Android 11 is here sort of
not really it's only the first developer preview and google has released it even
earlier than they usually do so the few big changes that are here are still a
little janky but that jankiness can tell us what to expect from the future of
Android so we installed Android 11 on our pixel 4xl so you don't have to
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so as usual this Android developer preview can only be installed on pixel
devices and a couple of other models essential being one
rest in pieces it requires a bit of know-how in order to flash the os and
has a bunch of glitches as we said a minute ago if you're not actually a
developer you should not install this on your personal device unless you're
looking to make your phone simultaneously more interesting and
less usable okay so let's dive in probably the most noticeable end user
facing feature in this release is the built-in screen recorder it's pretty
bare bones with no options for anything like frame rate or resolution but hey
it's it's finally there google teased us by adding this feature
to the developer preview of Android 10 and then yanking it from the final
release but while it was hidden in the developer options last year this time
around it's right there in the quick settings
which indicates we'll probably see it in the version that ships a man can dream
next up is bubbles or as most people know them basically the facebook
messenger chat heads this was another feature found in the Android 10
developer options in Android 11 it's properly baked in long pressing on any
message notification will give you the option to pop it out as an always on top
bubble and if you find even having that option to be offensive you can disable
bubbles for specific apps right now there's a glitch where tapping the
bubble will open the whole app which i'm pretty sure isn't supposed to happen but
i'm pretty sure i'm not supposed to download these developer previews either so
now you might also notice that messages are now grouped together in the
notification panel under conversations so you don't have to scroll through a
million celebrity gossip notifications before you find your friend's text
neat i don't have those on my phone i don't have celebrities
now for some smaller features we finally got a proper dark mode google calls it
dark theme in Android 10 and now like do
not disturb night light and the focus mode you can schedule it to turn on and
off at certain times to correspond with when you're feeling more edgy pinning
items to the share menu makes a return from freaking Android nougat bluetooth
will stay on if you have something like headphones connected when you turn on airplane mode and the pixel 4
specifically has another motion sense gesture tapping the air above your phone
will pause and play music making that feature about
1.65 percent more useful there's a bunch
more tiny changes but before we get to that i want to talk about what is useful
in this release because it's really the more under the hood stuff in Android 10
we got the option to let an app use a certain permission like location access
or audio recording all the time none of the time or only when we were using it
and in Android 11 you can grant access to an app only this time for greater
privacy control if you deny an app a certain permission twice it will stop
asking you not only that but background location permissions which let an app
grab your location anytime it wants will basically be off for all apps even
google maps unless the user specifically goes into settings and enables it
there's some more cool under the hood stuff 12 new modules are being added to
project mainline that's google's initiative for streamlining Android
updates by kind of breaking the os into chunks that can be individually updated
through the play store instead of making people wait for the big giant system
update to get to their phone more modules means more os elements that can
be updated that way so you always want more modules but
things are a bit less clear when it comes to another Android 11 change the
arrival of scoped storage this is less
of a new feature and more of a fundamental restructuring of the way
Android handles its entire file system basically each app has its own isolated
storage instead of every app having access to every part of your phone there
would be a few common directories that every app could access like the music
photos and downloads folders although you could grant apps like file explorers
access to the whole system this would be a huge step forward for security and
privacy as it means one bad app couldn't snoop around your whole system and
message your secret cookie recipe to the whole office secret cookie recipe what
it's it's nudes i'm talking about nudes the problem is
some developers don't seem super down with the idea partially because a it
requires a bunch of work to modify their apps to work with the new system and b
google has chosen an API called storage access framework or saf that's way
slower at reading and writing files than the existing API google basically gave
devs a warning with Android 10 that they'd be making the change and there's
some indication that with some optimizations saf's performance impact
isn't so horrible in Android 11. so hopefully either devs suck it up or
google capitulates and chooses a different API and i'm sorry developers
it's probably going to be the first one but don't be sad because now we're going
to fly through the rest of the tiny things hidden in the developer preview
that's fun first off swiping between home screens has a little jiggle now
what is this Android jello sorry there's a hidden page for
notification history so we might get the ability to see what notification we just
accidentally swiped away that would be very welcome a hidden command can put
media playback controls into the quick settings menu instead of in a
notification which would make both the media controls and the notifications
that are usually beneath it slightly easier to access in the developer
options there's a toggle to display a fraps style refresh rate indicator but
on the pixel 4 it only really switches between 60 and 90. so hopefully that
gets more granular there's a settings page for battery share indicating the
pixel 5 might be able to charge other devices like samsung's wireless power
share cool and you can tell what bluetooth codec
your wireless headphones or speaker is using in the developer options i like
and then there are some features hidden in the code that other people on the web were able to activate but i couldn't
because i'm just a simple boy you might be able
to customize a double tap on the back of pixel phones to launch a particular app
you might be able to split the notifications and quick settings menus
so you can swipe on the left or right side to only call down one or the other
and you might be able to choose specific colors for your quick settings icons so
you can differentiate them more easily oh wait you can definitely do that
because i did it with some adb commands
a kid on my level but again all of those features may or may not make it to the
final release of Android 11 when it launches probably with the pixel 5 this
fall google just throws us some crumbs and we have to
either eat them or buy a non-pixel phone and install a
launcher and get all these features through third-party apps anyway
so really either way you can get what you want
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hey thanks for watching guys if you're looking for something else to watch now
go watch the video where we installed Android on a nintendo switch
so it's a blue let's blow your mind dude