It is now a year ago that Google announced Android Lollipop (5.0), also known as Android L. The new version of Android was a total overhaul of the old Holo design, and they transformed it into Material Design. And tons of improvements under the hood, it was also the biggest change in Android seen in years. Every year Google will announce a new version of Android, and today at Google I/O they officially announced Android M.
Just like with Android L last year, the latest candy-flavored version of Android doesn’t have a release name for the public and the version number also needs to be released yet. But, the names and number will be different than the final release at the end of this year.
Android Lollipop’s biggest change was Material Design, which offered a total new look and feel for Android. Beyond those changes there also were a lot of changes under the hood like the adoption of 64-bit support and the movement to ART as the default runtime. Android M doesn’t change much at the Material Design interface, and at my first look it is a small upgrade with some new features. But don’t think that it just Android Lollipop with a few new features, there are plenty of improvements and additions. They’re aiming to squash tons of bugs and simplify certain features to make our lives easier.
One of the biggest changes of Android M is granular permissions support. Shorty, you can now approve permissions of the app, instead of granting all the permissions when you install a app. You’re also able to go into settings and disapprove certain permissions you gave to the apps earlier. The only downside to this system is that developers now need to use Android M SDK, and because of that there will be a lot of apps that don’t use this until they get updated.
And that is just the beginning of Android M, they also improved the battery life in Android M by using the feature: Calling dozing, simplified volume control improves the somewhat wonky controls that were used in Android L, support for Android M and so much more. Google is also improving the payment process with Google Pay, which will be able to use the Android M integrated fingerprint reading abilities, which makes the transactions even safer.
The announcement unfolded a little while ago, and we’re starting to dig in all the news of Android M, so if we’ve more news we will post more articles with all the latest news. We can tell you that a Developer review is on its way for the Nexus 5, 6, 9 and the Nexus Player with a final release expected in Q3.
Thank you for reading this, I hope you liked it! As always from me #NeverSettle for anything less than the best and latest news. Come back as more awesome news will be online soon!
There were many more things announced at the Google I/O 2015. Know all of them at http://www.truetech.tk/io15feed
