Android

According to Google, the latest version of Android that�s smarter, faster, and more powerful than ever. Android 8.0 or Android Oreo brings you new ways to develop more efficiently. Android Oreo gives you many new ways to extend your app and develop more efficiently. Here the list of new style and specification of Android 8.0.

Whats new in Android Oreo?  

1. Picture-in-picture
Android 8.0 (API level 26) allows activities to launch in picture-in-picture (PIP) mode. PIP is a special type of multi-window mode mostly used for video playback. PIP mode is already available for Android TV; Android 8.0 makes the feature available on other Android devices.

2. Notification Channels
A notification is a message you display to the user outside of your apps normal UI. When you tell the system to issue a notification, it first appears as an icon in the notification area. To see the details of the notification, the user opens the notification drawer. Both the notification area and the notification drawer are system-controlled areas that the user can view at any time.

3. Auto Sizing Text box
Android 8.0 (API level 26) allows you to instruct a TextView to let the text size expand or contract automatically to fill its layout based on the TextViews characteristics and boundaries. This setting makes it easier to optimize the text size on different screens with dynamic content.

4. Downloadable Fonts
 Android 8.0 (API level 26) and Android Support Library 26 introduce 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.

The Downloadable Fonts feature offers the following benefits:

•     Reduces the APK size
•     Increases the app installation success rate
•     Improves the overall system health as multiple APKs can share the same font through a provider. This saves users cellular data, phone memory, and disk space. In this model, the font is fetched over the network when needed.

5. Shortcut Pinning

Static shortcuts should provide links to generic actions within your app, and these actions should remain consistent over the lifetime of your apps current version. Good candidates for static shortcuts include viewing sent messages, setting an alarm, and displaying a users exercise activity for the day.

6. Managing Webviews
Android provides several APIs to help you manage the WebView objects that display web content in your app.

This page describes how to use these APIs to work with WebView objects more effectively, improving your apps stability and security.

7. Media Features
Audio focus enhancements

Audio apps share the audio output on a device by requesting and abandoning audio focus. An app handles changes in focus by starting or stopping playback, or ducking its volume.

8. Notification Badges
Android 8.0 (API level 26) introduces functionality for displaying notification badges on app icons in supported launchers. Notification badges show notifications associated with one or more notification channels in an app, which the user has not yet dismissed or acted on. Users can turn off badges for notification channels or apps from the Settings app. Notification badges are also known as notification dots).

9. Autofill Framework
Users can save time filling out forms by using autofill in their devices. Android makes filling forms, such as account and credit card forms, easier with the introduction of the Autofill Framework. The Autofill Framework manages the communication between the app and an autofill service.
Benefits

Filling out forms is a time-consuming and error-prone task. Users can easily get frustrated with apps that require these type of tasks. The Autofill Framework improves the user experience by providing the following benefits:

•     Less time spent in filling fields Autofill saves users from re-typing information.
•     Minimize user input errors Typing is prone to errors, especially in mobile devices. Removing the necessity of typing information also removes the errors that come with it.

10. Fonts in XML
Android 8.0 (API level 26) introduces a new feature, Fonts in XML, which lets you use fonts as resources. You can add the font file in the res/font/ folder to bundle fonts as resources. These fonts are compiled in your R file and are automatically available in Android Studio. You can access the font resources with the help of a new resource type, font. For example, to access a font resource, use @font/myfont, or R.font.myfont.

11. Adaptive Icons.
Android 8.0 (API level 26) introduces adaptive launcher icons, which can display a variety of shapes across different device models. For example, an adaptive launcher icon can display a circular shape on one OEM device, and display a squircle on another device. Each device OEM provides a mask, which the system then uses to render all adaptive icons with the same shape. Adaptive launcher icons are also used in shortcuts, the Settings app, sharing dialogs, and the overview screen.

12. Wide-gamut color
A ColorSpace is used to identify a specific organization of colors. Each color space is characterized by a color model that defines how a color value is represented (for instance the RGB color model defines a color value as a triplet of numbers).

Each component of a color must fall within a valid range, specific to each color space, defined by getMinValue(int) and getMaxValue(int) This range is commonly

. While it is recommended to use values in the valid range, a color space always clamps input and output values when performing operations such as converting to a different color space.

13. Java 8 language APIs
Updated Java language supports.

14. Multidisplay Supports
Beginning with Android 8.0 (API level 26), the platform offers enhanced support for multiple displays. If an activity supports multi-window mode and is running on a device with multiple displays, users can move the activity from one display to another. When an app launches an activity, the app can specify which display the activity should run on.


Sources: https://developer.android.com/