UPCOMING ANDROID "O"

On March 21, 2017, Google released the first developer preview of Android "O", available for the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, Pixel C, and Pixel smartphone devices. Google will release a total of four developer previews; the second, now considered beta quality, was released May 17, 2017, followed by further previews in June and July. A final, official release is scheduled for the third quarter of 2017.

DP3, which finalizes the release's API to API level 26, was released June 8, 2017. DP3 also changed the camera UI, reverted the Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity levels in the status bar back to Wi-Fi left, added themed notifications, added a battery animation in Settings: Battery, a new icon and darker background for the Clock app, and a teardrop icon shape for apps.

Features

User experience

Notifications can be snoozed, and batched into topic-based groups known as "channels". Android "O" contains integrated support for picture-in-picture modes. Adding a custom ringtone, alarm or notification sound is simplified.The "Settings" app features a new design, with a white theme and deeper categorization of different settings.

Platform

Android "O" will add support for Neighborhood Aware Networking (NAN) for Wi-Fi based on Wi-Fi Aware, wide color gamuts in apps, an APIfor autofillers, multiprocess and Google Safe Browsing support for WebViews, an API to allow system-level integration for VoIP apps, and launching activities on remote displays. Android Runtime (ART) features performance improvements. Android "O" contains additional limits on apps' background activities in order to improve battery life. Apps can specify "adaptive icons" for differently-shaped containers specified by themes, such as circles, squares, and squircles.

Android "O" supports new emoji that will be included in the Unicode 10 standard. A new emoji font was also introduced, which notably redesigns its face figures to use a traditional circular shape, as opposed to the "blob" design that was introduced on Android "KitKat".

The underlying architecture of Android is being revised so that low-level, vendor-specific code for supporting a device's hardware will be separated from the Android OS framework using a hardware abstraction layer known as the "vendor interface". Vendor interfaces will be required to beforward compatible with future versions of Android; due to these changes, OEMs will only need to perform their necessary modifications to the OS framework and bundled apps to update a device to a future version of Android, while maintaining the same vendor interface.

The operating system will offer a tailored distribution for low-end devices known as Android Go, which will be used on all devices with 1 GB of RAM or less. These devices will ship with platform optimizations designed to reduce mobile data usage (including enabling Data Saver mode by default), and a special suite of Google Mobile Services designed to be less resource- and bandwidth-intensive (such as YouTube Go). Google Play Store will also highlight lightweight apps suited for these devices.