L release gonna be a most wanted version of Android soon due to its new features and bold look. In IO Dave Burke said that "L is the biggest release in the history of Android" because it contains 5000 new API's touching early every expect of system. Also he showed us a quick demo of most commonly used app which is phone dialler. In phone dialler new features have been added like Bold material colours and shadows, ripple touch effects on tabs, floating dialler button with elevation value, Nested Scrolling and fresh look of phone dialler keypad with ripple touch effect on key touch.
See here in short video:
Also the most wanted feature for me or for everyone has been added also which is enhanced incoming notifications. In L now you are allowed to instant interactive access to your notifications right from your lock screen, so that you can read open and dismiss in seconds. In L Google improves the way of organising and prioritising notifications by analysing user behaviour to show only the most useful relevant notifications are presented to you. So now you can Swipe down to access a full list of notifications, you can double tap on notification to open up the corresponding app, or some that you don't need you can dismiss with the single swipe, and to unlock a phone you can swipe it away from bottom to up and you are in your device just fast and simple. Also a new "Heads-up" notification have been added to L release.
See here in short video:
In L release the new concept has been added that "Personal unlocking". Personal unlocking enables a device to determine if it is in a trusted environment say in the owner hands or beside the table. Personal Unlocking uses signal such as location you designate, bluetooth devices that are visible even your unique voice branch.Dave Burke showed us personal unlocking by wearing a watch and unlocked without pattern unlock, and when he take off his watch then device asked for pattern unlock.
Mobile web is also the most used feature of Android devices now a days, and day by day active users number is increasing, in last year monthly active users on chrome were 27 million and now it is 300 Million, which is 10X.
Now mobile web will also support Material Design and App indexing, also fluid and continuous animation as fast as 60 frames per second to give you best ever experience in mobile web which wasn't impossible a year ago, thanks to Polymer.
In L recents is also grounded with material deisgn, overlapping cards has been rendered with realistic shadows and perspectives. and now your chrome tabs will be included too in recents so that you can navigate even faster between web & apps, making multi-tasking that much easier.
Also an amazing feature is included in L release that is App indexing, this capability enables the app short-cut link in Google search (if app is installed on your device ) to redirect you directly in the app installed in your device. And there are many other interesting things like new keyboard UI, do not disturb mode, quick settings and much more.
L release runs exclusively on the new ART runtime compiler, and it support ARM x86 and MIPS, and this results 2X improvement performance over dalvik.
ART brings all new Garbage collector which reduces number of pauses and duration of pauses associated with the garbage collector events, as a result your app runs smoothly. ART doesn't just bring only better performance it is also more memory efficient, so it is smarter that when app is in background in which case it will apply a slower but more intensive a moving collector to save anything between 100 kb to many mega bytes. And finally ART is fully 64 bit compatible. and now you can benefit from:
So to take advantage of 64bit, Google has added support for new APIs, ndks, ARMV8, x86-64 and MIPS 64 and afcourse if your app is written in java then it will work absolutely with no modification on your new 64 bit hardware. Also Graphics has been improved in L release with Android Extension Pack which contains Tesselation, Geometry shaders, Computer shaders and ASTC texture compression.
It is not over yet, new L release will also comes with better Battery performance thanks to Project Volta:
Google has also added a new JobScheduler APi to help you optimise power consumptions in your app, so using JobScheduler Api you can make your application more efficient by align the platform called as non urgent network requests for multiple apps. As a result the platform can keep the radio sleep high posses of time to thus saving significant power.
And finally the new Battery saver mode is also included in L release. So Battery saver allows you to clock down CPU the refresh rate and even turn off the background data to conserve battery. And you can trigger it manually or configure to come ON when battery level is low.
So on a nexus 5 by running a battery saver mode, you can extend you battery life by up-to 90 mins of usage with in a typical single day use. And it is just the overview of L, and it contains much much more.
And developer preview SDK is available on developer.android.com, and early system images is also posted for the nexus 5 and nexus 7 so that you can start developing for android. And truly it is as amazing as rumours were about it, what do you think?
