Android’s Latest Version 5.0 Lollipop – What’s New

Android 5.0 Lollipop is the largest and most ambitious release for Android yet. It is packed with new features for users and thousands of new APIs for developers. It extends Android even further, from phones, tablets, and wearables, to TVs and cars. For a closer look at the new developer APIs, see the Android 5.0 API Overview. Below is a list of some key developer features in android 5.0:

Material design
Performance focus
Notifications
Your apps on the big screen
Document-centric apps
Advanced connectivity
High-performance graphics
More powerful audio
Enhanced camera & video
Android in the workplace
Screen capturing and sharing
New types of sensors
Chromium WebView
Accessibility & input
Tools for battery-efficient apps

Material design

Android 5.0 brings Material design to Android and gives you an expanded UI toolkit for integrating the new design patterns easily in your apps.

New 3D views let you set a z-level to raise elements off of the view hierarchy and cast realtime shadows, even as they move.

You can also define vector drawables in XML and animate them in a variety of ways. Vector drawables scale without losing definition, so they are perfect for single-color in-app icons.

A new system-managed processing thread called RenderThread keeps animations smooth even when there are delays in the main UI thread.

Notifications
Notifications in Android 5.0 are more visible, accessible, and configurable.

Varying notification details may appear on the lock screen if desired by the user. Users may elect to allow none, some, or all notification content to be shown on a secure lock screen.

Key notification alerts such as incoming calls appear in a heads-up notification—a small floating window that allows the user to respond or dismiss without leaving the current app.

You can now add new metadata to notifications to collect associated contacts (for ranking), category, and priority.

A new media notification template provides consistent media controls for notifications with up to 6 action buttons, including custom controls such as “thumbs up”—no more need for RemoteViews!

Document-centric apps

New APIs allow you to show separate activities in your app as individual documents alongside other recent screens.

You can take advantage of concurrent documents to provide users instant access to more of your content or services. For example, you might use concurrent documents to represent files in a productivity app, player matches in a game, or chats in a messaging app.

Advanced connectivity
Android 5.0 adds new APIs that allow apps to perform concurrent operations with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), allowing both scanning (central mode) and advertising (peripheral mode).

New multi-networking features allow apps to query available networks for available features such as whether they are Wi-Fi, cellular, metered, or provide certain network features. Then the app can request a connection and respond to connectivity loss or other network changes.

High-performance graphics

Support for Khronos OpenGL ES 3.1 now provides games and other apps the highest-performance 2D and 3D graphics capabilities on supported devices.

OpenGL ES 3.1 adds compute shaders, stencil textures, accelerated visual effects, high quality ETC2/EAC texture compression, advanced texture rendering, standardized texture size and render-buffer formats, and more.

Enhanced camera & video

Android 5.0 introduces all new camera APIs that let you capture raw formats such as YUV and Bayer RAW, and control parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration on a per-frame basis. The new fully-synchronized camera pipeline allows you to capture uncompressed full-resolution YUV images at 30 FPS on supported devices.

Along with images, you can also capture metadata like noise models and optical information from the camera.

Users have a unified view of their personal and work apps, which are badged for easy identification.

Screen capturing and sharing

Android 5.0 lets you add screen capturing and screen sharing capabilities to your app.

With user permission, you can capture non-secure video from the display and deliver it over the network if you choose.

New types of sensors

In Android 5.0, a new tilt detector sensor helps improve activity recognition on supported devices, and a heart rate sensor reports the heart rate of the person touching the device.

New interaction composite sensors are now available to detect special interactions such as a wake up gesture, a pick up gesture, and a glance gesture.

Check more in the video