Google I/O 2021 Keynote — What’s new in Android?

3 min readMay 19, 2021

Google I/O 2021 is started on the May 18. There were too many exciting news for all Google Products. But I can’t wait to share the Android news with you.

1. Material You

Every Android device, it has a very basic color scheme but there are more now… It refers that you can customise your device by choosing a wallpaper which also means changing the mood of your device. As a developer you may have access this wonderful themes with device default.

The notifications, settings, lock screen, home screen are all using much richer palette and are harmonized together.

2. Widgets — Refreshing widgets

Android 12 aims to build widgets are useful, discoverable and beautiful. There are more native support for interactive elements such as checkboxes, switches and radio buttons. Also widgets can be personalised.

3. Animations

According to Dan Sandler to head off app cold starts , they added a new splash screen, an animation that looks great for every app. With this every app will get a new zoom-in animation. Also you may specify your own launch animation.

4. Notifications

Behavior and appearance of Custom notifications are changing. Apps targeting Android 12, are not be able to use all notification area. The system will apply a standart template.

5. Toasts

Toasts will have app icons, so user will be know the source of the toast messages.

I also deliver a hint from Dan Sandler : “If you have more than just one or two very short lines of text to communicate to user, that’s what a notification is for. Use a notification!”

6. Picture in Picture

There is a new API setRenderEffect() which allows you to blur every view in your app. You can do this from your theme or programmatically using the window manager API.

7. Graphics

Android 12 add support for a new image format called AVIF. When you create an AVIF and a JPEG image which has same size on disk, AVIF has a better quality; or if you don’t mind the quality AVIF would use less space on disk against to JPEG.

8. Audio

Audio-coupled Haptic Playback - Haptic generator helps us to generate vibration patterns or haptic patterns based on an audio track. Romaian Guy explained us why to use this with a wonderful example: “So let’s say if you have a game, and you have an audio track with the footsteps of the main character or the sound of the rain, you can feed that to the haptic generator to automatically create these really nice vibration patterns for your user to increase immersion.”

It is not supported for all devices but you can check via isAvailable().

9. Privacy

Location — With new Bluetooth permission, developers don’t need location permission to scan bluetooth devices nearby. Also there is a new update with location permission options which allows user to not share exact location.

Clipboard — There will be a toast which will be telling user the clipboard is being accessed.

Thanks for reading my article, see you soon…