Android O — What’s New For Users? — Part 2

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AndroidPub

4 min readJul 18, 2017

This is the second part of the post Android O — What’s New For Users? In this part we will go through few changes on Android O which only advance users will notice. I recommend you to read the first post if you haven’t read it already.

Android O — What’s New For Users? — Part1

Whenever we receive an android update what is the first thing that we all do? We start looking for what’s new.

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Notifications

Background Notifications

Persistent notifications are more compact as shown above for Wynk Music application.

Android system now tells you if an app is displaying a screen overlay, which is both Good and Bad.

Good because you can come to know what apps are running as foreground and be safe from issues like Cloak & Dagger.

Applications can no longer draw on top of System UI so if there is any malware installed, you will get a notification that it’s displaying over apps and navigation bar and status bar is still under your control.

Bad because for few apps it shows multiple notifications for the same app. e.g in the case of Facebook Messenger, it shows 3 notifications as shown below, which is just insane. Let’s hope Google finds a better way to solve this problem.

There is already one improvement on the way for apps running foreground service with active notification as mentioned by Daniel Sandler.

If you have multiple apps running in the background then Android system will combine those while showing app in background notification (Phew.. Thank God!).

Notification Channels

Android O introduces notification channels using which you can control how different kind of notifications for an app behaves.

For Example, Google Maps application shows categories of notification which you can control.

If you have downloaded offline maps google maps, it shows notification when it’s about to expire and when a re-download is required; you can now control the importance of that notification as shown in the third screen above.

You can also launch the Google Maps Settings screen directly from the Additional settings in the app option.

Advance Search in Settings

The setting application now lets you search installed applications directly from the main screen with more contextual information.

Installing an APK File

Installing an apk is now much easier than before, prior to Android O we had to enable install from unknown sources option from settings to install apk outside the Google Play Store.

Android O introduces application wise permission for installing an application. For example, if you receive an apk in Slack and try to install it it will show a dialog as shown below.

APK install installation shows a determinate progress bar which is non-cancellable after a certain point.

Smart Storage Options

Device storage options now shows much more useful details like categorizations of the apps and free up space.

FREE UP SPACE shows if photos and videos are not backed to Google Photos, Downloaded items which you may want to delete to clear space, and the apps you have not been using for a long time.