Last week Android M Developer Preview 2 arrived on scene. That very day I released our first “Diving into M” post for the second preview, which highlighted the changes to the launcher and the ability to now edit the status bar with the Tuner UI tool in the developer options.
While I had planned to create more follow-up posts, I quickly realized that most of the changes that had been discovered were pretty small and so the decision was made to play with it throughout the weekend before summing up everything that has visibly changed all in one post — while also commenting a bit on what’s not visible.
Want to dive even deeper? Check out our full “Diving into M” series by clicking here.
As we’ve already mentioned before, the Android M Developer Preview 2 is less about showing off new changes and more about (near) finalizing the many new APIs coming with Android M so developers can test them out prior to the final release. After all, this is a developer preview.
That said, there are some changes. Let’s start by talking about the under the hood stuff.
STABILITY, PERFORMANCE, AND BATTERY LIFE
It has to be said that, even from day one, Android M’s stability was considerably better than we saw with L. This makes sense considering Lollipop was a big departure from KitKat, while M is more a minor evolution of what was started with Lollipop. With the new preview, stability only gets better.
I used my Nexus 5 as my daily driver the entire weekend and ran into virtually no problems. Not only was my experience with the phone smoother, battery life seemed better than it had with Lollipop and — while it might have been in my head — seemed better than it had in the first preview as well. How much better depends on how heavily it is used, but I will tell you that with Android Lollipop I generally found myself going to bed with 3 to 9% battery life on average. With M, it’s been around 15 to 18%, and this weekend it is has been slightly better than that (around 15 to 20%).
Bottom-line, Android M is shaping up to be a very stable, efficient build and should hopefully have considerably less bugs and other day-one issues than we saw with Lollipop. Considering Lollipop still is riddled with bugs and performance issues, we are really excited to see that M is taking a step forward here.
As for what’s new in the Android M Developer Preview 2? Here’s what all we found (in addition to the previously mentioned launcher and status bar changes):
No comments:
Post a Comment