The early days of Android, we made the first SDK available as a preview to developers. The vibrant developer ecosystem and open platform have been important keys to our success, which is why I’m excited that we’re once again giving developers a very early preview of some of what’s in store in the upcoming a version of Android

 

Android P.


Your early feedback is crucial to our efforts to push the boundaries of mobile development. In Android P, JobScheduler has been improved to let it better handle network-related jobs. Jobs can now declare their estimated data size, signal prefetching and specify detailed network requirements. For example, when a network is reported by the carrier as being congested, JobScheduler might defer large network requests while it can take advantage of surplus meter capacity to run a prefetch the job that returns content that will substantially improve the app’s user experience, such as prefetching top headlines. Android P brings performance and efficiency improvements to ART, Android’s runtime. We’ve expanded ART’s use of execution profiles to optimize apps and reduce the in-memory footprint of compiled app code. ART now uses profile information for on-device rewriting of DEX files with reductions of up to 11% across a range of popular apps. These correlate closely with reductions in system DEX memory usage and faster startup times. Kotlin is seeing massive growth in the developer community. We have heard so much Kotlin love from developers, and we are deepening our Kotlin investments. In P, you’ll see the first results of our platform work with new optimizations in ART. Apps are written with Kotlin will run faster on P than on previous versions of Android. We’re continuing to work with JetBrains to optimize the Kotlin compiler. And we are also improving our brand new D8 dexer to make sure generated code from Kotlin can run as fast as possible. Also, make sure to check out our ongoing preview of Android KTX, which is a set of extensions designed to make Android Kotlin development even more concise and pleasant. Android introduces an easier way to decode images to either Bitmaps or Drawables with ImageDecoder, which replaces BitmapFactory. ImageDecoder lets you create a Bitmap or Drawable from a ByteBuffer, file, or URI. It offers several advantages over BitmapFactory including support for exact scaling, single-step decoding to hardware memory, support for post-processing and decode, and decoding of animated images. ImageDecoder allows you to supply a callback that is called after the header is decoded where you can alter the output rather than having to decode the header twice. Decode Drawable allows you to create Drawables directly. If the encoded image is an animated GIF or WebP, the Drawable will be an instance of the new animated image Drawable. To help deliver the highest quality viewing experience, Android P adds built-in support for HDR VP9 Profile 2 enabling the delivery of HDR-enabled movies. We also added support for substantially improved image compression with HEVC compressed HEIF images, which means smaller downloads and less on-device storage. And we’re in the process of enhancing and refactoring the media APIs, so stay tuned. You can access streams simultaneously from devices that have logical cameras consisting of multiple physical devices, such as dual front or dual rear cameras, enabling new app possibilities. Other improvements in camera include new session parameters to reduce delays during initial capture and surface sharing, reducing the need for camera clients to stop and start camera streaming. We’ve also added APIs for display-based flash support and access to OIS timestamps to allow apps to perform image stabilization or use this data for special effects. Android P adds an API for the IEEE 802.11 MC Wi-Fi protocol, also known as Wi-Fi Round Trip Time RTT, to let you take advantage of indoor positioning in your apps. Android P  devices with hardware support can use RTT to measure the distance to a nearby Wi-Fi access point that supports the protocol. The device doesn’t need to connect to the AP to use RTT.  And to maintain privacy, only the phone is able to determine the distance. By measuring distances to three or more access points, apps can calculate their position with an accuracy of 1 to 2 meters. Android P adds an implementation of the GlobalPlatform Open Mobile API to Android. On supported devices, apps can use OMAPI to access NFC secure elements on Android devices to enable smart card payments and other security services. The Neural Networks API was introduced in Android 8.1 to provide support for accelerated on-device machine learning. In Android P, we’re expanding and improving the API, adding support for nine new Ops. On Pixel 2, the DP1 build includes an accelerated driver for quantized models. Android P is part of our longer-term initiative to modernize the foundations of the platform and the apps that run on it. We announced recently that Google Play will require all app updates to at least target Android Oreo by November 2018 and require apps with an NDK library to provide 64-bit support in 2019.

 




android p features, android pancake



In line with these changes, Android P will warn users with a dialog when they install an app that targets an Android platform earlier then Android 4.2, and future versions will continue to increment that limit. Every Android developer should start planning to migrate to target at least API 26 now. And we’ve built a checklist of resources to help and support this effort. We’re always looking for ways to improve the user and developer experience. In this spirit, we’re working to ensure that apps don’t use non-SDK interfaces, since doing so risks crashes for users and emergency rollouts for developers. In Android N, we restricted the set of symbols that NDK code could use. And with Android P, we’re further increasing stability by expanding these restrictions to cover the SDK interfaces as well. In the preview, you’ll see a warning when you use a non-SDK interface that we plan to restrict. If you feel that you’ll need the SDK API expanded to stop using non-SDK 1s, please let us know as soon as you can via our bug tracker. In Android P, we’re providing a standard system dialog to prompt the user to touch the fingerprint sensor managing text and placement as appropriate for the device. Apps can trigger the system FingerprintDialog using a new FingerprintDialog API. We recommend switching to the new system dialog as soon as possible, as the previous API may not be compatible with new devices. As part of a larger effort to move all network traffic away from clear text, unencrypted HTTP to TLS, we’re also changing the defaults for network security configuration to block all clear text traffic. On Android P and higher, apps with a network security configuration must make connections over TLS unless they explicitly opt into clear text for specific domains. To better ensure user privacy, Android P restricts all access to microphones, cameras, and sensors  from idle apps. When an app is idle, the mic will report empty audio, and the sensors will stop reporting events, while cameras used by the app will be disconnected and generate errors if the app tries to use them. Android P gives the user control over access to the Build. SERIAL the identifier by putting it under the read phone state permission. Direct access to this identifier has been deprecated since  Android 8.0. Android P adds platform support for edge-to-edge displays with cutouts. The status bar will adapt it’s height automatically. Apps with critical immersive content can use a new platform  API and window insetsto get the cutout bounds and a new API in the Window Manager LayoutParams to request layout in the cutout area. The updated MessagingStyle notification makes it easier to display notifications involving people or groups of people. It provides a standardized way to handle images and handle suggested replies. Give your users a seamless transition to Android P. Just download a device or emulator system image, install your app, and test. The Android P Developer The preview includes an updated SDK with system images for testing on the official Android Emulator and on Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL devices. Speaking of the Emulator, it’s a great place to test or develop on Android P. It’s incredibly fast and convenient to use, and you can even model long screens and screens with a display cutout for cameras and sensors. After you’ve tested, handle any P behavior changes, make any necessary updates, and publish to Google Play without changing the platform target. Then, change your an app’s targeting to P, and run it with the full Android P experience. Explore the many new features and APIs you can take advantage of in your app. Take a look at the API Diff Report along with the Android P API reference. You can start building with P by downloading the Developer Preview SDK in tools in the Android Studio. We’re also releasing an alpha the version of the 28.0.0 Support Library for you to try. Check out the release notes for complete details. We plan to update the preview system images and SDK regularly. This initial release is for developers only and not intended for daily or consumer use. So we’re making it available by manual download in Flash only. As we get closer to a final product, we invite consumers to try it out as well, and we’ll open up enrollments through Android Beta at that time. Stay tuned for details. But for now, please note that Android Beta is not currently available for Android P.