Android P: A First Look At Google’s Boldest Mobile OS Update Yet

This year, things got a little bit different and spicier with Android as the tech giant during its I/O developers’ conference explained that instead of showing you all the ways you can use its phone operating system to do more, the company is creating features to help you use it even less. 

Android P is the upcoming ninth major version of the Android operating system. It was first announced by Google on March 7, 2018, and the first developer preview was released on the same day. Second preview, considered beta quality, was released on May 8, 2018. An operating system due to be out later this year, will have a new dashboard that tells you how often, when, and for how long you are using every app on your phone. It will also allow you to set limits on yourself. You could give yourself a half-hour of Instagram per day, for example. Once your 30 minutes is up, the icon will go from its usual eye-catching gradient to a dull grayscale.

Android P also includes a new core interface that uses iPhone-like navigation gestures and smarter ways to access functions that are usually buried away inside apps. It’s the biggest change to how users get around on their phones that I’ve seen in a long time.

Last year, Android Oreo was more about internal changes than user-facing features. This year, Android P is full of visual changes and new features. In terms of how it actually feels to use an Android device day-to-day, it could be the biggest update in years.

Parental controls for your inner child (the brain)

Tech obsession is an alerting factor and it has caused more damage to humans than good. It’s a good time for Google to introduce these idea that can help limit our tech obsessions and addiction. Harris’ “Center for Humane Tech” helped kick off waves of stories about digital distraction and addiction earlier this year, which then metastasised into worries that our social media apps are hacking into our brains.

Sameer Samat, VP of product management for Android, says that the company has been working on these tools for a long time based on user research, not a desire to draft off the growing wave of concern about distraction.

”There are 2 billion Android users. It’s the largest mobile operating system in the world,” he says. “We are the OS, and we feel like we need to be doing more around this area. We feel like we have a responsibility to do more.”

Android P has a handful of tools to help keep your phone activities in check. These tools  range from subtle tweaks to how notifications work to new features that literally keep you from using it. Also the most interesting part is the new usage dashboard. It’s an app that gives you an almost overwhelming amount of information about your phone usage. Here’s how it breaks down the data:

• How many minutes you’ve used your phone overall per day.
• How many notifications you’ve received
• A pie chart of how long you’ve used each app on your phone that day.
• How long per day you’ve used each app on your phone, broken down hour by hour.

Samat says that this dashboard is part of a two-step campaign to get you to have a better relationship with your phone. “If you think about your day, do you remember how much you’ve used your phone? Do you know what you’ve done?” Chances are, your answers to both questions aren’t very accurate.

Dashboard is designed to give you answers to those questions. Think of it as a quantified self app. Only instead of obsessing over your step count and calorie intake, you’re analysing whether or not it’s a good idea for you to be opening your work email at 11PM.

The second step after “awareness,” is “control” and for Samat, he explains that the dashboard lets you set limits on your usage. You can set a number of minutes per day that you are allowed to use each app. When you get close to the end, a notification pops up warning you that you’re almost out of time. And when you’ve reached your self-imposed limit, the app is “paused.” It amounts to parental controls (which already exist for Android), but for you instead of your child.

Wind down mode/ Do not Disturb

 The gray scaling and self-limitation doesn’t stop with the dashboard. There’s also a new feature called “Wind down.”  When you “Turn it on,” and tell it you want to go to bed, Your phone will automatically go into “Do Not Disturb mode” and become entirely grayscale, with no colour at all. It will still work, but with a (literally) stark visual reminder that you’re breaking your promise to yourself to shut the thing down and go to sleep.

However, with Android “P” when you turn DND on, your notifications literally disappear. They don’t get shown on the lock screen, the always-on display, or in your notification drawer. The only way your phone will buzz or give you any visual indication at all that somebody’s trying to reach you is if a pre-set starred contact calls.

Samat says the company is also experimenting with a new gesture. If your phone is sitting faceup on a table and you flip it, it will be able to automatically turn on DND mode. (It only works that way if the phone was  sitting on a table to start. If you just set it face down after carrying it, it won’t turn on DND.)

Notification channel

Google is also iterating how notifications work in Android P to further limit distractions. The operating system is already great at offering options (perhaps too many of them) for how notifications do or don’t buzz your phone, so in P, Google is making them easier to access.

With P, your phone will keep an eye on the notifications you’re just ignoring and swiping away every day. After a while, when you’ve swiped one away for the umpteenth time, it will offer a small prompt asking if you’d just like to disable notifications from that app (technically, that notification channel). It’s also going to let you long-press on a notification to get to that app’s notification settings. (The slow-swipe to reveal the settings gear will still be there, too.)

Even better: at the bottom of the notification tray is a new “Manage notifications” button. Tap it, and you’re taken to a screen that shows all your app notification preferences, ordered by how recently they notified you. You can also sort by which apps send the most notifications.  Not to forget, with P it also shows a richer messaging notifications, where a full conversation can be read within a notification, full scale images, and smart replies akin to Google’s new app, Reply.

There’s one more option to reduce distraction for corporate users. On Android, it’s possible to have your phone configured so you have separate “work apps” from your regular apps. In Android P, those apps are separated out into a different tab on the app drawer. At the bottom of that tab is a toggle switch to disable them. So when you go on vacation, you can also take a holiday from your work apps without having to go through the rigmarole of turning off notifications one by one.

Gestural navigation

Android P completely revamps the core navigation of your phone. There’s still a home button that you can tap to go home. And there’s still a back button within apps — don’t panic — but much of the rest of what Android users have gotten used to is changing.

In essence, Google is switching up the behaviour of the home button on Android P. You will swipe up now to go to an overview of open apps and swipe up further to go to your app tray. There’s no longer a square multitasking button, and the back button only shows up in apps.

Dave Burke, VP of engineering for Android, says that the changes to navigation on Android were made in the name of “making Android simpler but also more approachable.” It’s a counter-intuitive way to describe the new system. The way we typically think about UI (and, in fact, the way Android designers used to talk about it), is that having a visible button you can tap is better than remembering a gesture — or, in this case, several of them.

Other features added to Android P include

• New user interface for the quick settings menu
• The clock has moved to the left of the notification bar
• The “dock” now has a semi-transparent background
• Battery saver no longer shows an orange overlay on the notification and status bars
• A “screenshot” button has been added to the power options.
• A new “Lockdown” mode which disables biometric authentication once activated.
• Rounded corners across the UI
• New transitions for switching between apps, or activities within apps.
• Redesigned volume slider
• Battery percentage now shown in Always-On Display.
• Lock screen security changes include the possible return of an improved NFC Unlock.
• Experimental features (which are currently hidden within a menu called Feature Flags) such as a redesigned About Phone page in settings, and automatic Bluetooth enabling while driving

Indeed,  is a whole new world with the Android “P” and hopefully it will be worth every download once made available.

Editor’s note: some of the content of this article comes from The Verge’s exclusive look into Google’s latest Mobile OS, Android P.