Android O Developer Preview: Our first take

Why it matters to you

Your next phone is likely to run Android O — and based on our tests, it sure looks sweet.

Android Oreo, anyone? Or maybe it’s Android Oatmeal Cookie?

Whatever Google ends up calling it, the Mountain View, California, company is prepping its next major Android release: Android O. On March 21, it made everything official except the name.

Just like last year, Google is offering developers (and intrepid users) the opportunity to test drive the new version of Android before it launches publicly later this year. That means it’s unfinished (and a little unstable), but packs most of the features that will make it into the final version.

The first Developer Preview is available for the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, Pixel, Pixel XL, and Pixel C. It’s not available as an over-the-air update — it has to be installed manually, which isn’t for the faint of heart.

Luckily, Google’s spilled the details about Android O in a lengthy blog post. And after many trials and tribulations, we managed to get Android O up and running on a dusty old Nexus 6P. Here’s everything we’ve learned, and everything you need to know.

Android O is now in beta

Google I/O is here and at the show, Google announced Android O is in beta — meaning that if you’re a developer, or just an Android hobbyist, you can now get the latest and greatest version of Android on your phone. Keep in mind, the operating system is in beta mode so you should expect bugs and probably should not install it if you don’t know what you are doing. You can sign up for the Android O beta by heading to the signup page.

While Google didn’t necessarily announce any new features for O at Google I/O, it did highlight a few aspects of the operating system. For example, the company mentioned Project Treble, its new initiative aimed at pushing updates to Android far faster. Project Treble essentially allows manufacturers to easily push low-level firmware updates to Android without having to update the operating system as a whole.

Google is also speeding up Android, in general. The company announced that through a number of operating system optimizations, boot time is now faster and apps should run a lot better. It is also implementing “wise limits” on apps that run in the background — ensuring they do not take up too much battery life and processing.

Revamped notifications

The previous version of Android, Android Nougat, added the ability to prioritize certain notifications over others. Android O tweaks that behavior.

Users can snooze alerts and schedule them to reappear at a later time, and developers can change the background color of notifications and cause notifications to dismiss themselves after predefined time increments: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour.

The snooze feature is perhaps the most obvious change, and it works rather well. After dragging a notification to the right-hand side of the notification shade, a clock-shaped icon appears, and tapping on it brings up the aforementioned list of time increments. In our testing, Gmail, Slack, Allo, and Hangouts notifications all reappeared without issue. A word of warning, though: It’s easy to accidentally dismiss notifications while pulling up the Snooze menu. Drag slowly.

Of course, not all notifications are compatible. For example: “Persistent notifications” or ongoing notifications that can’t be dismissed can’t be snoozed, either.

There’s a new prioritization feature in Android O called Notification Channels. More details are forthcoming, but here is Google’s description of how it works: If an important email from a colleague comes in among a flood of junk mail, the colleague’s message will appear on top. Depending on how users tweak Android O’s notification settings, they may not see the junk emails at all.

App developers can also choose to aggregate alerts of the same kind in a single Notification Channel. If you get several “tech news” updates across a handful of apps, for example, they’ll show up bundled in a single channel — much like Google’s Gmail sorting, which offers granular control over what emails users receive notifications for.

The onus is on developers to implement Notification Channels. We’ve yet to see an app that supports them, because Android O is so fresh out of the oven. We expect to hear more as the new version of Android progresses.

Battery

Android Nougat introduced Doze, a battery-saving feature that automatically “hibernated” apps running in the background. With Android O, Google has taken that idea one step further with “automatic limits” that place strictures on background apps — specifically those that update location of background services. Android O can impose “execution limits” on the latter, which limit system access to certain processes when the app isn’t being used. Location limits, on the other hand, prevent apps that access a device’s location (via GPS or Wi-Fi) from doing so gratuitously. Google’s calling it a “significant change” to the way Android manages apps.

We’ll have to run Android O through its paces to figure out how dramatically the under-the-hood changes impact battery life.

High-quality Bluetooth audio

Wireless Bluetooth headphones, earbuds, and speakers are all the rage these days, so it’s not all that surprising that Android O brings major improvements to wireless audio.

New Bluetooth audio codecs promise to make music crisper, clearer, and richer than on Android versions of the past.

Android O supports Sony’s LDAC wireless codec, which promises big audio performance gains. Here’s the gist: it lets phones transfer roughly three times the amount of data (990kbps) over the same Bluetooth connection as the average smartphone. That’s more than twice as fast as Spotify’s requirement for Hi-Fi streaming (320kbps), and just short of Tidal’s lossless quality (1,411kbps).

LDAC has been around a while — Sony introduced it at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, and has since built it into its high-end Walkman music players, Xperia smartphones, and MDR-1000X headphones. But Android O will mark the first time the codec’s made available on non-Sony devices.

Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to take advantage. LDAC requires that both the sending device (a smartphone) and receiving device (a pair of headphones) support it — if you don’t have cans with LDAC, you’re out of luck.

AptX, another low-latency Bluetooth streaming format, is also in tow. It’s hardware-dependent, but an increasing number of flagships — including those running Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon processors — support it. Android O’s audio is a dramatic upgrade from Android 7.0 Nougat for wireless fans.

Adaptive icons, picture-in-picture mode, and UI tweaks

Android O is relatively light on UI tweaks and changes, but there are a few notable ones in tow. The status bar is cleaned up. In Android O, new icons indicating your phone’s Wi-Fi and mobile connectivity status sit next to the battery icon. The Settings menu has been overhauled. Compared to Nougat, there are roughly half the number of top-level menu options thanks to aggressive consolidation. Google has done away with the slide-out menu.

Android’s System UI Tuner gained a bunch new features. Just tap and hold the settings gear at the top of Android’s Quick Settings menu. Once you’ve held it for a few seconds, the gear will begin to spin and a little wrench icon will appear next to it, indicating that the System UI Tuner has been enabled. From now on, you’ll see it near the bottom of Android’s Settings menu.

Android O gives you full control over the navigation bar’s appearance and behavior. You’re free to change the layout of the buttons, or add an extra right and left button. A new Compact mode squishes them closer together. If you’re the methodical type, you can assign buttons custom codes that trigger actions like launching the calendar app, pausing/playing music, and opening the default dialer.

Not all of them work equally well. We were able to add a custom button for the Calendar (code 208) and Dialer (5), but others like the Camera (27) and Calculator (210) seemed buggy. We expect Google to fix these sorts of niggles in developer previews to come.

A second welcome addition to the System UI Tuner is lockscreen shortcuts, which allow you to add shortcuts to your phone’s lockscreen. You can add a dedicated button for Chrome tabs, or a shortcut to the settings menu — the sky’s the limit, really.

A feature called Adaptive Icons let developers adjust the look and shape of app icons depending on what home screen theme users select. If a user swaps Android’s default theme to a custom pack they downloaded from the Google Play Store, for example, app icons that tap Adaptive Icons will automatically switch to match the styling and color scheme of said theme.

There’s growing evidence that Android O will introduce support for themes. In the display settings, there’s a section for “Device theme” and two options: Inverted and Pixel. The former, as you might expect, swaps the color palette of every Android settings menu — white icons become gray, and grey backgrounds become white.

Google didn’t announce themes as part of the first Android O Developer Preview, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see the feature fleshed out down the road.

Also in tow with Android O is support for iOS-style home screen badges. Apps that support them will show animated notifications for things like the number of unread messages in your email inbox or the number of mentions you’ve gotten on Twitter.

Android O packs a picture-in-picture mode for videos, too, plus support for launching activities on a secondary display and a pop-up window for third-party apps. It’s already working for apps like YouTube, but enabling it is not exactly a walk in the park.

Here’s how to do it: Head to Settings > System UI tuner and add a cursor button to the navigation bar. Map it to keycode number 171, and when you’re in a compatible app, press it to enable PiP mode. Press it again to disable PiP.

An optional “wide-gamut color” promises to make apps more vibrant and colorful than ever on high-contrast screens.

It’s incumbent on developers to support Adaptive Icons, home screen badges, picture-in-picture mode, and wide-color gamuts — as of now, there doesn’t appear to be a way to manually enable them. We’ll keep searching, but it seems we’ll have to wait for developers to do their part.

Other conveniences

Android O is also packed with miscellaneous goodies aimed at addressing longstanding annoyances.

It’s easier to add custom ringtones, alarm sounds, and notification sounds in Android O. Head to the ringtone selector in the Settings menu and select Add ringtone. Then, you can select an audio file you’ve downloaded.

Good news if you’re a frequent Skype user: Android O’s “telecom framework” will let you swap out your phone’s default dialer for a third-party VoIP alternative.

A new Networking Aware Networking feature will allow Android devices to communicate directly with each other over Wi-Fi, even if the network isn’t connected to Wi-Fi, GPS, or cellular data. There’s a low-power connection mode that allows for sharing small bits of data like sensor readings, location, and more.

New keyboard shortcuts including “arrow and tab button navigation” will make using physical keys a little less painful.

An autofill API will make it easier for password, address, and user name managers to register themselves as the system’s official autofill app. When a user encounters a password field, they’ll be able to paste a stored password from a list.

Apps installed from outside the Play Store now have to be granted permission manually. In Android Nougat and older, a toggling a universal “Install from unknown sources” option was enough to permit any third-party app access to your phone’s internal storage. Now, you’ll be prompted every time an app attempts an install.