Android M, all the details of the new version of Android

The Google I / O 2015 has just opened doors at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a traditional place for the most important event of the year in the Google world. Many of you have already seen from our live , although here is Android M Developer Preview .

Repeating last year's strategy, Google does not officially present the new great update of Android in this I / O 2015, but shows a few strokes of where the keys to improvement are in a version that comes to polish the deficiencies of Android 5 Lollipop and improve from its base .

Still without an official cupcake that gives it its name, Android M proposes six main improvement points that will seek a logical growth of the operating system emphasizing the user experience:

•New permission manager for applications
•Web browsing experience improvements
•Links between applications
•Mobile payments
•Authentication by native fingerprint
•Improvements in energy management and load


The Developer Preview compilation of Android M will arrive these days - if not today - for some Nexus devices, just in time to help developers understand the new version of Android and prepare their applications for change.

Managing permissions more intuitively

The first point of action that Google has wanted to work has been the confusing management of permits, a historical demand that many users palliated with other ROMs such as Cyanogen, advanced with AppOps but then forgotten to now shine a more intuitive and coherent manager.

Now the necessary permissions and that the user must evaluate has been reduced to eight typologies, and in addition the applications themselves warn of what permission they will use when they need it, allowing the user to decide if they want to accept it.

Obviously, these permissions are automatically associated so that we do not have to repeat them every time, but they can be checked to activate and deactivate them at all times, in a new manager from the device settings .

We can filter permissions by applications, or directly open a permission and see all the applications that use it. The new permit list is reduced to eight , as we had already mentioned: location, camera, microphone, contacts, telephone, SMS, calendar and sensors.

Custom tabs for a new web experience

The people of Google have thought that the management of our web link applications was poor, so Chrome’s custom tabs are the perfect solution for us to interact with links and content without having to leave the application used at any time .

The user can now access web content from the applications in a completely transparent way, making the web experience become immersive and also more useful for developers, when implementing certain elements.



The transitions are native and natural, since the open web will behave identically to the application and maintain its style palette. In fact, the conference showed an open link from the Pinterest application that maintained colors, fonts and other elements of the application.

According to Google, Chrome’s custom tabs will also be an improvement over logins, saved passwords, auto-refilling of fields and security, as Chrome and the application can be one natively.

AppLinks, or how applications can now communicate with each other

Until now, Android has already allowed applications to link to each other, although by pressing an item that should be opened from another application, the operating system opened a dialog box where the user had to select the target application.

In Android M the applications themselves will be responsible for verifying if they can open an item or perform a certain function that we have requested from another, acting accordingly to make the user experience more fluid.

AppLinks will facilitate the task of opening files or links, for example a link to a tweet from the browser will take us directly to the Twitter application, although as users we will maintain control in a similar way to the current "Default Options".

Android Pay is official and native

Android M also does not forget Android Pay, the new Google mobile payment system that will be native from the next version of the operating system.

Android Pay will look for simplicity and security ahead of other aspects, and will use NFC connectivity and Host Card Emulation technology to provide a smartphone-based payment platform that makes life easier for users without locking them into any system.

In fact, Android Pay is, according to Google, an open platform in which the user can choose both the Mountain View giant's own system and any banking application that allows the mobile payment process to be completed.

Google announces that operators have been very involved to carry it out, and that their system will initially work in more than 700,000 stores.

Native Biometric Authentication

Nowadays it is easy to see almost all the smartphones of the top of the Android catalog with a fingerprint reader for biometric authentication, although its usefulness is quite limited and it is reduced in almost all cases to the unlocking of the device.

In Android M , fingerprint readers will be supported natively by the operating system , making it possible to use our fingerprint to authenticate us when making purchases with Google's payment system.

There will be new APIs and some partners are working to develop applications that use the fingerprint sensor in more situations, and the standardization of fingerprint sensors will surely increase the possibilities of biometric security in this regard.

USB Type-C and improvements in energy management

There is no doubt that autonomy is the great pending issue of smartphones today, and in this sense Google has worked to improve as much as possible the efficiency of Android M when saving energy resources on our devices.

The new energy management and control system is called "Doze" , and uses previously unexplored aspects to achieve maximum efficiency: for example, motion detection to deactivate applications on "stopped" devices, without preventing the arrival of New notifications

In addition to Doze, with which Google intends to multiply the autonomy of the devices by two, support for USB 3.1 Type-C connectors is also implemented , something we all expected but no less important. In fact, this will even allow you to use one device to charge another's battery.

There is still time and ground to walk

The six main keys of Android M are already on the table, although the deadlines indicated by Google leave us in the air many more improvements that will be incorporated before its launch.

In fact, in the conference itself, sections are mentioned as a new volume control system that simplifies its operation, improvements in Bluetooth connectivity and security against master reset of terminals, etc.

Curious also that some improvements were made in the Android clipboard system, especially in the copy of text from one application to another, a highly criticized point and that all manufacturers choose to customize.

At the moment we like to see that the base of Android Lollipop still has a path to improve, and that is that Material Design was a success making it logical that Google did not want to break with some successful design lines. We will see what surprises these months bring us until the official arrival of Android M to our terminals, which we will surely not see until the end of the year.