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It's been a long journey traveling from P to Pie through the Android 9 developer previews, but Google has recently finished its newest version of Android. The platform has worked its way down Alphabet's alphabet all the way to "P," with this latest version first landing back with the March 7th release of developer preview 1. We've since learned that Android P stands for Pie, but that's only one among a long list of changes present in Android 9, and we've been keeping track of all of them.
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Android P Beta 2 / DP3 just landed earlier today, and while we're digging in to look for new features, a few of the more visually apparent additions have already been revealed. Today's release includes support for Unicode/Emoji 11.0—which was technically only officially released yesterday—as well as some tweaked gender-inclusive family and couple emoji which more closely follow the Unicode standard.
A cool little feature in the Android P Developer Previews was that you could select text and images from any item on the Overview screen. Unfortunately, it stopped working on original Pixel devices — intentionally, it seems, as Google support marked an Issue Tracker complaint about it "Won't Fix (Intended Behavior)." But the feature has now made it to the full release of Android 9 Pie, even on 2016 Pixels.
Moving the Google search box to the bottom of the Pixel launcher was a divisive change, although it makes complete sense to me. From the moment the first developer preview of Android P was released, Google began messing around with unimportant things like the transparency of the launcher dock, but one useful little addition was that of a microphone icon in the search widget that could be used to summon the Assistant. As of the latest (and final) developer preview, the mic has vanished.
Google just dropped the fifth developer preview of Android P and there aren't an awful lot of changes for us to pick through. That makes sense since it's the last beta before the final release later in the year, which we can expect to look very much like it does right now. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed one small change, however, in the shape of a new auto-rotate icon.
It was recently pointed out to us that Android P lacks support for the Wi-Fi Protected Setup authentication mode. WPS, as its known, is a protocol that allows a client Wi-Fi device to connect to a router using a PIN or a push-button and is widely regarded as being deeply insecure. In short, the PIN-based method for authentication is inherently crackable with a brute force attack, and the PIN mode is required to be enabled by default on routers with WPS support, making using WPS at all a Very Bad Idea.
It's been years since I've used anything more than two homescreens on my Android devices, let alone tried to reorder any of them in different ways. However, if switching your screens around is something you're used to, prepare yourself for disappointment with Android P. The Pixel Launcher has removed the feature, and seemingly so has Launcher 3.
Since Android 8.1 (even 8.0 on Pixel phones), the OS has had a divisive prompt that warns you if you toggle mobile data on or off using the quick settings toggle. Personally, I find this useful, since I never turn data off intentionally. If I do, it's probably by mistake, so this extra step is a good way of mitigating against that risk.
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- The little weather icon is back in DP3, and it should be here to stay. Like the upcoming events feature, it was initially broken because an update to the Google app didn't support it, but there isn't a Google app update pending. We're not expecting it to disappear.
Remember when you could add whatever widgets you wanted to the Android lock screen? Unfortunately, those days are long gone, but Android P is bringing a subset of that functionality back. If you liked using weather widgets on your lock screen, you'll be happy to know that Android P now displays the weather underneath the clock.
Android P's second developer preview is making quite a few changes to the lock screen. We already discussed its display of the weather on the lock screen and ambient display, but it turns out that upcoming events are being shown on the lock screen now as well.
If there is one feature I've wanted in stock Android for a long time, it's the option to disable the vibration. I hate it with all my might and can't comprehend how so many OEM versions of Android have already understood the need to have a separate vibration option whereas stock just keeps it enabled regardless. Your phone rings? It has to vibrate too. No easy silent mode either, only vibrate or DND. Ugh, it's incomprehensible. But luckily, Android P has the burgeoning of a solution.
With the launch of the second developer preview of Android back in May, Google added a surprising and useful feature to the Overview interface. You could highlight and copy text and also make use of Android's smart text selection functionality. Optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities meant you could also pull text from images.
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Direct Bluetooth file transfers have been available on Android since time immemorial, but Android P adds a long-overdue related feature. You can finally see a list of all transferred files. The menu is nestled in the connection settings—it's actually been there for a while, and no one noticed.
In Lebanon, when someone says it's 3 o'clock and it's daytime, we all know they mean 3pm and not 3 o'clock in the morning. So you can imagine my confusion when I moved to France for a year where everyone uses the 24-hour format and I had to do the mental gymnastics every time (pun intended) to figure out the correct time. There are countries where this is the norm and others where it's not, but until now, you had to manually pick that setting in your Android phone. Not with P though.
Bluetooth section and NFC toggle in Android P DP4 moved to 'Connection preferences' settings submenu
One of the more minor additions to the previous Android P DP3 release was a series of Bluetooth changes, including an aptly descriptive "Previously connected devices" section and a reorganization for the Bluetooth toggle into its own Bluetooth section. Now DP4 has further reorganized both that Bluetooth subsection and the NFC toggle into the "Connection preferences" subsection.
The recently-released Android P developer preview 4 is meant to be one of the last two release candidates—according to Google's initial released timeline—and in general that means polishing up existing features more than introducing a lot of new ones. Even so, a few new tweaks are present in this latest build, like a new slider for controlling call volume in Settings -> Sound.
One of the new features in Android P is 'App Actions,' where your phone will try to predict your next action based on previous usage. For example, if you connect your headphones, an App Action for launching Spotify might appear.
The original Android P developer preview added a neat rotation toggle that let you lock the screen into portrait or landscape when auto-rotate was disabled. Google has played around with how to present this feature, and the new dev preview makes the biggest change yet. The button has been completely redesigned, and it shows up in a different location (sometimes).
Android P is shaping up to be a pretty sizable milestone for the platform, but although the beta releases have been surprisingly stable, they aren't without bugs. They are "previews" after all, and in the latest image, there is one small regression worth noting: SafetyNet tests are failing. As a result, services like Google Pay which check for device security using SafetyNet are also broken, though not every phone on the latest previews is affected. According to a few recent reports, a server-side fix for the issue may be rolling out.