Tech brief

Five surprising things we learned about Android 11

The 4GB size limit for video recording has been removed

For a long time, Android has had a file size limit of 4GB whenever you record a video. That wasn’t so bad when you were shooting a low-bitrate 1080p video and saving it to an SD card that couldn’t process files larger than 4GB anyway. But with 4K capable cameras, it meant that even a 15-minute video would be chopped into more than one file because it’s too big.

With Android 11, that’s all a thing of the past as the software classes and APIs that write media has been moved to use a 64-bit file size versus the original 32-bit. That means the theoretical maximum size is about 2,305,843,009 ((2^64)-1) Gigabytes.

Android 11 has a hidden Recycle Bin

If you’ve ever used Google Photos, you might know that deleting a photo or a video doesn’t destroy it right away. Instead, there is a “Trash” folder that stores them for 30 days just in case you change your mind. It works the same way the Recycle Bin on a computer does, and now a similar feature is part of Android.

Apps that use the MediaStore API have three new features at their disposal with Android 11 – they can ask if you want to send a media file to the trash, mark it as being in the trash, and set an amount of time before it’s deleted permanently. There’s a systemwide limit of 30 days for storing “trashed” media.

Android 11 natively supports 84 new game controllers

Your Android phone can connect to a game controller that not only works as a gaming controller should but also as a weird sort of mouse if you’d rather not touch the screen. The problem is that there are so many good controllers out there that just don’t work properly with Android, so the consensus has always been to just buy an Xbox or PlayStation controller. That changes with Android 11, as there are 84 new controllers with out of the box support.

Voice Access can now understand what is displayed on your screen

Android Voice Access is an accessibility feature that allows a person to operate their phone by speech. Before Android 11, you had to tell Voice Access to do things like move down or move left to shift a virtual cursor to the different controls of an app, and that got very complicated very quickly.

With Android 11, Voice Access “just works” most of the time, and when you meet up with one of those times where it doesn’t, you can move directly to a control by number without the app losing track of the rest of what it can understand.

Android 11 forces apps to support being backed-up

Apps targeting Android 11 are forced to support a local storage backup, but not a Google Cloud Storage backup. Android already offers a complete backup infrastructure. Hidden in your Google Drive account is free storage space that gives every app its own 25MB of space to store things like settings or game progress data. But there’s another backup that can be done through ADB (Android Debug Bridge; a way for a computer and your phone to communicate) that locally creates a backup and saves it to your computer. The thing is, developers didn’t have to support it. In Android, 11 backup files will actually work. Don’t get too overjoyed though – apps must target Android 11, and we all know how that will play out.