What’s new in Android Oreo for developers

With every release of Android, comes the responsibility of updating your app to include the new features. This year Google made sure you have a lot to choose from and pick what feature suits your apps. The 8th major release of Android Operating System came with the name of a delicious cookie, Oreo. Along with new features and capabilities, Android 8.0 (API level 26) includes a variety of system and API behavior changes. Let us see what are the new features that every developer should look out for.

This is one of the most anticipated feature in Android both for users and developers. This feature was available in Android TV in the previous release, but with Oreo it’s available for all devices. With Picture-in-picture mode user can minimise your app into a smaller floating window and switch to another app. The perfect use case for this feature is the a Video calling app.

Picture-in-picture in action (source: https://developer.android.com/)

Notifications

Another big change to the User Experience in Android Oreo is Notification changes. Many new functionalities were added to notifications. Users can now long press on the individual icons to get the notifications from that app along with app shortcuts.

Notification Channels allow you to create a user-customizable channel for each type of notification you want to display.

Notification dots for displaying dots, or badges, on app launcher icons. Notification dots reflect the presence of notifications that the user has not yet dismissed or acted on. Currently this feature is available as third party launchers, but now it’s a functionality in the operating system.

Notification timeouts, snoozing, settings, dismissal callbacks, background colors are the other features to look out for.

Autofill Framework

This is a common feature we often see in our browsers while filling forms. This feature is very helpful for users in filling long forms. Now it is available in the Android OS and your apps can take advantage of it. All you need is to provide some metadata to the Operating system to autofill the input data. For example, provide [AUTOFILL_HINT_USERNAME](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#AUTOFILL_HINT_USERNAME) for a username or [AUTOFILL_HINT_CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#AUTOFILL_HINT_CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER) for a credit card number to be filled in that specific edit text box.

Background execution limits

There has been a lot of effort in this release to optimize the battery life of your device.

Apps that are running in the background now have limits on how freely they can access background services.

Apps cannot use their manifests to register for most implicit broadcasts (that is, broadcasts that are not targeted specifically at the app).

By default, these restrictions only apply to apps that target Oreo. But, users can enable these restrictions for any app from the Settings screen, even if the app has not targeted Oreo. So you should revisit those Service classes and make necessary changes.

Background location limits

Android 8.0 limits how frequently background apps can retrieve the user’s current location. Apps can receive location updates only a few times each hour. This is another step toward optimal battery usage.

Fused Location Provider, Geofencing, Location Manager, Wifi Manager, GNSS Measurements and GNSS Navigation Messages are the APIs that are affected due to these limits.

Downloadable Fonts

Android Oreo introduces support for APIs to request fonts from a provider application instead of bundling files into the APK or letting the APK download fonts. The feature is available on devices running Android API versions 14 and higher through the Support Library 26.

These fonts will be downloaded and cached and available system wide for all apps to access.

Autosizing TextView, Adaptive Icons, Color Management, Multi-display support, Networking and HTTP(S) connectivity are some of many other changes that are worth taking a look.