Today I’ll Discuss about 24 New Features of Android P Developers Preview 1, But Before we continue first of all we’ll through some light on background. Last Year I was posted at same website in which I was Disclosed Name of Android’s New Version after Android O, when it was in its very early development phases.
In the early days of Android P Development, Google made the first SDK available as a preview to developers Known as Android P DP1 at 7th March, Whereas it was to be available for Developers in the Mid of March, as stated by their Developer Preview and Final release chart.
The vibrant developer ecosystem and open platform have been important keys to Google’s success, which is why I’m excited to tell you that Google once again giving developers a very early preview of some of what’s in store.
As Stated earlier it is Just a Developers Preview and not the full and final release so Android DP1 is initially targeting Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, as well as Android Emulator, So be conscious before installing Android P DP1 on any device, please check its targeting devices and make sure your device is one among those listed.
In the upcoming version of Android, Android P your early feedback is crucial to Google’s efforts to push the boundaries of mobile development.
1. JobScheduler Network Updates.
In Android P jobScheduler has been improved to let it better handle network related jobs.
Jobs can now declare their estimated data size, signal prefetching and specify detailed network requirements. For example when a network was reported by the carrier is being congested job scheduler might defer large Network requests, while it can take advantage of surplus metered capacity to run a prefetch job that returns content that will substantially improve the apps, user experience, such as prefetching top headlines.
2. Improving Apps Performance
Android P brings performance and efficiency improvements to art Androids runtime. Google Team expanded arts use of execution profiles to optimize apps and reduce the in-memory footprint of a compiled app code.
Art now uses profile information for on device rewriting of Dex files with reductions of up to 11%, across a range of popular apps these correlate closely with reductions in system Dex memory usage and faster startup times.
3. Kotlin Compiler
Kotlin is seeing massive growth in the developer community. we have heard so much, Kotlin love from developers and google Team deepening their Kotlin investments. In P. You’ll see the first results of Google platform work, with new optimizations, In art out – written with Kotlin will run faster on P than on previous versions of Android.
Google continuing to work with JetBrains to optimize the Kotlin compiler and Google Team also improving Their brand new dax-ur to make sure generated code from Kotlin can run as fast as possible. Also make sure to check out Google’s ongoing preview of android KTX which is a set of extensions designed to make android Kotlin development even more concise and pleasant.
4. Introducing ImageDecoder
Android introduces an easier way to decode images to either bitmaps or drawables with image decoder, which replaces bitmap factory.
Image decoder election create a bitmap or drawable from a byte buffer, file or URI. It offers several advantages over bitmap factory including support for exact scaling, single step decoding to hardware memory, support for post-processing to code and decoding of animated images.
5. Animation
Android P introduces a new AnimatedImageDrawable class for drawing and displaying GIF and WebP animated images. AnimatedImageDrawable works similarly to AnimatedVectorDrawable in that RenderThread drives the animations of AnimatedImageDrawable. RenderThread also uses a worker thread to decode, so that decoding does not interfere with RenderThread. This implementation allows your app to have an animated image without managing its updates or interfering with your app’s UI thread.
Image decoder allows you to supply a callback that is called after the header is decoded where you can alter the output rather than having decode to head. Their twice decode drawable allows you to create drawables directly. The encoded image is an animated gif or web Page. The drawable will be an instance of the new animated image drawable
6. HDR VP9 Video
To help deliver the highest quality viewing experience, Android P adds built-in support for HDR VP9 profile – enabling the delivery of HDR enabled movies. Team Google Android P also added support for a substantially improved image compression with HAV C compressed a gif images, which means smaller downloads and less on device storage.
Google Team is in the process of enhancing and refactoring the media API’s so stay tuned. . .
7. Dual Camera Support for Apps
You can access streams, simultaneously from devices that have logical cameras consisting of multiple physical devices, such as dual front or dual rear cameras enabling new app possibilities.
Other improvements in camera include new session parameters to reduce delays during initial capture and surface sharing reducing the need for camera clients to stop and start camera streaming.
8. OIS and Display-Based Flash
Android P also added api’s for display based flash support and access to OIS timestamps to allow apps to perform image stabilization or use this data for special effects.
9. Indoor Positioning Support
Android P has an API for the IEEE 802.11mc Wi-Fi protocol, also known as Wi-Fi round-trip time RTT. To let you take advantage of indoor positioning in your apps.
Android P devices with hardware support can use RTT to let you measure the distance to a nearby Wi-Fi access point that supports the protocol.
The device doesn’t need to connect to the AP to use RT T and to maintain privacy only With Android P The phone is able to determine the distance by measuring distances to three or more access points. Apps can calculate the position with an accuracy of one to two meters
10. Enable Smart Card Payments & Other Services
Android P as an implementation of the global platform Open Mobile API to Android.
On supported devices apps can use O map ensure to access NFC secure elements on Android devices, to enable smart card payments and other secure services.
11. Neural Network API 1.1 New Ops
The neural networks API was introduced in Android 8.1 to provide support for accelerated on device machine learning, Android P expanding and approving the API adding support for nine new Ops(Pad, BatchToSpaceND, SpaceToBatchND, Transpose, Strided Slice, Mean, Div, Sub, and Squeeze) on pixel to the DP. One build includes an accelerated driver for quantized models.
Android P is part of Google’s longer-term initiative to modernize the foundations of the platform and the apps that run on it.
