Android N Developer Preview rolls out early with Multi-window support baked-in

Google today decided to surprise everyone with a developer preview build of Android N. At present its just called N and it may be named through an online poll.

The surprising part of the roll-out is that Google generally reserves Developer Preview builds till their annual I/O conference which is scheduled to take place in May this year. The reason for that is simple, gather as much feedback as possible from developers and for us consumers, it means an early tasty new Android treat.

Without any further ado, let's have a look at what's new in Android N:

Multi-window

The biggest change with Android N will be native support for multi-window or dual-window mode where you can interact with two applications side-by-side. Samsung and LG already have their versions of multi-window for a number of years now and are quite refined. Let's see what Google brings to the table with this feature.

Unlike iOS, multi-window mode will not be restricted to just tablets, you would be able to use it on smartphones as well although there may be restrictions put in place based on display size or resolution for optimum performance. TV's will also get support for the dual window feature, but there it would be displayed as picture in picture overlay.

Direct Reply Notifications

You will now be able to directly reply from notifications, without having to tap it to go into its app. This will make multitasking on Android even better. As you get a notification, you can just check it from the re-designed notification shade, choose to reply or ignore and carry on the work you were doing earlier. 

Then there's a new way of bundling notifications. Developers will now be able to group notifications for their apps and users can choose to expand them with the new expand button for bundled notifications.

Doze Mode Improvements

Battery-life on Marshmallow improved quite a lot for even some older Nexus devices including the Nexus 5X. With Android N, Google has made Doze Mode even better. At present Doze mode tries to figure out if you are using the phone or not, but with Android N it will kick into action as soon as your phone's display goes off.

Miscellaneous

For Developers, Google has added support for Java 8 language. There are improvements in performance and Google has also added a Data Saver mode built into Android N itself which would allow users to reduce the amount of data used by apps.

Although there is not much information about it, but the company says they have managed to reduce bandwidth usage by limiting streaming bitrate for videos, reducing image quality and reducing pre-caching for webpages.

Download

The Android N Developer Preview is now available to download for the Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6 smartphones. You can also try it out on the Nexus Player, Nexus 9 or Pixel C tablet. At present though Nexus 5 is not listed among devices ready to get the developer build.

You can download and install factory images for your respective devices from here. 

Source: Android Developers