Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google may be making a new tradition of releasing a developer preview of their latest mobile operating system (OS) prior to the official launch. For the second year in the row, (it released Nougat in a similar fashion last year), the Google has released a developer preview of their new OS and this time it is called ‘Android O’ as one might expect.
Other than its new added features, speculation is rife about new dessert’s name that the latest version of Android will take that, presumably, begins with the letter ‘O’. TechCrunch hopes it will be Oreo, CNet wants it to be anything from Orange to Onion Powder.
The greatest addition to the latest software update is definitely the improved battery life. Android O comes with the promise of improving the battery life, by restricting and managing which apps run in the background while multiple apps are opened.
Google is also trying to add something called ‘Notification Channels’. According to them, there will be an “app-defined categories for notification content”. This means, essentially, you will be able to group all the notifications for similar apps. You can even enable or disable background colours for different combinations of notifications.
The latest OS allows you to use snooze notifications. Once you see notification, you can slide your finger over it to make it appear again after 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
Picture in a Picture is another headline feature. Android O allows you to continue playing videos, even if you have opened another app while it is playing. This multi-window like mode is already available for Android TV; Android O makes the available for Android devices.
If an activity supports multi-window mode and is running on a device with multiple displays, users can move the activity from one display to another. When an app launches an activity, the app can specify which display the activity should run on.