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Participating in the latest betas is always a fun, but not risk-free endeavor. You get to try out things before anyone else and observe how a software evolves before it's released to the public. Android Q's gestures, for example, have seen several iterations across beta versions and now the most recent gestures are making their way to the Nokia 8.1 with the latest Beta 5.
Quite a while ago, along announcing the new Android Auto experience, Google also said that it would deprecate the interface for phones completely. It encourages its customers to use Assistant Driving Mode instead, which is poised to come out "this summer." Android Q is apparently already preparing for this, as some users on the latest beta report that the Android Auto app icon is disappearing for them, with no option to start the app from their phones anymore.
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Android Q Beta 5 officially lands today. As expected, it doesn't deliver a ton of changes or new features, representing the first so-called "release candidate" for developers to test their apps against before the final release later this summer. There are a few new tweaks in Beta 5, though.
Picture this. You're watching a video or playing a game in fullscreen, and you want to exit it. You think to yourself, no problemo, I'll just swipe from the side of the screen to trigger the navigation buttons then tap back. Or if you're using gestures, you swipe from the side thinking it'll trigger the back function. Either way, that swipe worked well on Pie and earlier, but it was removed in Q betas. We had to wait for Beta 5 to see it brought back.
Launched in December of 2018, Google Sounds is the company's replacement for the default ringtone picker on Android. It's like Google Wallpapers, but for sounds. The app has now received an update to version 2.1, which brings two important changes: a dark mode and the option to manually add ringtones.
With Android Q, Google is focusing on privacy and battery optimizations. The new OS version makes location permissions more granular and allows us to grant them only when interested apps are in use. Contrary to this new-found privacy focus, the latest beta switches all apps that you've previously granted location access "only while in use" to "allowed all the time." Luckily, it also addresses this issue by sending you a notification whenever an app asks for your location in the background.
Side menus — or navigation drawers or hamburger menus, whatever you want to call them — are a burr in the saddle of Android Q's gesture navigation system. Swiping in from either side of the screen with gestures enabled takes the user back one layer, a behavior obviously at odds with menus meant to be accessed by the same action. The next beta update will address that discordance, though, according to Googler Chris Banes.
Android Q's new gesture navigation is a vast improvement over the two-button nav bar introduced in Pie, but it still has quirks that need to be worked out. Particularly, the back gesture interferes with the swipe-to-open option for side menus. Google promised a fix in the form of a peek gesture, but that still feels very unfinished as of Beta 5. However, this release adds a two-finger swipe from the side of the display to open those slide-out navigation menus, and it's as awkward to use as it sounds.
Every major Android update changes the way notifications work in several ways, but those of us who follow Beta revisions to the OS know Google experiments with even more temporary modifications before settling on a final version. We've already covered the new naming, grouping, and snoozing features for notifications in Android Q Beta 5, but another aspect has been tweaked as well: lockscreen notifications.
We're getting close to the finish line for Android Q, so Beta 5 (understandably) doesn't have many major changes. However, Google is sneaking in a few updates to notification management before the final Q release, including even more alterations to how snoozing works.
At today's announcement of Android Q Beta 5, Google revealed that it was going to move custom launchers off of the new gesture navigation system as of Beta 6, defaulting to the old three-button method if you use one. While that might sound like a reason to worry, this change is merely an "an unfortunate, yet short-term inconvenience" in Action Launcher developer Chris Lacy's words. Google has confirmed it will bring gesture support for third-party launchers "in a post-launch update" for Android Q.
Some early builds of what appeared to be Beta 5 have been circulating for the last week or so, with a few folks seemingly getting it ahead of schedule. From those reports, a handful of features and subtle tweaks in Android Q were spotted. While at least one of those features is present in the latest official Android Q Beta 5 release, many of them are not.
One of the most popular tweaks offered by many third-party Android launchers/home screen replacements looks like it might be coming to Google's Pixels. According to a report by the folks at XDA Developers, the Pixel Launcher in a future Android Q release (originally pegged to be Beta 5) may include a gesture that allows swiping down to expand the notification shade from anywhere on the homescreen.
Proponents of dark mode, here's one more thing to tick off your wishlist for a black digital world. The upcoming Android Q Beta 5, which isn't yet available but has already leaked... twice, will offer a new dark boot animation when your phone is set to use the system-wide dark mode.
In addition to the previous Beta 5 leaks, more details are starting to trickle out from those that got in on the program a bit early. Someone over on the /r/android_beta subreddit (/u/Charizarlslie) reports being included in a US Carrier's testing program for Beta 5, and in addition to confirming the previous "Back Sensitivity" setting, he's spotted a snazzy, colorful new animation to accompany the gesture that triggers the Assistant in the new gesture navigation mode.
Earlier today, a redditor claimed to have received the Android Q Beta 5 update early. At the time, a few details in the apparent leak gave us pause, but the folks at 9to5Google have seemingly confirmed that the update was legit, and a new "Back Sensitivity" setting related to Android Q's fully gestural navigation system was discovered. It could have something to do with the gesture-related tweaks that Google revealed yesterday.