We knew that Google was going to reveal more information about Android P at its I/O 2018 developers’ conference today and the company did not disappoint. It talked about some new Android P features as well as the design improvements that it has made at the event. Google has developed Android P around three central concepts: Intelligence, Simplicity, and Digital Wellbeing.
Android P will use artificial intelligence to become smarter by learning from the user and adapting to them. One such intelligent feature is called Adaptive Battery. The feature will learn the user’s habits and then prioritize battery power for only the apps and services that they use the most. The same concept was applied to a feature called Adaptive Brightness which learns how they like to set the brightness slider depending on the environment.
Android P can better use context to give the user smart suggestions based on what they do frequently by anticipating their next action. A new Android P feaure called App Actions will help you get more done quickly by predicting what you want to do next. For example, if you connect your headphones, it will bring up an action to start listening to your favorite Spotify playlist again. App Actions will surfaced in places like the Play Store, Google Search app, Smart Text Selection, Launcher, and Google Assistant.
Google has also worked on improving simplicity which is why Android P now has a new system navigation interface. It’s considering the industry trend of moving toward bezel-less smartphones that ditch the home button. Android P ditches the software navigation buttons as well in favor of a single, clean home button and swipe gestures. Users can swipe up to see the new Overview user interface where all of the full-screen previews of recent apps are located. They can then simply tap to jump between apps or use the home button’s scrubbing feature to quickly sift through the previews.
Digital wellbeing is another major consideration behind the development of Android P. Google is now focusing on giving users better understanding of how they use their phones and offering more controls. Android P has a new Dashboard which will show how much time you’re spending on your device daily, including time spent in individual apps so you can quickly see if you’re wasting too much time in a particular app. It even lets you see how many times you unlocked your phone throughout the day and how many notifications you received.
There are other minor but useful features developed around this concept as well which include App Timer, a revamped Do Not Disturb mode, and Wind Down mode which aims to reduce screen time in bed.
Android P is going to be released later this year. Google has announced that a public Android P beta program goes live today.
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