On Monday, Google not only announced the release date of Android P, but the company also revealed the official name without a lot of fanfare that happened at the launch of Android 7 Nougat. Android P is officially called Android 9 Pie, and it has started to roll out to Pixel users yesterday.
Interestingly, this time Google tested its new powerful OS by rolling it out with a huge number of beta testers who signed up for the Android Beta program. This program lets the users try out pre-release versions of the software, and will also be receiving the update by the “end of this fall,” only if they are using devices from Sony Mobile, Xiaomi, HMD Global, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, and Essential.
Google also revealed that they are working with other partners to launch or upgrade devices with Android Pie “this year,” but the exact dates are yet to announced.
Social Champ will be covering all the important feature updates of the shiny new OS Update!
Adaptive Battery
As revealed in Google I/o 2018, Google partnered with DeepMind on a feature called Adaptive Battery that uses machine learning to prioritize system resources for the apps the user cares about most. Having said that, if your app is optimized for Doze, App Standby, and Background Limits, Adaptive Battery should work well for you right out of the box.
Adaptive Brightness
Talking about features that analyze the user’s usage patterns and adopt new settings, another interesting feature that Android 9 Pie brings is Adaptive Brightness, which learns how you like to set the brightness in different settings, and does it for you.
Slices
Slices are the snippets that can help users perform tasks faster by enabling engagement outside of the fullscreen app experience. It simply executes this by using UI templates from your app that can display rich, dynamic, and interactive content within the Google Search app and later in other places like the Google Assistant.
Furthermore, get to know more about building Slices to enhance your app here.
App Actions
App Actions is a new way to raise the visibility of your app and drive engagement. With Machine Learning b being utilized, Actions surface your app to the user at just the right time, based on your app’s semantic intents and the user’s context.
Text Classifier and Smart Linkify
Google has extended the ML models that identify entities in content or text input to support more types like Dates and Flight Numbers through enriched options for quick follow-on user actions.
New System Navigation
Android 9 Pie introduces new system navigation that Google has been working on for more than a year. This new gesture-design helps make Android’s multitasking more approachable, easy-to-navigate, and makes discovering apps much easier. Simply, swipe up from anywhere to access the new gesture-update, you can see full-screen previews of recently used apps and simply tap to jump back into one of them.
Notifications and Smart Reply
Android 9 Pie shows conversations, attaches photos and stickers, and can even suggest smart replies makes notifications even more useful, actionable, and more functional.
As for developers, they’ll soon be able to use ML Kit to generate smart reply suggestions for your app.
Text Magnifier
“In Android 9 Pie, Google has added a Magnifier widget, which lets users precisely position the cursor or the text selection handles by viewing zoomed text through a draggable panel”. The Magnifier widget can also provide a zoomed-in version of any view or surface, not just text. This will improve the user experience of selecting text.
Android Dashboard
This was one of the most awaited feature updates being discussed in Google I/O 2018, focusing on curbing phone addiction through its Wellbeing program. Although Google hasn’t launched this yet, interested Pixel owners can sign up to take part in the Digital Wellbeing beta. You’ll be needing a Pixel device running Android 9.0 Pie in order to take part.
Digital Well-being includes:
- Dashboard
- App Timer
- Wind Down
Coming to a Device Near You
Starting from 6th August 2018, an over-the-air update to Android 9 will begin rolling out to Pixel phones.
Now that Google has reached the official release, They’re bringing the Developer Preview to a close. They’ll soon be closing the Developer Preview issue tracker to new issues, so if you have feedback, feel free to file a new issue against Android 9 in the AOSP issue tracker.
