In this article I’m going to share list of all the new features of Android M Developer 2 released by Google. Don’t miss to read my this article on everything you need to know about Android M developer preview 2.
Google first released the developer preview of Android M at Google I/O event 2015 and company today released first update for Android M developer preview. After flashing Android M developer preview on Nexus device I started to figure out what developers was doing from last few weeks and find that lots of things has changed in comparison to what we got in Android M developer preview.
Android M developer preview 2 comes with lots of status bar options, a horizontal home screen, new app drawer and lot more. So without further ado, why don’t you check out whats new in developer preview 2 of Android M.
List of New Feature of Android M Developer Preview
Rewamped app Drawer
This update bring changes to the home launcher with rewamped app drawer. Previous app drawer features lists of all the apps installed on your device arranged alphabetically with letters on the left side of the screen which really took up lots of homescreen space. But with this update Google bring back the 4 column and scroll in the same way just like the previous version of Android. With the new app drawer you can quickly scroll through the app using scroll bar which is available on the right side.
Google also added option to enable or disable suggest app which is available at the top of the homescreen. This is really a useful feature in my opinion as lots of user prefer to have cleaner app drawer and I’m the one out of them.
New Widget Screen
Like new app new app drawer, Google also made some changes to the widget screen. Now you can easily scroll through list of all the widget just by using scroll bar which is available on the right side of the screen, just like in app drawer. In case the application has more than two or three widget you can simply scroll them just by swiping left to right.
Landscape Mode in Home launcher
One of the most exciting which Google added in the Android M developer preview is the ability to enable the new landscape mode in default homescreen launcher and app drawer. This feature was not available for some of the Google Nexus device.
So this is the really nice update for those who actually want their homescreen launcher on Auto rotate.
Delete Screenshot option
Taking a screenshot is very easy in almost every Android phone, but incase you’ve take the screenshot which is not good as you expected, then its little annoying to look for the one and delete it. But with this update you can delete them right from your notification area.
Whenever you take screenshot the notification pop to share or edit the image and now that option will also gives you the option to delete screenshot just with a single tap.
New System UI Tuner options
Under device settings you can enable developer options menu just by tapping on the build number. Under developer option you will see a new System UI Tuner menu. Previously this menu was non functioning, but now Google take it out a bit.
With this System UI Tuner option you actually got access to new menus. You just need to head over to status bar section and enable & disable different UI feature of the device status bar. Using this feature you can turn on and off the Wi-Fi icon, battery icon, cellular icon and lot more.
You can also enable “Demo mode” that will show you some of the default status bar icons for developer actually helpful when they take screenshots for the apps for the play store.
Storage and USB Memory Settings
In Android M developer preview 2, Google also added new user-facing settings menus in the Settings. The first one out of them is Storage & USB that let you check how much storage your device is using.
When you scroll down at the bottom of the screen. You will see “Explore” option which is actually a file manager of the internal storage.
This update also bring a new “Memory” section that will show you how much RAM your device is using. At the top of the screen you will see option to select the time period of 3,6, 12 or 24 hours. Below this option you will also see different options like average memory use, a performance grade, total memory, the average amount being used, and the amount which is free. You can also click on the “memory used by apps” to know exactly which application is using how much memory sorted in a list from most to least.
These are some of the feature which I found are new in the Android M Developer Preview 2, but surely there will be more new feature which I haven’t noticed yet. Will definitely add them in this article. So don’t forget to check this article later.
You can start conversation in the comments and let me know what you think of these new feature added to Android M.