have this functionality.
Keyboard Suggestions and Voice Access
With every update, Android’s content autofill and input methods get smarter, as they now offer content specific strings, words, or emojis. These can be seen in auto-suggestions as in Messages, reply to phone calls, and filling text boxes on websites you visit.
And for those relying much on voice commands, now there’s an on-device visual cortex to understand screen content and suggest relevant labels and access points.
2. Device and Media Controls
This one’s highly useful if you’re having smart appliances in your home. This IoT related development will now let you control all of your smart appliances like doors, cameras, locks, lights etc from your phone! Users have to long-press the power button to see the Menu and control them.
Further, Google has polishes the Power button Menu with more options like setting Cards, where users can plant images like Bus cards, tickets, ID cards etc to be immediately accessible. Further, controlling Media is now easy and connecting to external devices is a breeze.
3. Privacy
As with moving time, companies like Google have to focus more on privacy and securing users data. For this, it will now auto-reset the permissions given to an app, that’s left unused for a long time. Users have to grant permissions again when they visit the app again.
Further, users can set a one-time-permission option to direct the app to ask for permissions like storage, microphone, camera etc every time they open the app. It has also mandated the developers to get approval for accessing the background location information of an app and is extending the time for them to make changes.
Doubling the System Updates
Google Play System Updates was launched last year to facilitate core OS updates to Androids, and now, the number of modules is increased to 12 with this update, which will focus on privacy, security, and consistency for users and developers.
While these features are dedicated to users, app developers have their update fate in Android 11. The developer options UI has a new UI with a toggle option for many changes. There’s a Platform Stability milestone where developers can check their APIs and behaviour of their apps’ stability before launching them formally. There are also changes made to Google Play Console, Kotlin Coroutines and Jetpack compose toolkit.
Android 11 was scheduled on June 4 this year but was postponed citing the nation-wide protests over unjust death of George Floyd. As Google wanted major talks to be happening around racism, it now announced the new Android 11 in a much more different way – through web pages and short videos. Learn more about the launch and everything else besides Android 11 here: Android Blog
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