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Android 13's prepping a new option for apps trying to keep it on the down-low
Devs can stop their app from appearing on full display in the Recents menu
We're still eagerly awaiting the first Android 13 beta to arrive this month, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of new details worth diving into. Esper.io's Mishaal Rahman returned yesterday with a new deep dive into all the nooks and crannies of the next major Android release, and while it's primarily developer-focused, there are a couple of interesting points that may impact how you use your smartphone.
You can share links directly from the Recents menu in Android 12 Beta 3
Copy or share URLs across all of Android
Sharing is everything these days. Whether you're sending a list of your favorite restaurants to a friend from out of town or just passing along the latest viral story, having quick access to all of your links is essential. With Android 12, Google is looking to make it a little faster to reach and share links, no matter your browser of choice.
Android 12's app switcher now has a boring opaque background
At least the color still matches your home screen, sort of
Themes are a big part of Android 12, offering all-new ways for customizing your phone as much as you want. Unfortunately, there are a couple of places where it seems like Google has locked everyone into a single visual element. In Android 12 Beta 2, the Recent apps page has replaced your wallpaper with a new solid backdrop that uses Monet to pull colors from your wallpaper.
Google announced last month that one of the plans for Wear 2.0 had been to make the platform easier to update with software upgrades from the Play Store rather than relying so much on sending out a barrage of firmware updates. In the v2.6 update, quite a few improvements and little tweaks have been made to the interface, including new connection indicators, download status notifications, a recent app complication, and more.
While maybe not the biggest change in Android N, Google announced a few interface changes to app switching that were particularly well-received during the I/O keynote. A couple of them had already popped up in the Developer Previews, but the keynote serves as confirmation that they will make it to the final builds. A change that is new to all of us is that there will be a reduction in the number of apps shown in the recent apps UI. Anything that hasn't been used "in a while" will be hidden from the user.
One of the coolest features in the first two Android N previews was the fast app switching feature of the overview button. It was essentially like alt-tab on Windows, and it made it a breeze to cycle through recent apps. In the new developer preview, Google appears to have drastically scaled back this feature. You can only toggle between two apps now.
Android 5.1 made some major changes to the way recent apps are handled in Android. You can include Chrome tabs in the recent app list, and apps that are called up from another activity get their own card to keep things more consistent. However, Google also decided to never clear the list of recent app cards. It just goes on and on and on... it's kind of annoying. "Recently" from Chainfire fixes that, but you need root.
In the last several versions of Android, it was possible to quickly access an app's info screen (in Settings) by popping open the recents menu and long-pressing the app in question. If this is an oft-used feature and you've already updated to Lollipop, then you probably noticed almost immediately that it's seemingly gone in 5.0. That's not actually the case - it's just hidden.
While CyanogenMod is generally regarded as the biggest and best of the innumerable custom ROMs, some of the others tend to implement interesting additions to Android much sooner. The latest nightly builds of CM 11 (Android 4.4) have added something that's not exactly new, but should be very much appreciated by immigrants from other ROMs. Users can now long-press the physical or virtual Recents button to quickly open the last app "under" the current one. Observe:
We've known about Project Hera for quite a while, and at Google I/O today, it was confirmed by Google's Director of Product Management for Chrome, Avni Shah. Hera is a new way for the web and apps to interact with each other on Android via an API, allowing apps like Chrome and Docs to use multiple scrolling items in the Recents menu at one time. Combined with the visual overhaul in the L release, this may drastically change the way that users interact with content.
One of the fundamental differences between Android and every other mobile operating system is the practically unrestricted capability to run services. Without this freedom we could not enjoy something as powerful as a homescreen widget or as straight-forward as a Twitter client with background updates. Aside from games and very simple utilities, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find an app that doesn’t run a service, at least for a short span of time. However, a bug has snuck into recent versions of Android and it can cripple background processing in some apps and widgets.
There are a lot of apps like SwipePad, and no matter how many we cover, I keep coming back to the original. Loopr is the first app in a while that's tempted me away, thanks to both an impressive visual presentation and some thoughtful features. At its heart Loopr is a a quick app launcher/switcher with the usual side-swiping mechanism, this time launched as a semicircle of icons similar to Circle Launcher Widget.
A few months ago I wrote "Stock Android Isn't Perfect," an article where I turned my usual harsh UX critique on stock Android, instead of just picking on TouchWiz and Sense all the time in my reviews. The article went over pretty well, and even got a few responses from Googlers! I didn't cover everything that was wrong with Android, though, and there have been a bunch of updates since the original article, so it's about time I wrote a sequel.
International HTC One X Receiving OTA Update With Sense 4.1, Android 4.0.4 - Brings Recent Apps Button Remapping And More
Update: Here's HTC's official statement regarding the update, which elaborates on the changes in greater detail: As part of our ongoing commitment to
Update: Here's HTC's official statement regarding the update, which elaborates on the changes in greater detail: