Google Released Android 11 Developer Preview For Pixel Devices.
What's new in Android 11
- Behavior changes
System changes that may affect your app when it's running on Android 11.
- Privacy features
New safeguards to protect user privacy that you'll need to support in your app.
- New features and API's
API's for 5G, sharing, connectivity, media, NNAPI, biometrics, and more.
Google Android 11 developer preview is available for the Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 4, and Pixel 4 XL. To install the preview, you'll need to download the factory image for your device and manually install it.
If you decide to try the preview and want to go back to Android 10, you'll have to do factory reset your device in the process.
Android 11 beta version is expecting to launch on May 2020, in Google developers conference.
Added multiple new features to help users manage access to sensitive data and files, and we’ve hardened critical areas of the platform to keep the OS resilient and secure. For developers, Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities for your apps, like enhancements for foldables and 5G, call-screening APIs, new media and camera capabilities, machine learning, and more, said in blog.
5G brings consistently faster speeds and lower latency to more users around the world. With 5G you can extend your Wi-Fi app experiences -- such as streaming 4K video or loading higher-res game assets -- to mobile users, or you can build new experiences designed specifically for 5G. In Android 11 we’re enhancing and updating the existing connectivity APIs so you can take advantage of 5G’s improved speeds.
App compatibility
We’re also working to make updates faster and smoother by prioritizing app compatibility as we roll out new platform versions. In Android 11 we’ve added new processes, developer tools, and release milestones to minimize the impact of platform updates.
Minimizing the impact of behavior changes - While changes we make to Android can make the OS more helpful, secure, and better performing, some of these changes can affect developers’ apps. As we built Android 11, we made a conscious effort to minimize behavioral changes that could affect apps by closely reviewing their impact and by making them opt-in, wherever possible, until you set targetSdkVersion to 'R' in your app. We hope this gives developers more control, and leads to more apps working out-of-the-box on Android 11.
Easier testing and debugging - To help you test for compatibility, we’ve made many of the breaking changes toggleable - meaning that you can force-enable or disable the changes individually from Developer options or adb. With this change, there’s no longer a need to change targetSdkVersion or recompile your app for basic testing.
Privacy
Privacy has always been at the core of Android, and each year, Google have added more ways to keep users secure and increase transparency and control.One-time permission - For the most sensitive types of data - not just location but also for the device microphone and camera - users can now grant temporary access through a one-time permission. This permission means that apps can access the data until the user moves away from the app, and they must then request permission again for the next access.
Security
For Android 11 security, focus on raising the bar for security with each version of Android - from reaching more devices with monthly security updates to building more protections into the latest platform. In Android 11, Google extended Android’s defense-in-depth strategies to more areas of the platform and added new features and APIs for apps.Biometrics - Expanded our biometrics support to meet the needs of a wider range of devices. BiometricPrompt now supports three authenticator types with different levels of granularity - strong, weak, and device credential.
Google also decoupled the BiometricPrompt flow from the app’s Activity lifecycle to make it easier to integrate with various app architectures, and to improve the transaction UI. All apps using biometric auth should move to the BiometricPrompt APIs, which are also available in AndroidX for compatibility with earlier versions of Android.
Platform hardening - Google expanded use of compiler-based sanitizers in security-critical components, including BoundSan, IntSan, CFI, and Shadow-Call Stack. They also enabling heap pointer tagging for apps targeting Android 11 or higher, to help apps catch memory issues in production. These hardening improvements may surface more repeatable/reproducible app crashes in your code, so please test your apps.
Google used HWAsan to find and fix many memory errors in the system, and now they offer HWAsan-enabled system images to help you find such issues in your apps.
Secure storage and sharing of data - Apps can now share data blobs easily and more safely with other apps through a BlobstoreManager. The Blob store is ideal for use-cases like sharing ML models among multiple apps for the same user.
Identity credentials - Android 11 adds platform support for secure storage and retrieval of verifiable identification documents, such as ISO 18013-5 compliant Mobile Driving Licenses.