Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android 11 Overview – Everything you need to know”.
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, i’m joe hendy from androidauthority.com and today we’re finally going to check out the full release of android 11.. This year google decided to focus on people, controls and privacy. So let’s see how they did it. Let’S start with what you can see for the most part, there aren’t any major changes to the ui. The home screen is the same as it was before, as is the google feed to the left of the home screen, as well as the quick settings and regular settings menu as per the norm.
There were some minor shuffling of the settings menu and the recent apps looks a little bit cleaner than it used to, but otherwise the changes are minimal. Where you’ll see the most changes are in the periphery of the os. For instance, when you take a screenshot, the ui looks entirely different than before and falls more in line with what you typically see in samsung and lg devices. Long pressing a blank spot on the home screen gives you the same old options, but the styles and wallpaper, along with the widget selector, all received revamps to look more modern and they’re easier to use.
We especially like the new widget selector and its larger, easier to read graphics. Another spot that received some changes was the notification shade. Android 10 already separated notifications based on category, but android 11 adds the new conversations category to the mix. This wasn’t overly complicated or anything.
It just puts notifications from messaging apps in its own section at the top, so you can focus on people first and then your other notifications later additionally, android 11 makes notification history easier to view you can now tap on the option at the bottom of the notification. Shade opposite of the clear all button to view your notification history. In case you cleared one out that you really needed.
Media controls received a revamp as well. They are no longer part of the notification shade itself, but rather a part of the quick settings. It now shows up underneath the toggles, but above the notifications – and you can scroll between multiple media sources, so you can pause and continue as needed. This changed quite a lot since it was first introduced in earlier betas, but i think this is probably the best that i’ve seen it so far. Finally, the power menu received a massive overhaul.
Not only does it house the easter egg which we’ll get to later, but you can also see all of your smart home tech here if you have any, along with the usual power controls and a google page shortcut. This worked out of the box for my smart home tech without any special setup, but you do need to have your devices configured in google home for them to work properly. Of course, there were a bunch of other minor changes, swaps and updates to things like font, icons and other smaller ui elements, but in the interest of time we’re going to skip all of that stuff and move on android. 11 didn’t start with a ton of new features, but more and more were added over time.
The big feature this year is the bubbles feature that is actually on and working unlike last year. The premise for bubbles is relatively simple: it’s basically just facebook’s chat heads but extend it to any messaging app on your phone at this time it doesn’t work with every messaging app in my testing. It worked just fine with telegram, but not with discord. Direct messages developers do still need to add support for it, so it may be a bit before every messaging app supports this natively.
In any case, bubbles can be configured enabled and disabled in the settings menu. In case you don’t want or need them, they work basically as expected, without any real surprises. One of the bigger new features is the ability to natively screen record. This shows up as a quick settings toggle and you may need to edit your toggles to add it manually if it doesn’t show up on its own again. This is a super basic function.
You tap the quick settings icon select if you want it to show touches or record device audio, which is another new feature by the way and then hit start to begin. Recording the options give you the choice of recording, just your microphone, just the device audio or both at the same time, to stop the recording, simply open the notifications and tap the red screen. Recording notification to stop everything you can view recordings in the gallery app.
Those are the two big features, but there were several smaller ones throughout android 11., for instance, the camera app can silence notifications, so you don’t get bothered while taking video you have to enable this by giving the camera do not disturb access in the settings. Some other minor features include the ability to select copy and paste text from within the recent app screen without opening the application itself and that works about how you would expect. There is now a context aware dark mode that activates at night, similar to how other oems do it. Finally, there is a new resume on boot feature that will install an ota update overnight and reboot with full functionality.
So you don’t miss any notifications or alarms. There are also over 100 new emoji, including new body parts, new facial expressions, new animals, new objects and new signs. Unicode.Org has a full list available if you want to see them and we’ll have that linked up in the video description below and just like with the ui elements, there’s a whole bunch of other smaller updates and additions, such as the upgraded voice, access capabilities that understand. What’S on the screen, instead of just assigning numbers like it used to, but that would take another 10 minutes to explain so, let’s move on as usual, there were a metric ton of under the hood changes in android 11 and as per the norm, the vast majority Of them are for developers to improve the functionality of apps and games, but there were some os changes as well that make things better for everyone.
First, the os now includes native support for variable refresh rates. This lets developers choose where they want to higher refresh rates and reduce the refresh rate in instances where it doesn’t matter. For instance, netflix may want to keep it at 120 hertz for the menus, but then reduce it to 60 hertz, while watching actual video playback. Additionally, google improved project mainline the initiative that lets various things update in the google play store, instead of through over-the-air updates, google promised to add 12 new modules to the initiative, making it even less necessary to get intrusive, over-the-air updates.
There were also improvements and new apis for things like better 5g network information, foldable displays, waterfall displays and low latency video decoding for game streaming. Products like google stadia. These aren’t necessarily new, but they should further improve the functionality of all of this new technology. In various ways, interestingly, google planned to include some improvements to the scoped storage api for further security enhancements.
