Android M Official

A Peek into Features 1

It's been a little while the Android 5.0 has been available, but Google have announced officially the release of another update to it mobile Operating system. Some of it's features have been mentioned by Google, but let's take a look at some more.

Improved text selection and floating toolbar

While text selection has not really been an area that receives noticeable change during updates, this time Google made efforts to ensure that with M, you now get a floating toolbar with clear cut, copy, and paste buttons, with overflow menu for additional options such as search or translate. The selection now also moves forward word by word instead of letters to make it easier to mark text but you can go back to select letter by letter.

There will also be undo/redo keyboard shortcut buttons.

Direct Share

Android is already the most share-friendly mobile platform there is, but it keeps improving on ways to share as Android can now learn which apps you share content to frequently and place that at the top of the list, so if you share photos to the Facebook app a lot, it will be at the top. Direct Share also lets you share content to specific people that you contact you the most, so they are placed directly in the share sheet instead of having to hunt them in the contacts list.

App Standby

Apps now doze,which puts the device in a deep sleep state when not used for long periods of time to save power. App Standby does this for individual apps. When the OS detects an app hasn't been used in a long period of time then it automatically puts it on standby, which disables its network access and suspends its syncs and jobs. When you plug in your device for charging, these apps can resume syncing in the background as usual. 

Improved volume control

 

A lot of people were upset by the lack of a traditional Silent mode in Lollipop. With M, the silent mode is back, accessed by holding down the volume button and then once again to exit the vibrate mode. Only alarms work in the Silent mode, as they used to.

Google also brought back the extended volume control options, which let you control the media and alarm volumes by a drop down next to the ringtone volume level. The Interruptions feature has been removed from the volume bar and now is a separate feature listed below.

Do not disturb quick setting

M has a new Do not disturb button in the notifications, which is essentially the previous Interruptions feature. You can choose between Total silence mode, Alarms only mode, or Priority only mode. You can customize these options from the notifications or the Settings app.

Adoptable storage devices

Apps now see your External Sd card as internal storage which means Users can now add an SD card, which will then be adopted by the system to behave like internal storage. The memory card will be formatted and encrypted and will be seen like internal memory. You can then install apps and other private data easily onto the memory card.

Auto backup for apps

Google will now perform full automatic data backup and restore for apps designed for M. The data will be in your Google account and will be synced across devices.

Changes to UI

M brings a handful of changes to the UI. First thing you'll notice is the new app drawer, which lists apps alphabetically in a vertically scrolling grid and shows most used apps at the top. There is a search button at the top as well. Even the widgets drawer has a vertically scrolling design.

The lockscreen also gets a different font for the clock and the voice search button replaces the dialler in the bottom left corner.

Google got rid of the Google Settings app and now all the options are listed inside the main Settings app under an option called Google.

Swiping up from the Home button bring the new Google Now on tap UI with a new animation. Now on tap is not yet available even in the developer preview but you can still use the Google Search bar which is available at the top.

The animations in general on M are more dramatic. There are some new animations for interactions and all the UI elements pop in and out with greater flourish. If you didn't like the animations in Lollipop, you are probably not going to like this either.

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