Google dropped Android 11 about a week ago now and i've been playing around
with it but i've also been familiar with Android 11 with the
previous betas that were released earlier in 2020.
Now Android 11 represents quite a few fundamental changes to the operating
system and i'm going to take you through what i
think are the top six features of Android 11. First
let's talk about notification sorting notifications have
always been a bright spot with the Android operating system
especially when you compare it to iOS. In Android 11
Google has improved the notification sorting by making sure your
conversations are at the top of your notifications,
followed by your main notifications and then silent notifications.
It's a really great change because it'll keep all of your current conversations
all in one place and you don't have to go digging through your list of
notifications for them. Now do note some apps still haven't been
updated to support this just yet like Instagram's messages. Another important
part of the notifications update is setting priority for a conversation.
Doing that will move new messages in that thread to the top of your
conversations list in notifications, turn on bubbles, more on that in a bit,
it'll also use the contact's avatar as the alert icon in the notification tray
which is pretty neat. One last thing on notifications Google
made it much easier to see a recent history of notifications, so
if you accidentally swipe one away you can just scroll down to the bottom of
the notifications list and click history. Now this isn't always
enabled by default so to enable notifications history
go into your Android phone settings, click notifications,
notifications history, and then toggle on use notification history. Next up, let's
talk about media controls. Media controls were in the past shown as
a notification that would stick around while you were playing media from an app
like Spotify, Google podcasts, etc. Now in Android 11,
media controls have moved to a new space in Android's quick settings area. If
something is currently playing you'll see the new media control
as soon as you swipe down. If your media session isn't currently active,
you can still get to the media player view by swiping down again to expand the
quick settings area. If you click the gear icon
you can set the media player to stay there by default and
if you have more than one media app you can swipe through the different players
in a card navigation to get to the one you need. Now one
downside at launch is that way you can switch the media plane on your phone to
something like a bluetooth speaker headphones etc, you can't switch it to a
Google cast speaker or speaker group from this view. However
Google has confirmed that Android 11's audio output switcher
will work with cast devices once apps are updated
in the coming months. Coming in at number three is chat bubbles. Now if you are to
use facebook messenger on Android and you use the chat heads feature,
congratulations you already kind of know what chat bubbles are.
It's basically a circular icon overlay that you can drag
up and down the sides of your phone's screen. When you tap the chat bubbles
they fan out in this fun animation that shows you all of the current
conversations that you have bubbled. To get a conversation in bubble mode you
can do this by hitting the icon on a message that supports it. If you get
a message from a person while a bubble is on the screen,
you'll see the message pop up out from the bubble. Any contact that you mark as
a priority within a chat app will automatically become a bubble chat.
Bubbles are really handy when you're trying to get something done on your
phone while also continuing to converse with friends over chat. The only downside
right now is not all apps support priority and bubbles
like facebook messenger, and instagram messages don't even show up in
the conversation view yet in notifications. Next up number four on
our list is home control in the power menu.
Now if you already have a pixel device you're already somewhat familiar with
the new power menu controls. You long press the power button and
you'll see the normal controls for emergency powering down the phone or
lockdown then, earlier this year Google added a space
to see the passes and your default credit card for Google pay.
Now below that you can see there are controls for your home that you'd
normally see in the Google home app, you can control
things like your smart lights by dragging the bar for each group of
lights to adjust their percentage or tapping
the group to turn them on and off. You can also adjust things like
thermostats smart switches and you'll even be able to see a video feed from
devices like the nest hello doorbell, pretty cool stuff. Number five, screen
recording. Google has finally implemented a proper
screen recording feature directly into the OS. Swipe down to see
quick settings and click the gear icon to add
screen recording to your quick settings menu.
That's the only way i've been able to activate it so far when you start a
screen recording you'll see a countdown up at the top until it starts recording.
To stop a recording swipe down from the top and you'll see a red notification,
tap that notification to stop the recording. Then a notification with your
screen recording will be generated, making it easy to delete or share it.
Alright the last feature coming in at number six on our list is
screenshots. To screenshot something on Android now
you swipe up from the bottom of the phone,
to get into the multitasking view and then hit screenshot.
A little preview of your screenshot will appear at the bottom left corner
and you can delete your screenshot by hitting that little x.
You can also share your screenshot from this view as well as edit it.
Editing allows you to do things like crop and mark it up,
and if you're familiar with iOS this experience should be pretty familiar to
you. Now before we go one thing on another
new feature that didn't make our list, predictive apps. This feature tries to
predict the apps that you use on the bottom row of your home screen.
Now my experience for whatever reason they're just not as good as the
predictive apps at the top of the app drawer.
So they didn't make the list because i just haven't found them all that useful
and i ended up just replacing them within my home screen.
If you liked this video and found it helpful make sure you hit that thumbs up
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videos on Android and Google products like this one. For 6 Months Later, I'm
Josh Teder, thanks for watching.