When it comes to what apps can see. However, google actually pushed these plans back to early 2021 due to the kovid 19 concerns, so those changes did not ship with the os. Speaking of covet 19, google obviously included support for the exposure api that lets your phone see and tell you if you’ve run into anybody with covet 19. So you can properly quarantine yourself and be careful around others.
Apple devices have this as well, and it definitely helps combat the virus. Android 11 also brings an improved call screening api that lets applications better screen calls to keep telemarketers and robo calls from bothering you applications with these improvements. Now tell you why a call was rejected that it was rejected and it has better recognition of your contacts list. Keyboards or imes received a fairly hefty update this year as well.
There are new apis that add things like smoother transitions that help eliminate a lot of the jank that keyboards still have when popping open and closed. Additionally keyboard autofill is getting some improvements with better inline support. It may also start recommending some sensitive information, but the os hides that information from the keyboard so that no one can steal your information. Some other minor changes include the removal of the 4 gigabyte video recording cap since 8k.
Video is a thing now. New requirements for oems to prevent excessive background task, killing a new thermal api, so developers can overheat your device less often and a new sensitivity setting for your gesture controls for power users out there. One of the bigger changes is the official support for wireless adb. You can now simply pair your phone with your computer over a network with a pair code, and you can administer adb, commands and install things on the fly over wi-fi. Instead of needing a cable as usual, there were plenty of other smaller things in the os that you might find interesting. The official android developers website has the full list of new apis and api improvements.
If you want to see the rather extensive list, just like every year, google focused a lot on security. However, unlike prior years, some of the security stuff this year is actually really useful and really good. Most of it revolves around permissions, giving the archaic system a much more modern and smart twist to start with. Android 11 officially supports single use permissions for sensitive notifications such as the location, the microphone and the camera. You can open an application, give it the permission once and the application only has it for that session. As soon as you exit the application, it loses that permission and you have to grant it again.
Next time you enter additionally, android 11 will begin to automatically revoke permissions for applications you haven’t used in a while. The operating system will tell you when it happens, and you can always go back and grant permissions again. Developers have an api to allow you to bypass this for applications. You hardly ever use, but you still want running in the background with those permissions, but it’ll be up to the developer.
To give you that option. Finally, background location is a much more difficult permission to get than it used to be to grant background location. An application has to ask you for your location permission like normal. However, you have to grant a secondary permission afterward to grant background permissions.
That way, you can use location in the foreground without letting the application track. You when it’s not in use biometrics received a bit of a boost and now asks developers to specify authenticator strength instead of just asking for a fingerprint the new identity credentials. Api will eventually let you store your driver’s license or government id in your phone with enough security that the government actually recognizes it as a valid form of id. However, this one is still a work in progress according to google, and one of the biggest changes is to microphone, location and camera settings. It’S a little complicated to explain, basically, nothing changes in regards to how you use apps and use those particular permissions. However, if any app tries to access those permissions, while in the background, even if you granted it prior permission in the foreground, the operating system shuts it down entirely. Thus, no applications can just turn on your camera and see what’s going on. The only exception is background location which we talked about earlier. Overall android 11 feels like a natural extension of android 10.. For the most part it patches holes from the prior os and makes some positive quality of life changes. However, at its core, it still feels more or less like android 10, with a few new tricks up its sleeve. The good news is a lot of the stuff is good.
In particular, we love the changes made to the permission system. A couple of years ago, we called the app bouncer the best android app of 2018, because we believed how it handled permissions should have been a native android feature. Now it is for the most part, and we couldn’t be happier. The rest of the features are again: quality of life changes that you probably won’t use every day, but they’re certainly nice to have the screen recorder.
Functionality without an application is awesome for the quick stuff and the ime changes should make keyboards work even better. As per the norm, the vast majority of this year’s android update feels like it’s just maturing the experience rather than giving us some razzle dazzle new stuff. Now i totally get it if some folks feel like this is a lame upgrade. A lot of these features are already available from android oems and there’s nothing super big or flashy.
Those folks are likely disappointed and i totally get it. On the other hand, the changes made this year were actually more solid and more striking than last year. So at least there’s that, in terms of pure functionality and use it felt pretty good. My pixel 3a has no trouble running it and i haven’t run into any bugs since i installed it and started testing it.
Of course, google has been releasing bug, fixes and patches. All year, so i actually would be mildly disappointed if it were still broken. In any case, this is a solid entrant into the world of android and stock. Android fans should enjoy these little touches that people who buy samsung, huawei, lg or oneplus have been enjoying for years.
So, let’s end this video, the way we always do with the android easter egg for this year and strap in because this one’s going to take a second to start head to the settings, menu and scroll on down to the about phone, like you normally would from There tap where it says: android 11 repeatedly until a dial appears crank that sucker up to 11, it might take a few tries and then you’ve unlocked the android easter egg long press the power button to bring up the new power menu, hit, the three dot menu Click add controls and then select the see other apps option from there select the cat controls function and the power menu should now include the new and improved neko at sumi clone from the android 7 nougat release. The easter egg shows off how smart home controls work straight from the power menu, and it makes for a fun mini game, and that about does it for this one folks, we have linked up some stuff in the video description below, including our coverage of android 11. Along with the android developer website and a few other resources, if you want to read more about android 11., as always thank you all for watching and have a wonderful day, .