Chances are that you haven’t even had the opportunity to experience the Google’s latest Android version 6.0 Marshmallow. But rumors are already milling out about the next Android version. Google Senior Vice President for Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer recently posted a teasing tweet “Received a tip from a source familiar with the matter that Nori is not only healthy but also a very tasty treat,” referring to an edible seaweed species. Its quiet possible that Lockheimer is implying to a new name for their upcoming Android. For now, the new OS is referred to as Android N until it gets an official name.
What does ‘N’ Stand For in Android N?
Is it Nuts? Nachos? Noodles? Nuggets? or Nori like the Vice President hinted? Only time will tell. In retrospect, Android M was thought to be ‘Milkshake’, while Android Lollipop before its official announcement was ‘Licorice’ and Android KitKat was originally thought to be Key Lime Pie. Though several hints are bouncing around, one needs to wait till its officially confirmed.
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Android N: What’s New / New Features
Call Blocking: Android N is going to standardize number blocking. What that’ll do is, blacklisted contacts will be blocked from texting and calling. And not just that, service providers can read the call blocked from your phone, and when you change your device, there’s no way for unwanted calls to reach you.
As for call screening, Android’s latest version will help recognize numbers more efficiently and perform certain actions when you don’t want to block the number.
Emergency Info at Lockscreen: Among the tons of new features of Android N, there this thing called “Emergency Info”. To put it simply, when you end up hospitalized and cannot speak, you handset will do the speaking for you. It’ll spill significant infos like your date of birth, name, and your address, your blood type, known allergies, etc. Of course the feature will be useful only when there’s a terrible emergency like that. Not-the-less this feature could very well be a life saver.
Change Display Size: Android users can already tweak the system font via settings menu. Now for users who have trouble viewing the content on their handset, with Android N they can set a different display size. To change display size, go to Settings->Display->Display size.
Notification Panel: It’ll look very different in the new Android version. Instead of the card like look with small spaces between, the panel will be on a while sheet separated by small grey line that makes the notification look clutter free and much cleaner.
Data Saver: When it comes to data saving, Android is doing a pretty good job. This time around, the new version is reportedly going to go one step further. Found in the new improved menu setting, Data Saver will block all unknown background data consumption in your device. Therefore, no data will be consumed when you don’t use the handset.
Android N Features:
In terms of possible features in Android N, it’s a bit too early too tell but according to rumors, one of the not-too-distant future Android version will kill Chrome OS. Although that kind of OS wouldn’t be ready until 2017. Google have obviously been working on it for a long time and there are rumors flying about that in recent times a little progression have been made over the matter. it’s very likely that the Android OS that’ll kill off Chrome OS it will be Android 8.0.
Lockheimer had revealed during his Fast Company interview last year that Google wants to do more than put Android on more devices such as, they want Google to communicate with other Google more efficiently.
Android N Rumours:
With regards to the ongoing discussions at various forums and fans pages, there’s a rumour that newest version of Google’s mobile operating system may do away with the – the App Drawer. If you’ve having problems recollecting the how the feature looked, see the picture below:
The app drawer has been a long time feature of Google Android. Tapping on the ‘app drawer’ allows users to access all the application present in your device apart from the ones that are in your home-screen. On 26th February 2016, Google Maps tweeted a video show-off Google’s latest capabilities. In that video its hard to miss that the Nexus 6P home screen did not feature the ‘app drawer’. Droid-Life said, “assuming this video isn’t just a bad mock-up that wasn’t meant to confuse the world, yet is, then we could be looking into the future here.”
So far there has been mixed reaction to the speculation and many fans have said that removing the feature will lead users to create separate folders for different apps like they do with iPhones. At reddit, one commenter asked “Why fix (screw up) something that’s not broken Google??” At any rate these are still rumours noting to get too worried about.
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Android N Release Date:
Though Google hasn’t really been consistent in their Android OS updates but last year (2015), Vice President for Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer said, “As we’ve grown as a platform, we realize that to some extent predictability is important for the whole industry: developers, manufacturers, operators, and consumers, frankly. So we’ve landed with sort of a yearly cadence of big releases, so, for instance, one year we release J, the next year we release K, and then the year after that L, and then this year we’ll launch M, and so you can predict what will happen next year.”
Meaning that it’s very likely that the Android N is going to be launched sometime in 2016 (possibly this coming spring). One can also expect Android O in 2017, Android P in 2018, Android Q in 2019 and so forth.
Wrap Up:
The next version of Android will almost certainly drop at Google I/O 2016 which is most likely going to take place in June. In a Reddit AMA, Android and Chrome UX director Glen Murphy informed that one of the goals of Android this year would be to make the OS user-friendly and efficient. It’ll be incredible if they could actually make the OS compatible with multitasking. Android N could be the first version of the OS to make ‘multi-tasking’ a standard feature, although Samsung have been offering multi-tasking features for a long time.