The 10 interesting new features in Android 8 Oreo
Though that should be a big topic to dwell for now as it’s still young for that now. Android is quite the mature operating system nowadays and, for the past couple of major updates, has had some modifications that are nice to have, but not necessarily gamechangers. Still, there are a few features here and there that are quite big and worth looking forward to.
Speaking of fragmentation, Google has taken on the task to make Android updates faster. You know, a new build usually takes months after being officially out there, before its pushed to Samsung, LG, and other huge phones.
Android 8 Oreo wants to stop rogue apps from draining your battery. Now, when a certain app is consuming energy while in the background, the system will actively warn you via a persistent notification in the drop-down shade.
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Multitasking on a phone? Well, it’s not that far-fetched of an idea now that huge screens are a standard (and that 18:9 displays seem to be becoming more popular).
Every Android phone manufacturer likes to add their own skin on top of the vanilla experience. Every 3rd party launcher maker likes to experiment with different app icon shapes. The end result? A lot of times, non-default apps end up having a weird rectangle-like frame around their icon, kinda not looking like they fit in. Google has finally said “enough is enough” and made icons “adaptive”.
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Google is streamlining this with the so-called “Notification Channels”. Each app, which has multiple notification events, will have these events separated into “channels”.
You choose what channel does what — some may ring, others may just display a text banner, third can be limited to only glowing your phone’s LED. So, for example, you can set your Facebook app to ring when you have a friend request, vibrate when you are tagged in a picture, but only glow the LED of the phone when you have new comments on your posts.
With Android 6 Marshmallow, we saw Google make an attempt at bringing order to the Settings screen. There was now a hamburger menu to the left to take you to major places in Settings. And it felt quite redundant.
Apple has been dominating the musician niche for quite a while with its mobile devices, mainly due to the amazingly low audio latency its iDevices have. Developers have made a wide array of hardware and software for iPhones and iPads and people have been jamming by just plugging a guitar or MIDI controller in a phone for a while.