Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android 11 is HERE! What’s new in developer preview 1? (Android R)”.
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Joe handy from Android Authority. Oh man, Google decided to surprise drop its first Android 11 Developer Preview in February for some reason, but we’re still excited about it. So, let’s take a look. The UI section of this video is going to be rather short, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of new stuff and any subtle changes aren’t obvious at first glance.
However, this is the first developer preview and we actually had a few big visual changes last year and Google doesn’t usually do a bunch of UI changes two years in a row. However, I did notice that you can still switch between gesture controls. The three buttons soft key option and the two button gesture controls from earlier versions of Android.
The gestures feel a little bit smoother this time around. But that also just might be me seeing something that I wanted to see. If there are any major UI changes to Android xi will most likely see them in future betas. To be honest, it makes sense that we don’t see hardly any in this preview, because it’s solely for developers and not for consumers, so it doesn’t really matter what it looks like yet we’ll keep you up to date if we find anything cool. The first Android 11 preview isn’t too heavy on the features, but there are still some things worth talking about. The first end, most obviously noticeable feature is a screen recorder function in the quick settings. I had to add it to the quick settings shade with the edit button, but it does work as intended. You simply tick the quick setting, toggle and then it’s off to the races and the video recording works. Surprisingly, well, even though my pixel 3a was doing like 5 things in the background, there is a bug with the feature, though, if you take a screenshot, the notification for the screen recording disappears, and you must go back into the quick settings icon to disable the recording And while we’re on the topic of things, your screen records, there is a hidden flag in Android 11 that shows a screenshot UI. That includes an extend feature that will likely become the ability to take scrolling screenshots.
Some people at xda-developers got the UI to turn on, but the feature doesn’t work yet. Android 11 also improves the dark theme settings. The feature can now enable and disable itself at sunrise and sunset. This is a longtime feature on other devices, particularly samsung devices, but it’s nice to see it trickle down to stock android. Finally, one of my favorite new features is the ability to pin applications to the share menu. You simply long press the app icon and select the pin option to place it perpetually at the top of the share menu. This doesn’t work in every application yet, but did work in chrome where we tested it. Finally, it seems like bubbles finally works.
You have to enable it in the developer options and then long press a notification to turn it on, but you can actually see what the bubbles look like without any adb tomfoolery like we had to do last year. It’S buggy right now, but we expect it to improve over the course of the year plus notifications for messages are now bundled under a conversations tab. It didn’t work too well for me and didn’t include Facebook messenger, but again I expect it to get better over the course of the year and that’s about it for features right now, but we’ll update you if we find any more in the coming days and weeks Over at the website, as per the norm, a good deal of the changes in Android 11 take place under the hood, where I can’t film it so enjoy some nice b-roll.
While I read off some of these new features, the first and most noticeable thing I found was native support for some modern technologies. The documentation makes specific references to things like 5g foldable phones and low latency video support for things like game streaming. This is hardly a surprise though, and we fully expected it. However, we were glad to see a new cut out API that helps prevent screen elements from being hidden or messed up by curved displays, Waterfall notches pinhole cameras or other such things. Another minor change is potentially the ability to use Bluetooth audio while in airplane mode. Previously, airplane mode was a blanket effect that turns everything off. It still does that, but if you are connected to Bluetooth, headphones and connected to a2dp, Android is now smart enough to just disable the Wi-Fi and mobile connections. Without messing with your Bluetooth, audio Android 11 decided to fix another obnoxious issue of hearing loud notification, tones and vibrations, while shooting photos and recording video. This is enabled by default actually, and you have to disable – do not disturb mode for the camera in order to actually see this feature in place.
In any case, an API is also available so that this feature can work in third-party camera apps as well. You can already store credit cards, rewards cards and even car insurance cards on your phone and now Android 11 includes support for driver’s licenses. This one is a bit tricky because it has to adhere to ISO standards for identification and we’re not 100 % certain how it’s going to work or whether or not you can just use this as a valid form of ID, but it is here now.
Finally, there is a neat overlay for refresh rates similar to gaming software. That shows you the frames per second, it’s available in the developer options and shows you when your screen is at 60, 90 or 120 Hertz. Of course, this is only useful on displays with high refresh rates, so you can see when the higher refresh rates are actually working. Of course, there is a laundry list of other improvements to existing api’s, along with twelve new project mainline modules, along with some other things. It’S far too long of a list to just rattle off here, so I’ll include a link in the video description to the Android developers. Websites security is getting at least a few decent updates this year, but it’s actually just building on stuff that we had with Android 10.
For instance, we discussed scoped storage at length last year, and this year it received a bit more attention and is now a requirement for applications targeting Android Elevens API level. Another change is to the permission system. Last year, Google added the ability to grant permissions, while only the app is in use this year, they’ve added the ability to only grant a permission a single time.
This is very similar to how the app bouncer works. However, it only works for sensitive permissions, such as camera, microphone and location. Permissions also have another neat trick, apps like to ask for the same permission over and over and over again, even if you deny it in previous versions of Android, you could tick a box to not show that permission again and in Android 11 after two denials. The system automatically assumes you never want to see it again and prevents the application from ever asking. Additionally, Android 11 heavily restricts background location access for apps. The restrictions are long and tedious to explain, but suffice it to say that apps have to do a lot more than they used to in order to justify pinging your location in the background, including, but not limited, to getting approval to remain on the Google Play Store.
This could also save on battery and we’re always fans of that. There is also a new biometric API with varying levels of biometrics, including weak, strong and device credentials. To be perfectly honest, we saw mentions of strong versus weak biometrics as far back as Android 8.1, but it seems like the API, is expanding to be more spoof proof and more private. Of course, there are an array of smaller changes that would take ages to list here.
For instance, granting overlay permissions takes an extra tap in Android 11 than it did in Android 10. These changes are minor and it will take forever to les. So we’re going to direct your attention again to the Android developers, websites for every little change made. Overall, I have a fairly solid impression of Android 11. So far as is the norm.
These days, Google is showing up weaknesses from Android 10, while adding a few extra goodies, but most of the changes are underneath the hood and strictly for developers. Of course, this is the first developer preview and Google may be saving some of the consumer-facing stuff for later betas. There are some device specific changes. For instance, the pixel 4 gets an increase to touch sensitivity, option for screen protectors and more motion sense stuff. However, by and large Android 11 feels a lot like Android 10 plus just like Android 10 felt like Android 9 plus, you shouldn’t expect any major changes in this version for better or for worse. That said, I did like what I saw there weren’t any bombastic new features and it’s actually fairly run-of-the-mill in terms of updates, but there are a lot of quality of life changes that makes things better.
I especially like, depending apps to the sharing menu and the ability to screen record and, of course, all of the under the hood stuff that’ll make things better in the long run. I’M gon na answer that question that everybody asks, and that answer is no. You should absolutely not run this as a daily driver. I caught a few bugs just moving around the UI and the occasional log load time in an app or menu. This is for developers not for US consumers, so I recommend waiting until at least the next one to run this yourself, unless you really want to see it in action. In any case, that’s our first hands-on with Android 11. There are almost certainly things I missed or didn’t cover. I recommend, checking out the website and the written article for more coverage as we uncover Android Elevens secrets over the next few weeks. This is usually the part of the video where I show you the easter egg, but so far no one’s been able to find it, and that might be the biggest disappointment in all of Android 11 so far, and that about does it for this one folks, if You like this video, you know what to do and if not, you still know what to do, don’t forget to hit up the written version and check out all of the links in the video description below, because there’s a lot more content there. As always, thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day, .