Chris Lacy, the developer behind the well-known Action Launcher, has uncovered something in the APK file of the Clock app that comes in Android O: the manifest.xml mentions hours, minutes, and seconds as layers with default values, and the icon has separate images for the background and different elements.

That logically lead him to deduce that starting with Android O, the Clock app's icon will be animated to show the current time. That will happen both when the Clock is placed as a shortcut on the homescreen and when it's inside the app drawer.

Chris also used that animation in his latest Action Launcher release, which we wrote about a couple of days ago. That allows users from Lollipop onward to see the live animated clock icon without needing Android O on their devices. It even offers it as a widget as well.

You can check Chris' (short) investigation and findings in the source link below. Then you can all write a comment about how Android is just now adding a function that was there in iOS many years ago.

Source: The Blerg