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Google Android

Android O First Developer Preview Featuring Notification Channels, Background Limits Now Available (googleblog.com) 64

A year after Google released the Android N Developer Preview, the company has made available the developer preview of the next major version of Android, "Android O." You will not want to put it on your primary Android smartphone as the preview is likely to have rough edges. Google says as much. "it's early days, there are more features coming, and there's still plenty of stabilization and performance work ahead of us. But it's booting :)."

The company is using the developer preview to give beta testers a sneak peek into some new features, such as "notification channels," which will offer users the ability to group notifications. There is also Picture in Picture, which will enable you to have a video appear in a small window on top of homescreen or any application. Google is also adding "multi-display support" and improved "keyboard navigation." Your guess is as good as mine as to what these features will actually do. There's also better "background limits" which will supposedly help save battery, and wider Wi-Fi support to include things like Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN).

No word on what "O" in Android O stands for.
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Android O First Developer Preview Featuring Notification Channels, Background Limits Now Available

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  • I switched away from Android a while ago, mainly because I could not control permissions individually per app. E.g., I couldn't install a news app and just deny access to my location - I could say yes to all permissions and install, or no to all permissions and skip installation. Will that be addressed?
    • by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @02:27PM (#54083567) Journal

      Since Android 6 apps install with no/limited permission, the first time it wants your location (or to access your camera, a file etc) a pop-up from the OS asks to grant it.

      I like that feature because it allows me to see why the app needs this or that permission.

    • by hvdh ( 1447205 )

      With root, you can install "XPosed framework" and "XPrivacy". This allows fine-grained control per app for lots of rights.

  • Well .... O for Android Oreo seems fitting.
  • Color Management was introduced in Microsoft Windows... 95! And yet, here we are in 2017, and it is FINALLY being added to Android!? HOLYSHIT, Been seriously waiting YEARS for this. Now if only Apple could get their head out of their ass and support it in iOS too...

    • by Desler ( 1608317 )

      The fuck are you talking about? iOS already has color management.

    • Color Management was introduced in Microsoft Windows... 95!

      Wow you are claiming Windows as some colour management success? WTF are you smoking? I'm looking at you right now on a hyper saturated display simply because Windows colour management is a joke. Windows provides an API for telling apps what colour profiles they may use, and then leave it 100% up to the app to implement, often poorly. Window's own APIs are a joke compared to those even in basic photography apps doing a horrible job of perceptual conversion.

      You say colour management was introduced in Windows

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        OK. I'll say color management was introduced on the Apple ][.

        OTOH, this is a really stupid argument. Names are just names, and two guys named Harry can be quite different, yet both really named Harry. I don't know what the MSWind color management system is like, or what the Android color management system is like, but even if they're quite different they can both reasonably be called by the same name if they do *something* having to do with managing colors.

        • but even if they're quite different they can both reasonably be called by the same name if they do *something* having to do with managing colors.

          Which means that Android could be introducing a new paradigm that was never seen before (e.g. the still non-existent universal colour management on the OS level). Which makes it a bit silly to compare it to anything if your scope is so large.

          Point is the same. The colour management as introduced in BOTH Apple ][ and Windows 95 is nothing that could reasonably be called colour management. Hell both systems were unable to cope with screens being attached from each other thanks to the standard gamma difference

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Apple probably doesn't need it as much, whether they have it or not.
      There is a limited number of different iOS devices, all of them LCDs, and app developers could target them all individually if required.

      Contrast to the thousands of Android devices, going from black-and-white screens to hypersaturated AMOLEDs...

  • how about being able to cast to your TV and still have a screen on your phone to control video? or whatever?

  • Google is also adding "multi-display support" and improved "keyboard navigation." Your guess is as good as mine as to what these features will actually do.

    My guess is that former adds support for multiple displays and the latter improves the navigation of the keyboard.

  • The O stands for Observation

  • I wonder why Android can't have some bigger improvements to it. Google has a lot of developer resources, and some items added might make it a lot more developer and enterprise friendly:

    A hypervisor comes to mind, so Android can have a VM for work, a VM for home, etc. This is especially useful with dual-SIM phones, or a phone using the SIM for one VM, and Google Voice for another.

    A filesystem like APFS with deduplication, bit rot protection, encryption provisions on a block level, and other items.

    A way to

  • Are we getting zram configured with swap device size = 4x RAM, mem_limit = 50% RAM, vm.swappiness = 100? That will give effective doubling of RAM for approximately no performance hit.

    've not found the performance asymptote yet. The crude theoretical limit is exchanging 100% of working RAM for 3x the compressed space (100% compressed to an average 3:1, although 4:1 happens sometimes--typically you average 3:1). The frequency of page decompression increases as you reduce the working RAM (the part not ho

  • No word on what "O" in Android O stands for.

    My money's on "Ovaltine", which is both in keeping with their naming scheme and a fun reminder of A Christmas Story.

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