Team Google announced recently that Google Play will require all Ops updates to at least targeted Android Oreo by November 2018 and require ops to the NDK library to provide 64-bit support In 2019. In line with these changes and repeat will warn users with the dialog when they install an ops that targets an Android platform earlier than Android 4.2 and future versions will continue to increment that limit.
12. Developers Must Use API 26 Now
Every Android developer should start planning to migrate to target, at least API 26 now. And Team Google built the checklist of resources to help and support this efforts.
13. NO TRESPASSING
Google Android Team always looking for ways to improve the user and developer experience. In this spirit we’re working to ensure that apps don’t use non SDK interfaces since doing so risks crashes for users and emergency rollouts for developers in Android and they restricted the set of symbols at NDK code could use and with Android P or further increasing stability by expanding these restrictions to cover the SDK interfaces as well in the preview.
you’ll see a warning when you use a non SDK interface that team google plan to restrict. If you feel that you’ll need the SDK API expanded to stop using non SDK ones, please let us know as soon as you can via our bug tracker.
14. Introducing FingerprintDialog,
Android P providing a standard system dialog to prompt the user to touch the fingerprint sensor, managing text and placement as appropriate for the device. Apps can trigger the system fingerprint dialog using a new fingerprint dialog API.
Google Android P Team recommend switching to the new system dialog as soon as possible. As the previous API may not be compatible with new devices.
15. Network Security Configuration
As part of a larger effort to move all network traffic away from clear text unencrypted HTTP to TLS. They are also changing the defaults or network security configuration to block all clear text traffic.
In Android P and higher after the network security configuration must make connections over TLS, Unless they explicitly opt in to clear text for specific domains.
16. Ensure User Privacy.
Stop Access of Microphone, Camera and Other Sensors from Idle Apps.
To better ensure user privacy Android P restricts all access to microphones cameras and sensors from idle apps. When an app is idle the mic will report empty audio and the sensors will stop reporting events, while camera is used by the app will be disconnected and generate airs, If the app tries to use them
17. Serial Number Identifier
Android P gives the user control of our access to the builtin Serial identifier by putting it under the read phone state permission. Direct access to this identifier has been deprecated since Android O.
18. Edge to Edge Display Support.
Android P adds platform support for edge to edge displays with cutouts. The status bar will adapt its height automatically
Asked with critical immersive content can use a new platform API in window in sets to get the cutout balance and a new API in the window manager layout params to request layout in the cutout area.
19. Notifications
Android P introduces several enhancements to notifications, all of which are available to developers targeting Android P and above.
19.1 Updated Messaging Style
The updated messaging style notification makes it easier to display notifications involving people or groups of people.
It provides a standardized way to handle images and handle suggested replies.
19.2 Channel settings, broadcasts, and Do Not Disturb
Android P simplifies notification channel settings by
- Blocking channel groups
- New broadcast intent types
- New Do Not Disturb priority categories
20. Emulator
Speaking of the emulator, it’s a great place to test or develop on Android P. It’s incredibly fast and convenient to use and you can even model long screens and screens with the display cut out for cameras and sensors.
After you’ve tested handle any P Behavior changes. Make any necessary updates and publish to Google Play without changing the platform target, Then change your apps targeting to P and run it with the full Android P Experience. explore the many new features in API’s you can take advantage of your app. Take a look at the API differ port along with the Android P API reference, you can start building with P by downloading the developer preview SDK and tools in Android studio.
21. Autofill framework
Android P introduces multiple improvements that autofill services can implement to further enhance the user experience when filling out forms. Earlier Autofill Framework was introduced first in Android 8.0 (API level 26) introduced the autofill framework, which makes it easier to fill out forms in apps.
22. Client-side encryption of Android backups
Android P enables encryption of Android backups with a client-side secret. Because of this privacy measure, the device’s PIN, pattern, or password is required to restore data from the backups made by the user’s device. To learn more about the technology behind this new feature, see the Google Cloud Key Vault Service whitepaper.
To learn more about backing up data on Android devices, see Data Backup Overview.
23. Accessibility
Accessibility is an important part of any app. Whether you’re developing a new app or improving an existing one, ensure that components are accessible.
Android P introduces several actions, attributes, and methods to make it easier for you to work with the accessibility framework in order to enhance accessibility services for users.
24. Screen Rotation(Portrait, Landscape)
Users in Android O can toggle between auto-rotate and portrait rotation modes using a Quicksettings tile or Display settings.
To eliminate unintentional rotations, Android P added a new mode that pins the current orientation even if the device position changes. Users can trigger rotation manually when needed by pressing a new button in the system bar.
In Android P there are significant changes to the portrait rotation mode. The portrait mode has been renamed rotation lock and it is active when auto-rotate is toggled off. There are no changes to auto-rotate mode.
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Google Android P also releasing an album version of the 28000 support library for you to try, check out the release notes for complete details. They plan to update the preview system images and SDK regularly. This initial release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use so, Google Android P making it available by manual download and flash only as They get closer to a final product, They’ll be inviting consumers to try it out as well and they’ll open up enroll Android beta at that time,
Give your users a seamless transition to Android P. Just download a device or emulator system image install your app and test the Android P Developer Preview includes an updated SDK with system images for testing on the official Android emulator and on Pixel, Pixel XL, pixel 2 and pixel 2 XL devices.
Stay tuned and write down your feedback in bellow comments section, as your feedback is always very important for us. . .