What’s New in Android 11

Android 11 introduces great new features and API’s for developers. Android 11 now has the interesting feature to schedule when your device should shift to dark mode and many more exciting features. Android 11 includes a new controlsProviderService API that we can use to expose controls for connected, external devices.These controls appear under device controls in the Android Power menu. Media controls in Android 11 are located near the quick settings.The Latest Android 11 has put more focus on how to make interaction between people more effective.

New Features

Screens:

Android 11 has now come up with the several better API’s to support waterfall displays which wrap around the edge of the device.these displays are treated as a variant of displayswith display cutouts.The existing Displaycutout.getSafeInset()method now returns the safe inset to avoid waterfall areas as well as cutouts.

Hinge Angle sensors and Foldables:

Android 11 has made it possible for apps running on devices with hinge based screen configuration to determine the angle of the hinge by providing a new sensor with TYPE_HINGE_ANGLE and a new Sensor Event that can monitor the hinge angle and provide measurement in degrees between two integral part of the device.

Improvements in conversation:

Android 11 has come up with the better ways to handle the conversation.Conversation has now become real-time,bidirectional communication between two or more people.Conversation area now given special importance .

Chat bubbles:

Chat bubbles is similar to what Facebook has been offering for years with its messanger app on android.this feature makes sure that you don’t miss out on any conversation amongst other notifications.Bubbles are now available for developers to help surface conversation over the system.

5G Visual Indicators:

In Android 11 with API Level 30 and higher apps with android.Manifest.Permission_Read_State permission can request telephony display information updated via PhoneStateListener.On DisplayInfoChanged().This includes a radio access technology for marketing and branding purpose.

The new API ha come up with various 5G icon display for different carriers.the Suppported Technologies includes the Following:

• LTE
• LTE with carrier aggregation(LTE+)
• Advanced PRO LTE(5Ge)
• NR(5G)
• NR on millimeter-wave cellular bands(5G+)

Wireless Debugging:

Android 11 has now come up with support for the deploying and debugging the app wirelessly  from your work station via Android Bridge(Adb).We can noe deploy our debuggable app to multiple remote devices without physically connecting the device via USB and contending with common USB connection such as Driver installation.

To bring the Wireless Debugging in use ,we need to pair our device to our workstation using  a pairing code

ErrorDetection using the native memory allocator:

GWP-ASan is a native memory allocator feature that helps to find the bugs.GWP-ASan is enabled on some randomly selected system application and platform executable on process start-up.Enabling this feature helps to find out the memory related bugs and prepare the app for the ARM Memory tagging extension.It collects additional information about all the allocation that it intercepts.It is designed not to incur any Significant CPU overhead.

Neural Network API(1.3):

It Supports inferencing by applying. The Android Neural Network API is an Android C API designed for running computationally intensive operations for machine learning on Android devices.It provides a base layer of functionality for high level machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow Lite,Caffe2 which builds and train the neural networks.

Inferencing has many benefits like:

• Latency
• Availability
• Speed
• Privacy
• Cost

Text and Input:

Android 11 introduces new API to improve transition for input method editors like onscreen keyboards.This has made it easier to adjust yor app’s content in synchronization with the IME’s appearance and disappearance with other elements like status and navigation bars.

Media:

Android 11 includes a new Mediacodec API’s that hgives apps more control when allocating input and output buffers.This will help in managing memory more efficiently.

Android 11 has come up with the new classes and new methods:

• LinearBlock
• OutputFrame
• QueueRequest

New Methods:

• getQueueRequest()
• getOutputFrame()
• LinearBlock.isCodeCopyFreeCompatible()

Also, the behaviour of two methods in MediaCodec.Callback() have changed.

Graphics:

Android 11 has much more improvement in field of graphics also with the help of following :

• NDK image decoder
• Frame rate API
• Requesting and checking for low latency support
• Performant Graphics Debug layer injection

Images and Camera:

In Android 11 we can mute only vibrations or both sound and vibrations while using camera.

