"Android Developer Blog" Android N Developer Preview 2, out today! (APRIL 2016)

Android N Developer Preview 2, out today!

Last month, we released the first developer preview of Android N, which gives you a sneak peek. Your feedback helped us find bugs and added new features. Now, the second version of the developer Preview is ready to continue testing your app.

The latest preview fixes some of the bugs you've found for us, such as not being able to connect to hidden Wi-Fi (AOSP 203116), Multi-window pauses (AOSP 203424), and closing the current activity (AOSP 204411) with a quick reply. Simply cite these few examples. We are still testing to find more questions, please continue to feedback to us at N Developer Preview issue tracker or N preview community.

New gadgets:

Last month's developer preview introduced many new features, such as multiple windows, bundled notifications, and more. This time apart from the functionality, there are also some new things to bring:

• Vulkan (Vulkan): Vulkan is a new 3D rendering API that, as a member of Khronos, helps develop and provide developers with a clear, low-overhead GPU (graphics processing Unit) control that significantly improves the performance of Draw-call frequent applications. Vulkan reduces CPU overhead, making some composite benchmark programs up to 10 times times more draw-call than OpenGL es on a single core. A good API design with a single thread allows multiple cores to run efficiently in parallel, significantly improving the performance of Draw-call frequent applications. With Android N and Vulkan, you can try running developer Preview 2 on supported devices. Read more click here. Vulkan Developer Tools Blog click here.

• Quick Start Mode (Launcher shortcuts): Now the app can customize the shortcut keys, users can click in the Pop-up dialog box to help them perform the action faster. These shortcuts include a intent that can jump to the exact location of your app (such as sending a text message to your best friend, navigating home directly in the map app, or playing the next episode in a video app).
  Pop-up shortcuts require the use of shortcutmanager.setdynamicshortcuts (List) and Shortcutmanager.adddynamicshortcut ( Shortcutinfo) These two methods, an app can pop up 3-5 shortcuts.

• supports Emoji Unicode 9 (Emoji Unicode 9 support): We have introduced some new character Emoji and replaced some of the general design with some more humanized Emoji icons. If you are an IME or SMS app developer, you should start adding these emoji to your app. This update also introduces support for skin changes and Unicode 9 characters, such as bacon,selfie and face palm. You can use paint.hasglyph () to dynamically query the features of the new emoji.
  
  New Human emoji
  
  New activity Emoji

• API changes (API changes): This update also includes some API changes, we will continue to improve multi-window support (now you can specify a separate minimum height and minimum width for activity), notifications and other functions. For more information, you can look at the variance report in the API reference package.

• bug fix (bug fixes): We have fixed some system issues, including the ones reported on issue tracker. Please continue to give us feedback on the problems encountered.

How to upgrade:

The easiest way to get this version or a later preview upgrade is to register your device with the Android test plan. Just visit G.co/androidbeta and choose an optional Android phone or tablet – you'll soon receive a preview update for this version (or later). If you have already registered your device, you will soon receive updates and do not need you to do anything. Also you can manually download and refresh. Developer Preview 2 is intended for use by developers rather than as a daily use, and this version has not been optimized for performance and battery life.

Android N Developer Preview is currently available for Nexus 6,nexus 5x,nexus 6p,nexus 9, and Pixel C devices, as well as universal 4G phones. For Nexus Player, it will be updated several days later than other devices.

To compile and test the app using Developer Preview 2, you'll need to use Android Studio 2.1– the same version as Developer Preview 1, and you'll need to check for SDK component updates (including build tools and Emulator System images) to developer Preview – see this for more details.

Thank you so much for your feedback so far. Please continue to share feedback on N Developer Preview issue tracker or N preview community. The sooner we get feedback, the better we can merge into the next release.

Original link: http://android-developers.blogspot.co.id/2016/04/android-n-developer-preview-2-out-today.html

"Android Developer Blog" Android N Developer Preview 2, out today! (APRIL 2016)