Google is gearing up for the next version of its mobile operating system, currently known as Android O and will succeed Nougat, which was rolled out late last year. It will also announce brand new functionality to Android smartphones and tablets.
Android is the most popular mobile platform around the world and there will be a lot of pressure on the company to bring the features that millions of its users want. On its second developer preview, Android O delivers a wide number of performance improvements and new thrilling features. While many of these may just be small tweaks, collectively, they'll make Android a lot more great to use on the whole. According to a source, Android O officially entered its beta phase and is now available to anyone with a recent Pixel, or Nexus phone, and Android One device sometime in Q3, most likely in August or early September.
One of the major improvements Google wants to make with Android O is the battery life. The software will limit the activity of apps running in the background and will focus closely on location updates, broadcasts and background services and that should help users phone battery life last longer.
Android O should also make it handy for users to deal lots of notifications from plenty of apps. Also, it will feature a snooze function that comes handy for meetings which will allow users to prioritize certain alerts over others.
Picture-in-picture mode is more likely to prove widely popular, particularly amongst YouTube and Netflix fans. This will allow users to continue watching clips while using another app without pausing the video.
"Copyless" pasting sounds really handy and would see the Android system guess what text you want to copy in just one app and will make it available to paste in another. If a user is looking at a restaurant in Google Chrome and subsequently opened Maps, the keyboard would bring its address as a suggestion.
Google is also working closely with delivering better audio to Android, by adding new audio codecs to enhance the sound quality of music played through wireless speakers and also with headphones. Google is letting developers experiment with different shapes for icons, and it appears like Android O could also bring support for badge notifications, similar to those in iOS and a lot of new features.
