Top Features in Android 11? Android 11 2020

Android 11 introduces great new features and APIs for developers.

  

New Experiences-

Device controls

Android 11 includes a new ControlsProviderService API that you can use to expose controls for connected, external devices. These controls appear under Device controls in the Android power menu.

Media Controls

Android 11 updates how media controls are displayed. Media controls appear near quick settings. Sessions from multiple apps are arranged in a swipeable carousel which includes streams playing locally on the phone, remote streams, such as those detected on external devices or cast sessions, and previous, resumable sessions in the order they were last played.

Users can restart previous sessions from the carousel without having to start the app. When playback begins, the user interacts with the media controls in the usual way.

Screens

Better support for waterfall displays

Android 11 provides several APIs to support waterfall displays, displays which wrap around the edge of the device. These displays are treated as a variant of displays with display cutouts. The existing DisplayCutout.getSafeInset() methods now return the safe inset to avoid waterfall areas as well as cutouts. To render your app content in the waterfall area, do the following:

·        Call DisplayCutout.getWaterfallInsets() to get exact dimensions of the waterfall inset.

·        Set the window layout attribute layoutInDisplayCutoutMode to LAYOUT_IN_DISPLAY_CUTOUT_MODE_ALWAYS to allow the window to extend into the cutout and waterfall areas on all edges of the screen. You must make sure that no essential content is in the cutout or waterfall areas.

Hinge Angle Sensor and Foldables

Android 11 makes it possible for apps running on devices with hinge-based screen configurations to determine the angle of the hinge by providing a new sensor with TYPE_HINGE_ANGLE, and a new SensorEvent that can monitor the hinge angle and provides a measurement in degrees between two integral parts of the device. You can use these raw measurements to perform granular animations as the user manipulates the device.

Conversations

Conversation improvements

Android 11 makes several improvements to the way conversations are handled. Conversations are real-time, bidirectional communications between two or more people. These conversations are given special prominence, and users have several new options in how to interact with them.

Chat Bubbles

Bubbles are now available to developers to help surface conversations across the system. Bubbles was an experimental feature in Android 10 that was enabled through a developer option; in Android 11, this is no longer necessary.

If an app targets Android 11 (API level 30) or higher, its notifications are not presented as bubbles unless they fulfill the new conversation requirements. Specifically, the notification must be associated with a shortcut.

Prior to Android 11, if you wanted a notification to be bubbled, you needed to explicitly specify that the notification was set to always launch in document UI mode. Beginning with Android 11, you no longer need to explicitly make that setting; if the notification is bubbled, the platform automatically sets the notification to always launch in document UI mode.

There are several improvements to bubble performance, and users have more flexibility in enabling and disabling bubbles from each app. For developers who implemented experimental support, there are a few changes to the APIs in Android 11:

• The BubbleMetadata.Builder() constructor with no parameters is deprecated. Instead, use either of the two new constructors BubbleMetadata.Builder(PendingIntent, Icon) or BubbleMetadata.Builder(String).
• Create BubbleMetadata from a shortcut ID by calling BubbleMetadata.Builder(String). The string passed should match the shortcut ID provided to Notification.Builder.
• Create bubble icons with Icon.createWithContentUri(), or with the new method createWithAdaptiveBitmapContentUri().

 

 

5G visual indicators

For information on displaying 5G indicators on users' devices, see Tell your users when they're on 5G.

Privacy

Android 11 introduces many changes and restrictions to enhance user privacy. To learn more,

Security

Biometric authentication updates

To help you control the level of security for your app's data, Android 11 provides several improvements to biometric authentication. These changes also appear in the Jetpack Biometric library.

 

Additional support for auth-per-use keys

Android 11 provides more support for authentication using auth-per-use keys.

Secure sharing of large datasets

In some situations, such as those that involve machine learning or media playback, your app might want to use the same large dataset as another app. In previous versions of Android, your app and another app would each need to download a separate copy of the same dataset.

To help reduce data redundancy, both over the network and on disk, Android 11 allows these large datasets to be cached on the device using shared data blobs. To learn more about sharing datasets, see the in-depth guide on sharing large datasets.