The demand for Android developers has been increasingly steadily in recent years. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a highly intuitive platform to streamline the development of Android applications – until recently. Google has made a major announcement that is going to lead to some impressive changes.
The first developer version of the upcoming Android operating system arrived earlier than expected. The ‘developer preview’, which was expected in March, arrived on Tuesday 19th February.
In a post on its official blog, Google detailed the areas on which this new system will be focused.
According to the company, this new version of Android will have an important focus on privacy.
On the one hand, Google foresees greater controls for business devices. That is, if it is a company’s phone, there will be more facilities to divide the working life of the employee’s staff.
For example, the employer may ensure that employees are unable to install video streaming applications that consume large amounts of company-subsidized cellular data, but the employer will not have visibility into which of the permitted applications employees choose to install and use.
In that sense, there are limits, but there is also privacy, by restricting the visibility that the internal support or technology teams in the companies have of the use of the applications and personal data.
What’s New
The system will also cater to more screen shapes by giving in to the trend of recent years than smartphone manufacturers who have implemented waterfall type screens (which have degrees of tilt at the edges and curved screens).
Google also announced that it will continue working on image decoding, a segment in which its Google Stadia service would increasingly seek to optimize the downloading and transmission of video. It would also bring improvements for example for bokeh effects (which blur the background of a photograph).
In addition to including biometric protection features, Google would add options to help users take control and manage access to confidential data and files within the terminals.
Another feature of the operating system relates to access to internal storage. In this version, it will be possible to limit the ability of applications to access files, especially if they are not essential to their operation.
Although this proposal was already present in Android 10, with the new version you will be able to establish even stricter limitations.
Among other trends, Android 11 will be Google’s step towards the newest thing on the market: 5G and folding phones, two technological developments that have been adopted in countries such as South Korea since 2019.
Android Developers
?AndroidDev – We’re excited to share the first Developer Preview of #Android11 with:
? Stronger user privacy protections
? Bubbles, Pinhole, and waterfall screens
? Native image decoder and camera features
? Biometrics
? 5G and foldables
You can read the post here ? https://goo.gle/android11-developer-preview-1 …
The preliminary version, which is called ‘Android R’ for now, will be the successor to Android Q (version 10). For a generation, Android abandoned the fun trend of naming their operating systems as candy, being the predecessors: Android Pie, Oreo, Nougat, Marshmallow, Lollipop or KitKat, among others.
By releasing this ‘first look’ Google hopes that over the months the feedback from the community will allow to strengthen the new system as usual. This is a “basic initial compilation for developers only and is not intended for daily use or for the consumer user, so we are making it available only by manual download and flash”.
For now, the preview is available for the brand’s terminals: Pixel 2, Pixel 3, 3a and Pixel 4, which are usually the first to receive such updates.
In the coming months, Google will be releasing beta versions for developers and specialized testers, but these versions.