Android 11—The Ars Technica Review
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Android 11 has finally arrived after a lengthy beta process that started approximately three years ago in February 2020. This is the 30th release of Android, if we're counting by API levels, and in a year when it seems nearly everything has been delayed or canceled, Google has managed to turn in one of the smaller Android releases.
Last year, Android 10 was a massive release, adding gesture navigation, a dark mode, Project Mainline, a dual-boot system, scoped storage, foldable smartphone support, and a million other things. In comparison, Android 11 is more limited. This being the annual Ars Technica review, however, there are of course still plenty of things to talk about-like yet another notification panel revamp, a new media player, chat bubbles, smart home controls, and more.
Table of Contents- The notification panel
- The persistent media carousel
- Conversations and bubbles
- Notification history
- One-time and auto-revoking permissions
- The new power menu and smart home controls
- Get better smart home support, Google
- Emoji 13.0
- Project Mainline, Part 2-Even more modularity
- Google's Scoped Storage brinkmanship
- Keyboard autofill gets a big upgrade
- Grab bag
- Building on Android 10, with a few upgrades of its own
- The good
- The bad
- The ugly
The notification panel is one of the biggest strengths of Android, and Google can't seem to let a major release go by without iterating on it. This year, the theme seems to be around organization and creating what Google calls a "dedicated persistent space" for certain types of notifications.
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