What’s new in Android M.

What’s new in Android M.
Run-time permissions – instead of install-time.  Apps will ask for access. Permissions can be changed individually after installation.

Voice Interaction – user can do vocal confirmations.

Finger prints – Two authentication APIs.

Android Backup – Opt In/out for app settings and resources.

Google Play Services 7.5 – Network Manager – smarter decisions on when to use wifi or phone intensively.  Backwards compatible with L and older. Also – Maps on Android Wear, App Invites, Cast Remote Display, Smart Lock for passwords.

Power Management – improving screen-off battery life by “dozing”. Untouched devices become “inactive”. Waits longer to wake up for background tasks. App standby –  Unused apps lose network access., Tasks and apps resume when launched/user or phone is plugged in.

Assistant support – new APIs. Just-in-time help for the user.

Data Binding – connecting data and UI elements. Pre-processed at build time.  Removes a lot of boilerplate code.

Android Design Support Library – suggestions / tips / patterns / components – CoordinatorLayout, Snackbar, TabLayout, NavigationView, FAB (the circle with the shadow).

UI Changes – RecyclerView: swipe to dismiss, drag & drop
WebView: PostMessage, WebViewClient, off-screen drawing, etc.

Notifications – New support for icons with on-the-fly generated bitmaps.

Text selection/copy/share/paste significantly improved!  Text selection processing.  Better formatting / hyphenation / flow-control.

App-links: Understanding relationships between related app and web site, automatically using the appropriate intent.

Direct share: context based Intent delivery for shared data.  Gives receiver smarter intent selection set.

Stylus support – used to be digitizers only – now adds Bluetooth stylus support, and merge info with the touch surface (ie the BT pen can deliver the pressure and accelleration, while coordinates comes from the touch screen.  Also adds button support, gesture support, etc.

Graphics & Media – BLAS intrinsics (huge matrices), allocation-less launches (size of kernel separate from data), ScriptGroup (dependency types, optimizations).

Camera – New Torch mode (runs flash independent of camera), Alpha optmizations, auto hw layer for translucent views.

MIDI – android.media.midi – in/out – simplifies the consumption and production of MIDI data streams.

Hi-rez audio – single precision floats at 96kHz.

Android Studio – Integrated testing support, Data binding, Vector drawables, new annotations (improve type safety), Android NDK

Systrace – app performance analysis, now with tips and diagnostic descriptions.

ART – better performance and lower memory use.

More
– “Adopt” permanent storage (SD) avoid hard coded paths.
– New “brain dump” guide for better apps being published on medium.com/google-developers

Preview:
d.android.com/preview

SDK+Android Studio and System images:
d.android.com/sdk

Bug reports:
code.google.com/android-developer-preview

DevBytes:
youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers

Google Developers 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw

https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=rXEeTkFOhJc&u=/watch?v%3DndBdf1_oOGA%26feature%3Dshare