We have been hearing a lot about Android Lollipop these
days. Google claims it to be one of their most ambitious release . The
developer preview has been in the market for some time and recently Google has
also announced about the general availability of Android L, so we thought of
sharing a quick preview for developers about this latest iteration in the
Android world.
From our experience it looks like that with this set of API
Google wants to provide a seamless experience across devices ( no matter whether it’s a phone, tablet , a
wearable or a Television). Some of the interesting features that we would like
to mention about Lollipop are:
a.
Material
Design : Android 5.0 brings Material
Design to Android and also provides a toolkit to bring in the latest UI
Patterns in your code. Material Design is based upon 3 principles:
i.
Material is a metaphor: The design uses attributes of real material (tactile attributes,
effect of light, motion etc)
ii.
Bold , Graphic , Intentional: Using the
foundational elements of Print Design
iii.
Motion Provides a Meaning: Primary user actions are inflection
points that initiate motion, transforming the whole design
Those who are new to Material
Design can refer to the following link for details about Material Design
Also the built in transitions and
the ability to use shared visual elements takes the user experience to another
level
b.
More
Juice: Android 5.0 provides a faster, smoother and more powerful computing
experience. Android now runs exclusively
on the new ART runtime, built from the ground up to support a mix of
ahead-of-time (AOT), just-in-time (JIT), and interpreted code. It’s supported
on ARM, x86, and MIPS architectures and is fully 64-bit compatible.
Android 5.0 also offers enhanced A/V sync. The audio and
graphics pipelines have been developed for more accurate timestamps, thus
making video and games run much smoother.
c.
Enhanced
Notifications: In Android Lollipop
the Notifications are more visible and a lot configurable. Different
notification details may be made available on the lock screen. Then amount of
content ie. None, some or All can be made available on the lock screen as
configured by the user. In coming calls and other key notifications
appear as head up notifications and can be responded without making the user
leave current app. A fair amount of meta data can also be added to
notifications as developers can now collect associated contacts, category and
priority. The media notifications is also juiced up and supports upto 6 action
buttons also custom controls like “Thumbs
up” are now available
d.
The Big
Screen Experience: For developers targeting the big screen, Android 5.0 has
something stored in the kitty. Android TV provides a TV platform to maximize
the big screen experience of the app and allows user to easily discover
content along with providing voice based
search and recommendations. Developers can now also support game controllers
and other input devices. Leanback UI framework provided with android can be leveraged to build cinematic 10-foot
UIs for TVs. The TV Input Framework provides access to
a wide range of live TV input sources and mingles them with in a single user
interface for users to relish the
content.
e.
The redesigned
“Recents” space: Android 5.0 introduces a redesigned Overview space
(formerly called Recents) that’s more flexible and useful for multitasking than
available in the predecessors. New APIs allow developers to show different
activities in an app as individual documents alongside other recent screens. The
developers can also leverage the concurrent documents to provide users instant
access to more of content or services.
f.
Next
Generation Connectivity : The connectivity has also got a boost in
Android Lollipop , three key areas where we see significant improvements are:
i. Bluetooth
Low Energy (BLE): Supports
concurrent operation allowing both central and peripheral modes
ii. Multi
Networking: Supports querying of network for features
iii. NFC
API: Allows apps to register an NFC app Id dynamically and card emulation
g. Godly Graphics: High performance 2D and 3D graphics are now
possible by support of Khronos OpenGL ES 3.1. Android 5.0 also introduces the Android
Extension Pack (AEP), a set of OpenGL ES extensions that give you
access to features like tessellation shaders, geometry shaders, ASTC texture
compression, per-sample interpolation and shading, and other advanced rendering
capabilities
h.
Support
for sensors: Tilt Detector for
activity recognition, Hear Rate Sensor for analyzing Hear rate and various
Interaction Composite Sensors for wake up, glance and pick up gestures are now
supported
i. Chromium
Webview: Chromium for Webview based on Chromium M37 adds support for WebRTC
, WebAudio and WebGL. Native support for all Web Components is also available
j. Efficient
Battery Management: With the newly introduced job scheduling APIs developers can optimize battery life by
deferring jobs for the system and schedule them to run at a later time or under
specified conditions, such as when the device is charging or connected to
Wi-Fi.
k. Capture and Share Screen: Android 5.0
lets you add screen capturing and screen sharing capabilities to your app. With
user permission, you can capture non-secure video from the display and deliver
it over the network if you choose.
l. Enhanced
Sounds: A new audio-capture design offers low-latency audio input. The new
design include a fast capture thread that never blocks except during a read;
fast track capture clients at native sample rate, channel count, and bit depth;
and normal capture clients offer resampling, up/down channel mix, and up/down
bit depth. Multi-channel audio stream mixing allows professional audio apps to
mix up to eight channels including 5.1 and 7.1 channels.
Apps can expose
their media content and browse media from other apps, then request playback.
Content is exposed through a queryable interface and does not need to reside on
the device.
Apps have
finer-grain control over text-to-speech synthesis through voice profiles that
are associated with specific locales, quality and latency rating. New APIs also
improve support for synthesis error checking, network synthesis, language
discovery, and network fallback.
Android now includes
support for standard USB audio peripherals, allowing users to connect USB
headsets, speakers, microphones, or other high performance digital peripherals.
Android 5.0 Lollipop also adds support for Opus audio codecs. There also are
new MediaSession APIs for controlling media playback to make it easier to
provide consistent media controls across screens and other controllers.
m.
Lights,
Camera, Action
Android 5.0
introduces all new camera APIs that provide the ability to capture raw formats
such as YUV and Bayer RAW, and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO
sensitivity, and frame duration on a per-frame basis. With the new
fully-synchronized camera pipeline developers can capture uncompressed
full-resolution YUV images at 30 FPS on supported devices.
Along with
images, there is the option to capture metadata like noise models and optical
information from the camera. Apps sending video streams over the network can
now take advantage of H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) for optimized
encoding and decoding of video data.
Android 5.0 also
adds support for multimedia tunneling to provide the best experience for
ultra-high definition (4K) content and the ability to play compressed audio and
video data together.
