It came out much later in March than we expected, but yesterday Google launched the second developer preview for Android 11, the next big version of Android due out at the end of the year. Despite the coronavirus disrupting just about every part of normal life, Google posted the same schedule it did with Preview 1, indicating that the plan is still to have a preview release every month.
As always, an excellent look at the new features by Ars. We’re still early on in Android 11’s development cycle, though, so everything is still very much subject to change.
Following the article, IMHO:
1) “Even more notification changes” is the epitome of the worst attack against Human Interface Guidelines (HIG): unless you have a 25” smartphone, you’ll have a nice “scroll” on the side because you’re wasting SO MUCH screen space that is insulting.
2) “New buttons have come to light” is jus another hack to the HIG. I accept the new UI is much more logic (first one was a question of “start recording or casting” with only options “cancel or start now”, which you wouldn’t let you know what the hell you were doing: recording or casting) BUT it goes against showing that the app popping that up is “locked” (as you can see in the first preview) opting for a grayed out do-not-know-what-it-means that goes against how all the other apps works.
3) “The new Web-based Android installer”. I mean, seriously? I can imagine thousand of newbies going to their phone shop saying their phones do not work anymore as they did before… or that they became a nice brick….
IMHO, bad decisions all of them…