Google officially unveiled its new Pixel lineup last week featuring a bunch of features exclusive to those phones, however every other feature was part of the new Android 7.1 update.
Google has now confirmed with its developer community about an opportunity to test the new update before releasing to the public later this year. The Android 7.1 developer preview is set to make its debut by the end of the month and to recap, here’s what’s new:
Android 7.1 delivers the productivity, security, and performance of Android 7.0, along with a variety of optimizations and bug fixes, features, and new APIs (API level 25).
For developers, Android 7.1 adds new capabilities to help you drive engagement in your app and deliver an improved user experience, such as:
App shortcuts API — lets you surface key actions directly in the launcher and take your users deep into your app instantly. You can create up to 5 shortcuts, either statically or dynamically.
Circular app icons support — lets you provide great-looking rounded icon resources that match the look of Pixel and other launchers.
Enhanced live wallpaper metadata — lets you provide metadata about your live wallpapers to any picker displaying the wallpapers as a preview. You can show existing metadata such as label, description, and author, as well as a new context URL and title to link to more information.
Android 7.1 also adds these much-requested developer features to the platform:Image keyboard support — expands the types of content that users can enter from their keyboards, letting them express themselves through custom stickers, animated gifs, and more. Apps can tell the keyboard what types of content they accept, and keyboards can deliver all of the images and other content that they offer to the user. For broad compatibility, this API will also be available in the support library.
Storage manager Intent — lets an app take the user directly to a new Settings screen to clear unused files and free up storage space on the device.
For carriers and calling apps, the platform includes new APIs to support multi-endpoint calling and new telephony configuration options.
