Just a random Wednesday in March, and Google releases the first Android N developer preview. The biggest new feature in this Android N developer preview is, as Google promised, multiwindow.
Multi-window – A new manifest attribute called
android:resizableActivityis available for apps targeting N and beyond. If this attribute is set to true, your activity can be launched in split-screen modes on phones and tablets. You can also specify your activity’s minimum allowable dimensions, preventing users from making the activity window smaller than that size. Lifecycle changes for multi-window are similar to switching from landscape to portrait mode: your activity can handle the configuration change itself, or it can allow the system to stop the activity and recreate it with the new dimensions. In addition, activities can also go into picture-in-picture mode on devices like TVs, and is a great feature for apps that play video; be sure to setandroid:supportsPictureInPictureto true to take advantage of this.
As you can see in the video The Verge has up, the multiwindow feature is fairly straightforward, and it looks quite smooth considering it’s a beta – see the video on The Verge, or this one for a tablet view. Unlike iOS, the feature is not restricted to just certain tablets; multiwindow on Android N is available on both phones and tablets, in landscape and in portrait.
There’s a number of other new features as well, such as improvements to the power-saving Doze feature, notification grouping (finally!), direct replies to notifications, several Java 8 language features, and more. Digging a little deeper into the changes, there’s an interesting tidbit about future releases possibly bringing an end to unbound background services.
You can install the Android N developer preview on a Nexus 5X, 6, 6P, 9, 9G, Player, and the Pixel C. You can also enroll your device in Android’s new beta program, allowing you to upgrade your device using over-the-air updates, so you don’t lose all your data. This program will go live later today.
Google should have looked at RemixOS…. Funny how it’s now AWESOME that everyone else get “split screen” multitasking but how “lame” it was with Windows 8…
Yes, just like it happened with material design as well.
For me, it depends what you’re comparing it to. Coming from traditional desktop Windows (and all others) where you can have unlimited windows, and then limiting it to one or two – that is a downgrade. Coming from the smartphone / tablet world, with everything in one window – then split-screen is an upgrade.
Oh, and I hate flat design, no matter who does it.
Uh, Windows 8’s splitscreen multiwindow has been universally praised all over the web, including by yours truly. No idea where you’re getting this from.
Who said it was lame?
Underutilized and largely unreported maybe, but lame? I think you’re projecting your own bias onto it. Snap View was very nicely implemented on Windows 8 and was one of the better things to come out of that OS.
Whoop whoop
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Sorry, but THIS is the bigest new feature
http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/03/09/android-n-feature-spotlight…
Such BASIC functionality should’ve been there since v1.0.
Funny thing is I think the comment stating DPI settings available is even more important than all of it if it is true/stays.
and the RGB color tweaker. changing colors look right to your eye seems pretty good
Probably wrong link for ‘this one’?
Samsung will break it and do their own thing (they already have their own multi-window), Motorola won’t bother, and HTC and LG will do something else different or else not have the upgrade at all. As a result, app developers won’t support it and we’ll have a broken mess. Business as usual in Droid land.
What I want to see from an Android upgrade? Google drop the hammer and require that any device that has Google apps get regular updates and those updates must bring consistent feature experiences across all handsets. If an OEM doesn’t comply, they don’t get Google Apps anymore. Period. That would be the most important new feature, and might go a long way to stopping this crazy mishmash they have now.
Too late to edit, but have to add carriers into that list alongside OEMs. In fact, carriers should be removed from the equation altogether, either the way Apple has done it or the way Microsoft has (probably the latter in Android’s case). At no point should carriers be permitted to decide on software updates aside from their own apps, nor should they ever be providing custom firmware for devices unless said devices are their own brand.
I’m just happy that Google is finally acknowledging that there are versions of Java after 6. Too bad Android’s horribly broken update story means that the support for modern Java will be pretty much unusable until 3 years from now.
Hu?
“Improved Java 8 language support – We’re excited to bring Java 8 language features to Android. With Android’s Jack compiler, you can now use many popular Java 8 language features, including lambdas and more, on Android versions as far back as Gingerbread.”
Gingerbread is Android version 2.3, so you get java 8 language support back to Android 2.3.
This is because it’s easy to compile java 8 source code, to java 6 bytecode. The only thing I don’t understand is why it took them so long.