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- Our friends at XDA Developers took a deep dive into Rules on the recently released Android Q Beta 5. Apparently, the Tasker imitation is already fully functional there. The team was able to create and trigger rules on a Pixel 2 XL, although they're speculating that only the upcoming Pixel 4 might receive the feature at launch, since Google hasn't talked about the new functionality at all during the Q preview phase.
Android has always been known as a system open to deep integrations with third-party applications, allowing us to automate our devices through services like Tasker and IFTTT. However, Google intends to change that with Android Q and wants to make it harder for apps to hook into the OS as a security measure. To compensate this, the company now appears to be working on a Rules app similar to a very rudimentary Tasker that allows you to reproduce some of its abilities natively.
Google has released the latest version of its mobile OS, Android 10, but what's new? Your eagle-eyed Android Police editors (with your help) have been combing through the latest version for months since the earliest Android Q betas looking for new features, changes, improvements, and even setbacks. We've enumerated everything we've found here, together with a brief description of what it is or does. So, let's take a look at Android 10.
The share sheet in Android 10 has seen many a change. It's supposedly faster, has new previews for links and images before sharing them, eight direct share targets, and four suggested apps on top, plus it uses a strict alphabetical order for apps. What we hadn't noticed, even though it's been there since Beta 3, is one other improvement: apps can no longer hijack the share sheet by naming their targets as "Add to."
Ever since Android 10's first betas, we started noticing bits of information pop up at the top of the general settings section. We've seen them for everything, from available Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices to notification channels, customizable styles and themes, and more. A new suggestion is making its way to that area and, this time, it's for the Play Store.
Back in April, our friends over at XDA found an unfinished app called Pixel Themes hidden in the then-new Android Q Beta 2. We didn't hear anything about this app for months, but now that a new app called ThemePicker's been uploaded to AOSP, we've gotten a better look at it.
One of the small but nifty additions of Android Pie was a little trick that helped you stop your phone from going to sleep by simply touching the fingerprint sensor. The gesture stopped working in Android Q during the beta stages and isn't there in the final 10 release. It also looks like Google won't be fixing this anytime soon.
Android P introduced a rather magical ability for smart text and image selection (on Pixel devices, mostly in English). When you opened the app switcher, a.k.a. Overview or Recents, you could tap and hold on any text or image to share it to another app. This allowed users to circumvent certain apps' lack of a proper share menu, so you could send Instagram pics as proper images via other apps, instead of sending post links. The same was true of Spotify album art or Facebook images, and more. Sadly, in Android Q beta 2, this isn't working.
Android Q is nearing a stable release, but there are still tidbits of new information surfacing. Back in July, when Google accidentally pushed an internal test build to the public, XDA Developers found hints that the latest OS version could support advanced customization options for Pixels. They should allow owners to choose clocks, styles, wallpapers, and more. In Beta 6, some users saw evidence that this could indeed end up in the final release when they got the Settings suggestion to "Customize your Pixel." Tapping it leads to the pre-installed wallpaper app for now, though.
All the way back in Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google added a 'Trusted Face' mode to Smart Unlock, giving all devices a slightly-secure way of unlocking with the front camera (the easily-fooled face unlock in Android 4.0 doesn't count). However, many people on the latest Android Q beta are having issues with it. If you're in that group, don't worry, there's a fix you can try.
In years past, some of the Easter eggs hidden in major Android releases included a kitty collection game, a Flappy Bird clone with lollipops, and a Flappy Bird clone with marshmallows. Android Pie's Easter egg simply showed the letter 'P' with moving circles, but Android Q's is slightly more fun.
Google decided to introduce a new version of gesture navigation in Android Q, which is an excellent idea. The 2-button gesture nav design from Pie was, let's face it, terrible. The new full gesture navigation system in Q has some good ideas, but the back gesture is a mess. Google's latest attempt to fix that in Beta 6 isn't going to be enough.
During its I/O press conference, Google announced several improvements to Digital Wellbeing including a tight integration with Family Link, enabling parents to set screen and app usage limitations for their children's devices. The feature was said to be coming in Android Q, but we hadn't yet seen it in any beta release. With today's update to Digital Wellbeing, the integration appears to be going live.
Before Android Q Beta 5 launched, details from a leaked internal build were already doing the rounds on Reddit. This gave us a glance at some functionality that didn't make it into the publicly available beta build, like an option to change the back gesture's sensitivity. Another feature from the internal build has now surfaced that offers to translate the contents of an app preview in the Recents screen.
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.
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.
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- This feature is partly broken as of Q Beta 4. Trying to enable the setting in developer options merely results in a crash, booting you back out as the setting remains toggled off. Presumably, this will also affect the "alternative" slightly-tweaked dark mode we spotted (which was probably a bug).
Google has officially announced dark mode for Android Q at I/O and has updated the Material Guidelines telling developers how to properly implement the theme in their apps. But of course, there's always going to be some apps that simply won't receive a gray look, be it because it's abandoned or just not a priority to the developer. To test how the OS could circumvent these, Q Beta 3 introduces a brute method that forces all apps into dark mode.
One of the changes introduced with Android Pie was a list of suggested apps and App Actions in the drawer and the Overview screen when you were switching between apps. However, that was a customizable setting that you could disable if you wanted. With Q's latest Beta 4, the setting is gone, meaning you can't get rid of those icons if you don't want to see them.