Everything You Should Know about Android Q and Its Features

What is Android Q and its Features

Android Pie may still be rolling on mobiles, but we’re looking ahead to Android Q and it’s significant changes to Android. Google yet to reveal the full name of the Android Q, Available for Beta testing on various mobiles and the number of rumors and leaks that we’ve seen.

Here’s everything we should know about Android Q so far.

Live Caption

On top of hardware innovation, we’re continuing to see Android’s AI transforming the OS itself to make it smarter and easier to use, for a wider range of people. A great example is a Live Caption, a new feature in Android Q that automatically captions media playing on your phone.

Live Caption brings real-time captions to media on your phone – videos, podcasts, and audio messages, across any app—even stuff you record yourself. Best of all, it doesn’t even require a network connection — everything happens on the device, thanks to a breakthrough in speech recognition that we made earlier this year. The live speech models run right real time on the phone without leaving the audio stream on your device.

Suggested actions in notifications

In Android Pie, they have introduced smart replies for notifications that let users engage with your apps direct from notifications. We provided the APIs to attach replies and actions, but you needed to build those on your own.

Dark theme

The people can set or access the Dark theme through the Display settings in Android. It seems as though you can schedule Dark mode depending on the time of day, or you can have it always on or always off. When enabled, all apps will have a dark gray tint to them, while panels like the Quick Settings shade have a black background. The Dark mode seems to work in most stock Google apps, but it may also work in third-party apps that don’t have their own Dark mode, according to the report. There are plenty of reasons you might want a Dark mode. Apart from it being a bit easier on the eyes, Dark mode could save battery on phones with OLED displays.

Focus Mode

Google also wants to make it a little easier to put down your phone and concentrate on other things. Focus Mode allows you to turn off notifications for certain apps, only keeping notifications for the apps that are important to you. Once you turn Focus Mode off, notifications from all apps will be able to show up again.

Gestural navigation

Many of the latest Android devices feature beautiful edge-to-edge screens, and users want to take advantage of every bit of them. In Android Q we’re introducing a new fully gestural navigation mode that eliminates the navigation bar area and allows apps and games to use the full screen to deliver their content. It retains the familiar Back, Home, and recent navigation through edge swipes rather than visible buttons.

Users can shift to gestures in Settings > System > Gestures. Currently, there are only two gestures: Swiping up from the bottom of the screen takes the user to the Home screen, holding brings up Recents. Swiping from the screen’s left or right edge triggers the Back action.

Foldables

Android is quickly adopting the foldable phone trend. We already knew that Google was working on ways to natively support foldables in Android, and that support will come in Android 10 Q. Critical improvements come in the form of how apps resize and added support for multiple-display app switching.

Better privacy and security

Android Q puts privacy controls front and center. Privacy controls will now be right at the top in the Settings menu, making it quick and easy to change those settings. Not only that, but Google is tweaking how location information is shared with apps. Now, you can choose to share location information only while the app is in use — similar to how location permissions work on iOS.

Faster sharing

The sharing feature in Android has always been pretty slow and Google confirmed it was working on a way to change this a few months ago. In Android 10 Q, Google is adding “Sharing Shortcuts,” which will allow users to jump directly into an app to share content, like a file or photo. This way, users can avoid the slow-to-load sharing menu and get straight to sharing.

In-app settings panel

With Android 10 Q, users will be able to quickly and easily toggle settings that pertain to the app. The example Google gives is that users will be able to toggle things like Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity from within a web browser, meaning that you don’t necessarily have to navigate to the Settings menu. It makes accessing settings that little bit easier and should come in handy for developers, too.

Depth formats for photos

When a camera with multiple lenses takes a photo, that depth information is stored along with the photo itself — and in Android Q, apps will be able to request that information. What that means is that users will be able to edit things like bokeh and blur to a photo within different apps, which could come in handy with apps that have specialized photo editing features.

HDR10 Plus Support

Google developing support for HDR10 Plus into the Android operating system, meaning that you’ll get better-quality video capture no matter what app you’re using. On top of that, Android is getting support for the AV1 video codec, which will help allow media providers to stream higher quality video to Android phones.

Other changes

Android, in general, is set to get a little faster too. Google is continuing to expand Vulkan within Android and is strengthening ART performance, which should help apps load faster and use less memory once they have loaded.