Ten years ago, when we launched the first Android phone – the T-Mobile G1 – it was with a simple but bold idea: to build a mobile platform that’s free and open to everyone. Today, that idea is thriving – billions of people around the world rely on their Android phone every day.
To make Android smarter and easier to use than ever, today we’re unveiling a beta version of Android P, the next release of Android.
There’s tons of new features, mostly about Android trying to anticipate what you want to do next. Android P takes Android’s already pretty good inter-application communication a step further, by exposing actions and even parts of applications outside of the applications themselves, with App Actions and Slices.
App Actions, for instance, help you get to your next task more quickly by predicting what you want to do next. Say you connect your headphones to your device, Android will surface an action to resume your favorite Spotify playlist. Actions show up throughout Android in places like the Launcher, Smart Text Selection, the Play Store, the Google Search app and the Assistant.
Actions are a simple but powerful way for helping you get what you need quickly; but what if we could surface part of the app itself, right when you need it most? Slices do just that, giving you an even deeper look into your favorite apps. If you search for “Lyft” in Google Search, you can see an interactive Slice that gives you the price and time for a trip to work, and it’s interactive so you can quickly order the ride.
Other than that, Android P also brings gesture navigation to Android, to deal with phones with smaller bezels. Furthermore, Google put a lot of emphasis on what it calls “digital wellbeing”, which aims to make you more aware of how and how often you use your phone. For instance, a feature called Wind Down will make the screen go black and white at a chosen time, encouraging you to put the phone down and go to sleep, and Dashboard gives you detailed information about how you use your phone.
The beta version of Android P is available starting today, for Pixel phones and a variety of other phones.
Nothing much to see here, since “P” won’t be installed on any significant number of phones for years to come, other than Google’s Pixel phones, and they do not sell in significant enough numbers to be relevant as far as Android is concerned. This is still Android’s Achilles heel, OS updates have to be “tested” by device manufacturers and carriers, and each is allowed to overlay their sometimes godawful skins on top of stock Android as well as stuff their phones full of duplicate apps and bloatware that cannot be removed.
I am sure that there are some nice new features in P, but I won’t be concerned about it. By the time it can be installed on a current Android phone, “Q” will have been released at next year’s Google I/O.
Edited 2018-05-08 21:53 UTC
We’re all perfectly aware of that, there’s no need for people to point this out on *every single article* that discusses new features in Android.
Yeah, we’ll have to wait to use it.
Yeah, it’s still worth knowing about because it’s still cool new stuff we’ll eventually use.
Additionally, things actually are better now with Project Treble. Because of that, the P Beta is being released on a bunch of non-google phones. See https://developer.android.com/preview/devices for the full list.
My moto x4 supports treble but there is not even Android 8.1 on it yet. I am not sure what was the point of it. The only thing is because of Treble moto x4 owners probably will not see the lineage os anytime soon either (apparently it changes too many things which are not doable for now by lineageos developers). So, yay \s!
The reason for that, is that once Motorola switched hands from Google to Lenovo, the chinese parent company decided to focus on launching more devices each year, instead of bringing updates to the phones.
During Google era, they had two models to build new Android versions, X and G. Now they have four, X, G, E, Z, with variations for each one as Normal, Play and Plus. This makes creating updates a much harder task.
Simply put, they are investing in people changing their phone models each year to get latest Android version, that gives them money, instead of supporting an old model for a long time that only gives them trouble. In terms of business, this, sadly, makes sense.
Google put a lot of emphasis on what it calls “digital wellbeing”, which aims to make you more aware of how and how often you use your phone.
Like this crap? If you don’t already know this, what the hell are you doing with the phone?
God save the human race from the Teletubbies!!!
I just hope it gets more testing than Oreo, ’cause the Oreo rollout is still on hold for some devices because of stability issues. For example, the BB KEYOne was supposed to get it in March but it’s nowhere to be seen because of the stability issues. And BB has upgraded their Android phones to newer versions before so it’s not like it was a false promise. Now if P gets better testing, the rollout might go smoother and faster. Not to many phones, as you point out, but some flagships like BB’s phones, Samsung S*, etc. could get it faster if it’s more stable and less buggy due to better testing.
Edited 2018-05-09 09:18 UTC
Android P Beta has been opened up to phones from Samsung, Nokia, LG, Motorola, One Plus to name a few.
I might use “a feature called Wind Down will make the screen go black and white at a chosen time, encouraging you to put the phone down and go to sleep” almost all the time – I like greyscale interfaces
(so yes, NextStep/GNUstep is very appealing to me; perhaps it’s a leftower from using my Commodore 64 with an old Soviet b&w TV – and I kinda liked the graphics more than when hooking it to a colour TV in the living room; 16 shades of gray look IMHO more… refined than 16 colours 
)