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Here are all the little changes in Android 11 Developer Preview 1
Opening links, compatibility testing, and even the Pixel Launcher all have improvements
The first developer preview of Android 11 is here, and even though it's just the first of many pre-release builds, there are still a ton of new features and changes. We've already written dedicated posts for most of the visible updates in Android 11 — you can see all of our coverage here — but there are also some smaller tweaks that aren't quite substantial enough for several paragraphs of explanations.
Google recently introduced the improved Nest Wifi mesh router system with integrated Assistant speakers. If you think that means you'll have to scramble to buy discontinued Google Wifi devices to expand your existing Google Wi-Fi network going forward, you'll be happy to learn that it's possible to use any Google Wifi and Nest Wifi devices in combination. You can add or replace some of your gear with Assistant-equipped access points.
Inter-operability in the smart home isn't a given. Even when using standards like ZigBee and Z-Wave, you'll still find products from different companies that don't work well together. This is why today's news that Fibaro's devices are now compatible with SmartThings is quite nice to hear.Fibaro is well known across Europe for making its own smart home solutions — hub and all — and it's been expanding in the US as well. It uses Z-Wave for its products and until now, those required community-written code to work with the SmartThings hub if you didn't have Fibaro's own. Now you don't need that. You'll be able to add the company's sensors and devices directly in the SmartThings app without any tinkering.
The Google Assistant's bag of smart home tricks is growing at breakneck speed. At the beginning of this year, the Assistant supported 1,500 devices; by May, that figure had ballooned to more than 5,000. Now, with little fanfare, the Google Home support page has been updated to show that more than 10,000 devices from more than 1,000 manufacturers play nice with Google's ecosystem.
Google has been consistently updating its Android Auto compatibility lists every few weeks for quite some time now. Back in October of last year, the amount of car models and head units with Android Auto crossed 400, which is no small feat. Almost a year later, that figure has grown by another hundred.
Wear OS users in Poland and Russia are now able to use Google Pay on compatible watches, bringing the number of countries with Wear OS/Google Pay capability to seven: those two plus the US, UK, Spain, Australia, and Canada. With both Poland and Russia having a healthy number of financial institutions supported by Google Pay, this is nice news for users in those countries.
As a die-hard and stubborn football fan, I know nothing about basketball except that you have to bounce the round thing on the floor at regular intervals. But I do know quite a bit about Android gaming, like the fact that a $7.99 game that includes up to twenty bucks in in-app currency purchases will be dismissed out of hand by both frugal free-to-play gamers and traditionalists who prefer to pay once for the full experience. So prolific publisher 2K Games is getting the worst of both worlds with the pricing structure of NBA 2K16.
HBO Now is the premium cable service's olive branch to cable-cutters, an attempt to reach out to the IPTV crowd before competition from Netflix an the like starts to seriously impact their bottom line. So why they chose to limit HBO Now to Apple devices in the first place is a bit of a puzzle - surely you'd want to make a paid service available to as wide an audience as possible? In any case, it wasn't too long before HBO Now came to standard Android devices, but support for Android TV was still missing. Until today. Sort of.
We're also happy to confirm that both the Nexus 5X and 6P will work with all major carriers in the US across GSM, CDMA, and LTE, just like the Nexus 6 did. Here are the wireless bands from both phones, per the specs page on the Google Store:
At this point my choice of music service boils down to which one will let me store all my music in the cloud for the least amount of money... and actually work long enough to play it (lookin' at you, Google Play Music). So, Amazon Music and the Prime service it's associated with are looking more attractive these days. If you're one of the very few early adopters of Android Auto, you can now use the app with Google's vehicular electronics system.
If you're a Samsung phone owner hoping to play with the manufacturer's custom-made game recording app, you might just be able to today. Game Recorder+ has been updated to work with a few new devices, plus improved compatibility for new Android 5.1 builds and better performance.
Google's compatibility definition document (CDD) is meant to provide guidelines, requirements, and recommendations to Android device manufacturers who want their devices to be "compatible" with the latest release of Android, allowing them to pass Google's Compatibility Test Suite.
Since Google I/O we've been waiting anxiously to see which apps would be among the first to gain compatibility with Chrome OS. As Sundar Pichai explained at this summer's conference, Google plans to get Android apps running natively on the company's desktop OS, using App Runtime for Chrome.
The latest Dropbox update should give early adopters of the Android L preview something to smile about. This release addresses the showstopping compatibility issue that has thus far plagued the app, so users should now be able to use the cloud storage app on their pre-release mobile operating system of choice without experiencing an instant crash.
Update: Director of Product Management for Google Wallet Peter Hazlehurst dropped by our comments section below to confirm that Wallet is not compatible with the new Nexus 7 for the same reason as the HTC One Play Edition – the device does not carry a secure element, the small bit of hardware required to store encrypted card credentials on a device. This is required in order for Wallet to function, well, securely.
Pushover, a "simple push notification service" that essentially allows web services, scripts, and a lot more to send notifications to your mobile device, got an update recently to version 1.6 (and soon after, 1.6.1), which brought on a couple more nifty features.
When Stargate Command launched on the Google Play Store a couple of weeks ago, there were shouts of "For cryin' out loud!" heard 'round the Android gaming community. If you had trouble installing the game thanks to an absurdly limited number of "compatible devices," then boot up your DHD and grab a handy Zat gun: it's now showing compatible with just about everything we can throw at it.
There aren't many things in this world that can be as purely amazing as LEGO. The only people who aren't fans of the world's best creativity toy are people who (mistakenly!) think the company has sold out and encourages kids to follow pre-made instructions instead of building something new. To that I say: Mindstorms EV3. With Android compatibility out of the box. Your argument is invalid.
Grand Theft Auto III, the car-stealing, open world game that came to Android in celebration of the series beginning ten long years ago, got a nice update today, bumping it to version 1.3. Besides the usual bug fixes, the GTA update expands the game's compatibility to ASUS' Eee Pad Transformer Prime and the Medion Lifetab, while also adding support for Gamestop's wireless game controller, and enhanced controls for other gamepads and Sony's Xperia Play.
Since its launch, we've had bittersweet feelings about the Amazon Mobile app for Tablets. The app shows promise as a tablet-friendly shopping solution, but until now has suffered an extremely limited compatibility, only working with tablets running 4.1 and up and carrying a 1280x800 resolution.