Google releases Android O and aims to improve battery life
While you might be waiting to test your apps on Android Nougat, Google has moved a step ahead and released the first developer preview of Android O. The focus of the new open source project is supposedly to improve battery life and enhance performance on compatible devices.
Battery life is one big concern on Android devices. Though Android engineers at Google had tried to fix various bugs on its Lollipop, Marshmallow and the recent Nougat versions, the issue persists — on almost all the smartphones and tablets.
But with Android O, the Sunder Pichai-led team is planning to deliver a better experience by enabling some automatic limits on apps running in the background. This advances the power optimisation that was a part of the Nougat release last year.
“Building on the work we began in Nougat, Android O places a big priority on improving a user’s battery life and a device’s interactive performance. To make this possible, we have put additional automatic limits on what apps can do in the background, in three main areas — implicit broadcasts, background services and location updates,” explains Dave Burke, vice president of engineering at Google, in a blog post.
The latest changes supposedly enable apps to have minimal impact on the hardware and this enhances the battery life.
Developers are recommended to learn the tweaks to make their apps compatible with the new background limits. Google has already got documentation ready on background execution limits and background location limits to make things easier for app makers.
Alongside the enhancements to improve battery life, Android O is all about an
upgraded experience. There are new notification channels that work to enable appdefined categories for notification content. The operating system also works with autofill APIs to add login details and repetitive information automatically to certain forms.
The Android O additionally includes some root-level changes to improve the existing user experience. There are font resources in XML as well as adaptive icons and a wide gamut of colour capabilities for apps.
Google has also provided a large number of Java 8 language APIs and runtime optimisations to take on other mobile platforms including iOS. You can download the very first Android O Developer Preview on your Nexus or Pixel device. The new version comes with an updated SDK to make development even easier. Moreover, an emulator has been specifically designed to test Android Wear 2.0 apps on Android O.
A manual download and Flash is currently the only available channel to install the O release on compatible devices. But you should only install the preview to test your development skills, as some hidden bugs can affect the performance of your device.