There is expanded camera support in Android emulator in the newer version of Android 11.The features that have been added are:

• Raw capture
• YUV Reprocessing
• Level 3 devices
• Logical camera support
• Concurrent cameras
• Emulating sensor orientation by using data from sensor manager
• Applying video stabilization by reducing handshake frequency
• Applying edge enhancement by removing the upscaling usually done in the YUV Pipeline.

Connectivity:

Android 11  has also improved some connectivity features which are mentioned  below:

• Wifi Passpoint Enhancement
• Expiration Date enforcement and notification
• FQDN matching
• Self-signed private CAs
• Allow Multiple Profiles with identical FQDN
• Installing profiles without a Root CA certificate
• Improved Home and Roaming Provider Matching

Android 11 has expanded the WIFI Suggestion API to increase the app’s network management capabilities.connectivity management apps can manage their own networks by allowing disconnection requests.Passpoint networks are integrated to the suggestion API  and can be suggested to the User.Analytics API enable to get information about the quality of the network.

Resource Loaders:

Android Android 11 introduces a new API that allows apps to dynamically extend how resources are searched and loaded. The new API classes ResourceLoader and ResourceProvider are primarily responsible for providing the new functionality.They provide the ability to supply additional resources and assets, or modify the values of existing resources and assets.

App Process exit reasons:

Android 11 introduces the ActivityManager.get HistoricalProcess ExitReasons() method ,which reports the reasons for any recent process termination .Apps can use this information in order to gather the crash diagnostic information.

APK Signature scheme V4:

Android 11 adds support for the APK signature scheme V4.This scheme produces a new type of signature file in a separate file but is otherwise similar to v2 and v3.this scheme supports ADB incremental APk Installation.

ADB incremental APK installation:

This feature accelerates the process of installing large Apk’s on a device by installing enough of the APK to launch the app while streaming the remaining data in the background. Adb install will use this feature automatically if supported by the device and if we have the latest SDK Platform tools installed.If not supported, then default installation method is silently used.

Dynamic Intent Filters:

This feature allows the apps to chage their intent filters at runtime which was not available in Android 10.In order to receive intents,an app must declare at compile time which types of data it is able to receive by defining an intent filter in the app manifest.

Android 11 introduced the MIME groups, a new Maifest element which allows app to declare a dynamic set of MIME type in intent filter and modify it programically at runtime.

Autofill enhancements:

Android 11 introduces improvements for autofill services by using the following:

• Hint identifiers in AssistStructure.ViewNode
• Dataset shown events
• Data sharing with content capture service

Privacy:

Android 11 has added more feature in terms of privacy to keep the user’s secure and to increase the transaparency and control.

Scoped storage enforcement: Apps with Android 11 are always subjected to the scoped storage behaviours.

One time Permission: User’s can grant temporary accesss to location ,microphone and camera through a one time permission.

Permission auto-reset: If the user haven’t used an app for months on Android 11,the system auto resets the app’s sensitive permsissions.

Background Location Access:Android  11 changes how the usercan grant the background location permission to apps.

Package Visibility:Android 11 has changed the query and interaction of apps with other installed apps on the same device.

Foreground Service Type: Android 11 has changed how these foreground services can access camera and microphone data.

Security:

To increase the security of the app’s data,Android 11 has come up with several features like:

• Biometric authentication Updates
• Secure sharing of large dataset

Biometric authentication updates: Android 11 has introduced the BiometricManager .Authenticators interface that defines the type of authentication for the Biometric manager class supports:

BIOMETRIC_STRONG

BIOMETRIC_WEAK

DEVICE_CREDENTIAL

Secure sharing of Large dataset: In order to help in reducing the data redundancy. Android 11 caches shared datasets that support use cases such as machine learning and media playback with the help of BlobStoreManager which is new in system service manager in android 11.

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