Android O isn’t expected to be released to consumers until much later this year, but Google has already released the developer preview of it. Codenamed “O,” the most interesting changes coming to the next version of Android is the promise of better battery life as well as a revamped notification system.
According to Dave Burke, the Android VP of engineering, Android O has “additional automatic limits on what apps can do in the background, in three main areas: implicit broadcasts, background services, and location updates.” Basically, Google is making sure your battery life won’t be killed by background activities of apps, especially badly optimised ones.
Battery life has always been one area many smartphone makers struggle with. After all, in comparison to iOS’ battery optimisation, not many Android smartphones offer the same level of battery life with similar battery capacities. Hopefully, this issue will finally be addressed in Android O.
Another neat change coming to Android O are Notification Channels, which are “app-defined categories for notification content.” While this sounds rather vague, it will let users control the kind of notifications they want to receive, which should allow users to block certain notifications from any given app without actually blocking all of them from said app.
Burke emphasised that more features will be added to Android O in the coming months, and we’ll likely learn more about the new version of Android at Google I/O in May 2017. If you’d like to know more about what’s coming in Android O, you can do so here.
(Source: Android Developers Blog via The Verge)
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