Android P beta was announced at the Google I/O 2018 conference and is already ready for download on the Pixel as well as smartphones from other brands, which is a first. Android P beta is available for select devices from OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, vivo, Sony, Essential and HMD Global’s Nokia smartphones. Google executives also confirmed there will be a Go edition of Android P, though this was not announced at the keynote. For Google, 2018 marks ten years of Android, which has emerged as the world’s dominant smartphone operating system. With Android P, the company is introducing a number of new features, including a new gestures navigation system. “With the Beta version of Android P we have a lot of new consumer features. With Oreo we spent a lot of effort on Project Treble, hence we did not have so many new features. However, the benefits of Project Treble are clear going forward, with more devices being available on Android P,” explained Dave Burke VP Engineering, Android in an interaction with members of the media on the sidelines of I Read | Google I/O 2018: Here is how Android P will change how you use the smartphone Project Treble, for the uninitiated, is a reframing of the Android architecture, which makes it faster, cheaper and quicker for different manufacturers to upgrade to new versions of Android. This also explains why different phones from other vendors are now available for the beta version of Android P at launch. Earlier the Android Oreo beta was limited to the Pixel and Nexus phones, when it first rolled out. The implementation of Project Treble also means that in the future more devices could be eligible to get Android P beta, though Google has not confirmed anything on this subject for now. The other big change with Android P is the new ‘Gestures’ feature. Android P is getting rid of the three screen buttons, which have for long been associated with operating system, and instead implementing one single home button. The comparisons with Android P and the Apple’s iPhone X and its gesture-based UI have also been made. However, Dave Burke does not agree with the view that Google copied on Apple on this. “We have always had gestures, even with Android 1.0 where you could swipe down and get the notifications shade. We’ve been adding gestures continuously. With Android P, we are changing the space and the relationship a bit,” he said. “We’re ahead of other people in this and we went further by the way with this UI. You can see the content, you can also select things in the Overview feature. We also allow users to select an image in the Overview.We’re very careful to keep that home button and we think it is very important to go back to the same place. It’s something we’ve been working on before the iPhone X,” he added. Android P will also see more focus on features driven by Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. The UI will have a new Actions feature where the OS will give users suggestions around what they can do next with an app, which they might use more often. With the new Home button, Google says it makes the UI easier to use. There’s also a new Dashboard for helping users with their Digital well-being, which can breakdown for a user their habit and usage of a smartphone. Google’s VP of Product Management Sameer Samat says this is part of the company’s long-term commitment to help people use technology in a more balanced way. “We have to look at the role that tech is playing in the world. Google has a responsibility in this and we have make sure we listen to how people use tech. This notion of balance has come up more and more as a topic in the last couple of years,” he adds. Google is also improving the DND mode to ensure that even visual notifications disappear from the screen when this is activated. On Android Go for P, Samat says the cycle is just starting with a number of manufacturers launching Go edition Android phones. Go Edition phones have a version of Android which has been designed to occupy less storage space and work with phones with less than 1GB RAM. Recently players like Nokia, Lava, Micromax have launched Go edition phones in the Indian market.
