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Jared Peters
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Google has finally taken the wraps off of what’s new in their Android L preview. You’ll see a new Material Design language that they’ve been hinting at with app releases over the past few weeks and other under-the-hood tweaks, including better graphics and battery performance, security enhancements, and ART becoming the standard runtime moving forward. This new preview comes with 5,000 new APIs for developers, full 64-bit support, and some new tools for web developers, to boot.
The new Material Design takes some cues from Google Now’s card aesthetics, but goes a bit further with great new animations and fluidity. Some major components of the new design include elevation values for different UI elements and “ripple effects” whenever a user touches something on the screen. These changes make apps seem much more alive and reactive, which is a major improvement.
The main design pillar with Material Design is elevation for different elements. Developers will be able to set up different levels of elevation for different objects on screen, (such as elevating a picture on top of a wall of text) and Android will handle all of the shaders and drawing real-time shadows with no extra developer input. The end result is a very attractive design that we’ve been seeing hints of in other Google apps.
The user interface side of things is also getting some improvements. Google put some heavy emphasis on reactive touches, called “ripples,” which basically are just simple animations whenever a user touches anything on screen. Tapping the numbers in the dialer creates a small ripple effect, for example, and everything from expanding notifications to moving around between emails will all have fantastic animations to go along with them. It’s not a major addition, but it’s amazing how adding in those small details creates a much more pleasant experience for users.
The material design isn’t the only thing that’s seeing an improvement in Android L. The performance of Android devices should also see a huge boost on Android L, with better CPU and GPU performance and significantly improved battery life. Plus, as we’ve previously heard, ART is going to be the default runtime over Dalvik with Android L and going forward. ART offers a massive performance boost over Dalvik, and developers won’t have to adjust their apps at all to get the performance boost.
Google has teamed up with major chip manufacturers to fine tune Android graphics performance, and the results were pretty impressive. A real-time demo of NVIDIA’s Unreal Engine 4 was shown off at I/O, thanks to the Android Extension Pack. This Extension Pack includes APIs for high-quality graphics shaders, tesselations, and the like, and the end result is near-console quality graphics on a mobile phone. If you’re big into mobile gaming, you should definitely be excited for these improvements.
GPU performance isn’t the only thing that’s getting better going forward. Android is getting Project Volta, which is a new set of tools that should greatly extend your Android device’s battery life. Volta includes a new battery historian app, which replaces the current battery stats available on Android. It will allow users to get a more detailed view about what apps or services are chewing up battery life, and find out exactly when your phone is being woken up and drained. There’s also a new Job Scheduler API that will allow apps to group together network requests instead of having multiple different apps trying to access WiFi or 3G/4G radios whenever they feel like it. A big chunk of battery drain comes from apps simply needing to access the internet for one reason or another, so this API should be very useful. The last big new feature comes in the form of a baked in power saving mode built right into Android. Third party skins have already had power savers, but now that feature will be native to Android. The power saver can limit processing power and turn off background data, and you can adjust if you want it to stay on all the time or to only turn on when your battery is low.
Security was also a topic of focus with Android L. Many users spend a lot of time putting in pin numbers or patterns to unlock their devices which amounts to several wasted minutes a day. Android is going to solve that problem with using other devices and radios to determine when a device needs a security lock and when it doesn’t. At I/O, this was demonstrated with Bluetooth smartwatches, which does include the upcoming Android Wear devices.
Basically, the new security features turn on or off depending on whether or not they can detect a nearby smartwatch. If you’re holding your phone in your hand, and you’re wearing your watch, the device will unlock without a password. If you take the watch off or hand the phone to someone else, the phone will ask for a password before it can be unlocked. It’s an incredibly simple addition, but with the rising popularity of smartwatches and other devices, it creates a widely available new security feature for users.
Speaking of accessing your lock screen, Android’s lock screen notifications are getting tweaked. Currently, you can access your notification shade and a few basic notifications from the lock screen, but it’s not the most robust system. Google is working on changing that by introducing rich notifications, right on the lock screen. These work very similarly to your current notifications, as you’ll be able to look at your full notification list and expand individual notifications. Swiping away notifications still works, and double tapping a notification will open up the notification and application. If you just want to get into your phone, swipe up from the bottom. Simple, yet effective. All of the animations on the lock screens here follow Android’s Material Design aesthetic.
Of course, Android isn’t Google’s only focus. The company also tries to look out for web developers, so they’re releasing tons of new APIs for web designers to take advantage of. They will be able to access many of the great new features in Android L on their mobile web sites, including the Material Design look and 60 FPS animations. There is also new API indexing to take advantage of. Many, many users still browse mobile sites regularly instead of using apps, so these new tools should help make the web easier to browse on smaller screens.
Android L is going to add a ton of great new things for users, including performance improvements, a better design, and easier navigation. Developers will be able to check out the L Preview tomorrow, and a public release is slated for later this fall.
We’re still a few months out before the general public can test out Android L, but in the meantime, you can see Google’s new design language in action in the video below. After you’re done, be sure to keep up with the rest of our Google I/O coverage.
Click here to view the embedded video.Come comment on this article: Google details what’s new in Android L preview, including new design language, performance improvements, and security features
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