Android 11 introduces great new features and APIs for developers. Android 11 focus more on People-centric and expressive, with a new controls space and more privacy features.
Extend your apps with conversation notifications and bubbles, try one-time permissions, surface devices and media in the controls. Work faster with tools like compatibility toggles, ADB incremental installs, and more!
Lets look into Android 11 features
Conversation notifications
There are now three notification categories: Conversations, Alerting, and Silent. The Conversations section, quite obviously, houses all your conversations. This would mean any app where you are directly communicating with someone else, including text messages and chat apps.
Meanwhile, the Alerting and Silent sections act as they have before in Android 10. You can also easily silence notifications from certain apps, which would push all future notifications to the Silent section. With Android 11, you now have more control over notifications than you ever had previously.
Notification history
In Android 11! A new feature gives you the option of saving every single notification that landed on your phone over the past 24 hours. You can check the running list, find the notification you accidentally swiped, and see what you missed.
Related: Here’s a list of Android 11 phones
Chat bubbles in Android 11
For all chat applications Android, you already know how chat bubbles work. With Messenger, a “chat head” appears on your phone that overlays on top of pretty much every other app. A quick tap of the icon launches the chat and then you can minimize the chat back to an icon. Done with the conversation? You can remove the chat head until the next conversation starts
Android 11 screen recorder
The screen recorder function lives in the Quick Settings tiles. You tap the Screen Record feature which gives you a few options before you start recording. For example, you can choose whether or not your screen-taps should also be recorded and whether the phone should capture audio, too. Media controls
If you are playing music on your Android 10 phone, a music player appears at the top of your notifications drawer. Of course, with Android 11, that section of the drawer is now reserved for conversations, so the media player needed to move. Google decided to move it one rung up to the Quick Settings section.
When you swipe down your notification drawer, the media controller will be pretty small. It will show you the app it’s related to, cover art, basic controls, and on which system the media is playing. If you pull down again on the drawer, the alert expands and shows the information
Smart device controls
Google added a new section in Android 11 that allows you to easily control your various devices without needing to open an app.
You can hold down the power button to launch the new tool. At the top, you’ll find the usual power features, but underneath, you’ll see a lot more options. There’s a Google Pay shortcut that allows you to quickly choose which payment method you want your next contactless transaction to use. Under that, you’ll see a bunch of buttons connected to your various smart home products.
The Device Controls feature, available starting in Android R, allows the user to quickly view and control external devices such as lights, thermostats, and cameras from the Android power menu. Device aggregators (for example, Google Home) and third-party vendor apps can provide devices for display in this space.
One-time permissions and auto-reset
Android 11 gives the user even more control by allowing them to give permissions only for that specific session.
Similarly, Android 11 will now “auto-reset” apps you haven’t used in a while. If you granted location data permissions to an app that you haven’t opened up in a long time, Android will now revoke all permissions. Next time you open the app, you’ll need to approve those permissions again.
Dark Theme
With Android 11, users can now schedule the dark theme using one of two different metrics. You can schedule a dark theme to turn on or off when the sun sets or rises. You can also set up a custom schedule for dark mode activation if you wish.
Some of the other features are
Concurrent Camera Streaming : Many devices have the hardware capability to stream multiple camera sensors concurrently.
Camera Bokeh : to make the bokeh feature available to third-party apps
Generic Kernel Image : Android R introduces the Generic Kernel Image (GKI), which addresses kernel fragmentation by unifying the core kernel and moving SoC and board support out of the core kernel into loadable modules.
Device Type Limit : In Android R, no limit on the number of audio device types to allow new audio device types to be added
Soft restarts : Android R supports soft restarts, which are runtime restarts of processes in the user space used to apply updates that require a reboot (for example, updates to APEX packages).
Zombie permissions : Android will automatically revoke an app’s permissions after an undetermined time of inactivity—somewhere between 60 and 90 days. Launching an app within that time reinstates any permissions you’ve granted
Notification/Sound Muting : Device vibration and sounds can hurt image and video quality, especially for cameras with optical image stabilization module. camera app could use the (DnD) APIs to mute the vibration and sounds
Offline Processing: Today camera apps must wait for all requests to be fully processed before it can disconnect from the camera or switch to a different configuration, The offline processing API allows the camera HAL to perform post-processing in the background to improve the latency of mode switching or camera closing
Android 11 updates via Play Store
Each year, Google releases the latest version of Android. Each month, it pushes out the latest Android security patch. Both of these updates get funneled to your phone either by your carrier or equipment manufacturer. Because of this, some phones get many updates very quickly, while others either get them much slower or not at all.o counteract this, Android 11 gives more power related to updates over to the Google Play Store. This allows Google to bypass carriers and OEMs entirely and push out updates to everyone.
App-pinning to the share sheet
You can now pin apps to your share sheet in order to easily access them whenever you want to share something.This feature allows you, the user, to control which apps appear at the top of the list when you want to share something.
Improved prediction tools
Android 11 will seemingly reduce the work you need to do on your phone, by predicting your habits and patterns.
One such example of this is smart folders, so you can let Android 11 automatically sort your apps into folders of similar apps, like games or productivity tools.
App suggestions is also tweaked to suggest apps based on your routine - for example, if you always log onto your Fitbit app first thing in the morning to examine your sleep habits, the phone will now automatically pop that app into the Home screen in the morning so it's easily accessible.
Finally, apparently the Smart Reply feature already usable in Android phones has received some tweaks. This mode suggests some automatic responses when you receive a message, letting you reply with one tap (if any of the responses are appropriate) but it's not clear what's new here.
New phones coming with Android 11
