Android 5.0 runs across our favorite screens,
from phones to tablets, wearables, TVs, and even cars.
I'm Ankur Kotwal, a developer advocate at Google.
And I'm going to show you the developer
highlights of this tasty new treat.
Let's start with material design.
Material design is a new approach
for designing apps in today's multi-device world
that takes a comprehensive strategy to visual, motion,
and interaction design.
Android 5.0 brings material design
to their platform with a full set of tools
for implementing it in your apps.
The system is incredibly flexible,
allowing your app to express its individual character
and brand with bold colors and a variety of responsive UI
patterns and theme-able elements.
The support library has also been
updated to provide backward-compatible UI widgets,
allowing you to bring the modern beauty of material design
to all their devices.
Next, the lock screen lets you surface content, updates,
and actions to users at a glance without needing
them to unlock their device.
The notification APIs provide visibility controls
to let you declare the sensitivity of the information
displayed on your notifications.
This is particularly important, as users
can choose to show or hide sensitive content on their lock
screen.
Instant messaging apps should declare their notification
content to be private, whilst media playback
apps should declare this to be public.
Heads-up notifications display content and actions
in a small floating window managed by the system,
no matter which app is in the foreground.
Notifications are appropriately themed,
and you can express your brand further
through accent colors and other customizations.
These enable your apps to prominently notify users
without pulling them out of their current activity.
You can get further details about the new notification
APIs at the following DevByte.
WebView has been updated to Chromium M37,
bringing security enhancements, stability enhancements, and bug
fixes.
With this release, WebRTC, WebAudio, and WebGL
are included.
But here's some awesome news-- WebView
is now unbundled from the system and can
be updated through Google Play.
This will provide the latest web enhancements to users
and the latest Web APIs to developers.
How cool is that?
Another cool initiative is Project Volta,
which focuses on improving battery life
and has resulted in power optimizations
across the platform.
These are new tools to help your app run efficiently
and conserve power.
Battery Historian, a tool included in the SDK,
lets you visualize power events over time
and understand how your app is using power.
The JobScheduler API lets you minimize battery impact
by setting the conditions under which your background tasks
and others jobs should run, such as when the device is idle,
connected to an un-metered network, or to a charger.
The JobScheduler is one of my favorite new APIs.
Android 5.0 ships with the Android Runtime
known as ART as the system default.
ART offers ahead-of-time compilation, more efficient
garbage collection, and improved development and debugging
features.
In many cases, it improves the performance of your app
without you having to change your code.
64-bit support has also come to Android in this release.
It adds 64-bit ABIs, provides additional address space,
and improved performance with certain types
of compute workloads.
Apps written in Java running on DEX bytecode
can benefit on 64-bit architectures
with no code changes.
For apps and games that use native code,
NDK release 10b includes 64-bit support
and is available for download.
Another new feature is concurrent documents
in Recents, which lets you organize your app into tasks
and present these concurrently as individual documents
on the Recent screen.
For example, each Chrome tab can now
be a separate document in Recents.
Users can flip through Recents to find the specific Chrome
tab they want and jump straight to that site with a single tap.
A new set of capabilities is Android in the Workplace, which
enables a unified interaction model
across both personal and workplace apps,
making it easier for employees to have
a single device for personal and workplace use.
Framework enhancements offer a unified view
of Apps, Notifications, and Recents
in a single launcher across both personal and workplace apps.
For photo lovers, the Camera2 API
gives you new APIs for managing image capture and processing.
On supported devices, your app can capture uncompressed YUV
captures in full eight megapixel resolution
at 30 frames per second.
The API lets you capture a raw sense of data and control
parameters, such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity,
and frame duration on a per-frame basis.
You can get further details about using this API
at the following DevByte.
There are a boatload of new features for game developers,
starting with support for OpenGL ES 3.1.
This gives you compute shaders, stencil textures,
and texture gather for your games.
Android Extension Pack is a new set
of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring
desktop-class graphics to Android.
Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation
and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture
compression across multiple GPU technologies.
The sound architecture has been enhanced,
resulting in lower input latency and the addition
of multichannel mixing.
This DevByte covers enhancements for game developers
in more detail.
Android 5.0 has new connectivity features.
Devices can now function in Bluetooth Low-Energy Peripheral
Mode, or BLE Peripheral mode.
Apps can use this feature to broadcast their presence
to nearby devices.
For example, you can now build apps
that let a device function as a pedometer or health monitor,
and transmit data to another BLE device.
Apps can also work with the system
to dynamically scan for available networks
with specific capabilities, and then automatically connect.
This is useful for when you want to manage hand-offs to connect
to a specialized network, such as a carrier-billing network.
There are many more APIs in Android 5.0--
over 5,000 of them, in fact.
You can get started developing and testing on Android 5.0
right away by downloading the Android 5.0 platform and latest
support library from the SDK Manager.
I look forward to seeing your beautiful material design
apps on screens everywhere.