One of the promised features of Android N was launcher shortcuts, a way for developers to include additional actions in their app's launcher icon following a certain gesture. There were dynamic shortcuts, pinned shortcuts, and a lot of interesting things for developers to explore that you can read about in Cody's exploration of the feature.

But Launcher Shortcuts are going away. Recode had already reported the rumor that Google was going to delay their introduction, and it turns out that was true. The latest developer documentation explains that Launcher Shortcuts will be deferred to a future version of Android (so not N) and that their APIs will be removed from the Android N API starting with the next developer preview.

They're still there in Preview 3, so developers can still tinker with them and get some interesting ideas going, but they're not long for this world. This could mean that either the feature is not close to being complete on N, or that Google may be looking at different ways to implement these Launcher Shortcuts.

Source: Android Developers

Image Credit: +Kevin Barry