The app info screen in Android has always been hugely useful, and it's even more so in Android 6.0. You can uninstall an app, see permissions, change notification settings, and more. Google made it a little harder to access an app's info page in Lollipop, but in Marshmallow it's easier again. It's just a tap away from the recent apps list.
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Google is done shrugging off its easter egg in Android M. While the Preview releases show a string of ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ after tapping the Android version number repeatedly in settings, the official Marshmallow release will have an honest-to-God easter egg. Here is a look at it in the screenshot below.
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Every major version renaming of Android brings with it a series of new graphics and designs to enjoy that are interspersed across the interface. One of these is the USB Debug icon that shows up in the notification bar. Traditionally it has followed the naming of the version, but with two eyes and two antennae, so on Android 5.0 and 5.1, we had a mutant lollipop-insect icon, and over the previous versions we've seen all kinds of desserts become droid-like creatures.
When Android M's previews were released, the icon was a simple M graphic akin to the M logo but in plain white, because we didn't know what the dessert name would be.
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The nice thing about having a huge public beta test is that, well, you get to test stuff. Apparently the reaction to the new dedicated Memory section of the Settings menu wasn't everything that Google had hoped for, because it's been given a notable redesign in the brand-new version 2. The most striking change is a new overview screen that appears when you first tap Memory. Now it shows you the total memory in use with a readout in MB or GB, instead of breaking it down by apps. You can view the readout by hour increments: three, six, twelve, or an entire day.
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"Tap to wake" is advertised as a feature. Instead of reaching for your power button every time you want to wake up your phone, you simply tap the screen a few times instead. It reduces hand contortion and puts less abuse on the physical button all at the same time.
But maybe you accidentally toggle it more often than you would like, and you would rather do away with the feature entirely than continue to deal with rampant pocket dials and general battery wastage. For you, Android M appears to have added a setting that lets you toggle this feature on and off.
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Stop the presses! We have groundbreaking news for you, fellow Android lovers with a knack for detail and an insatiable thirst for Material. If you remember Lollipop, you'll recall that this archaic OS had an even more archaic icon for Bluetooth when you went to share something. Oh, you've already hard reset your brain and can't recall anything prior to M? Here, let me jog your memory with a screenshot.
Left: Barfville. Right: Yeah baby yeah!
See? That's L on the lllleft and M on the mmmmright. It looks earth-shatteringly better, doesn't it? A material icon with the boldest bluest color and the longest shadow'est effect.
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One thing we haven't seen change much in Android over the past several versions is the hotspot feature. I'm sure many of us have used it quite often, but it's one of those things that basically works fine as it is.
Left: Nexus 5, Right: Nexus 6
With Android M, however, Google is bumping the hotspot feature up to version 2.0, which includes one somewhat major new feature: the ability to broadcast in 5GHz mode. Naturally, the hardware has to support this as well (in the developer preview it's only available on the Nexus 6 and 9), so not all devices will be capable of producing a Wi-Fi signal in this frequency.
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