Top 5 Android 11 Features

The new version of Android will get an early look at it and the form of an alpha or beta release then we'll dig into it find the coolest new features and then share it with you guys. Now this year with Android 11 those earlier builds were honestly a little bit underwhelming like the alpha builds were not super feature-rich and they weren't ready. But now that we're getting towards that time of year where You're supposed to have Google IO which is of course canceled. But now that we're getting to that time the beta builds that are coming out. Especially this first one is a lot more close to final and there's some good stuff in it. So we're going to dive in and take a look now. Keep in mind Android. As just as a whole is a lot more well-baked more mature than it was a couple of years ago. So a couple of years ago at a version update like this could be a whole visual overhaul. This isn't a visual overhaul anymore. This is a lot more tweaking a lot more fine-tuning but there is still some cool stuff and some good features in here. So that's we're going to take a look at it.so these are top 5 Android 11 Features

Number Five

Number five is the updated pixel launcher. So this has been my favorite launcher, I guess on any Android phone for a couple of years now anytime I get a new phone. I just kind of try to make the home screen feel kind of like a pixel but they have tweaked some stuff here. So first of all, they let me turn auto rotation on the home screen, correct me if I'm wrong that wasn't enabled before so you can just turn your phone sideways like a tablet and just use it like that right away. I don't think I ever would use my phone like this on the home screen. I almost never turn it that way anyway, so It's cool. I don't think that was enabled before then. There's now a new option for your bottom row apps to be app suggestions. So basically it moves everything up a row and then that whole new bottom row is suggested apps open on your phone based on learned behaviors and you can pin a suggest it a pin place down there. If you think it should be there permanently and there's also an option in settings to block an app from ever showing up there. So just check the box. If you don't want it to ever be suggested this to me is kinda neat thing Then the app switcher is also a little bit different huge cards still but now you get an app screenshot button a share button and a select button to select text within the app and you know,


Use the extra pull-down up to get into the app drawer and there are some small new animations. You can see the wallpaper shifts a bit when you pull the notification bar down and it also shifts when you pull up into the app drawer. It's really subtle. It's super subtle,

Number Four

So number four is the New Media controls up at the top. Now. This is an option that's actually not enabled by default and I suspect that's because it's a bit buggy and incomplete but when you do go into the developer settings and enable it puts a little colorized media widget in the top of your quick settings pull down. I think this is sweet. It's like Android,s version of the iPhones Quick Settings media toggle. And since it's at the top it means you never have to scroll very far to pause whatever music or podcast you're listening to now. As I said, it is a bit buggy, but you can have more than one open at once but it doesn't yet work with every single app. Like it doesn't work with YouTube yet. And also sometimes they playback scrubber doesn't work. But generally, I'm a big fan of this feature. You can also quickly toggle playback devices. So if you have headphones or speakers paired stuff like that, you can quickly get to that and the little mini-player the color of it is always going to match the album art of whatever you listening to so Again, very subtle, but that's nice.

Number Three

Number three-voice access or voice control full credits to deter from The Verge for surfacing as for me. basically it's an accessibility feature. So not everyone's going to use it. But I feel like anything that improves accessibility on a phone this much could be used by anyone basically and what gets this good it's worth it. So here's how it works. So the voice access feature itself is not new you can grab it from the Play Store. It shows up in the Phone when you enable it in this new Android beta it's controlling the phone with your voice. And the best Improvement here is instead of just saying the number corresponding to what you want to press you can actually also just say the name of the action and it's gotten really good at responding

Number Two

Number two the power button hold which is easily just to like turn off the phone or reset gets even more functionality. Now, I'm not sure why they chose the power button hold for this stuff other than just giving quick access to things that weren't originally quick. But here we are. So now when you press and hold the power button instead of just getting shut down restart and screenshot you get all those things plus a shortcut to Google pay and whatever other cards and passes like boarding passes you have which is broken right now in this Beta and then also a bunch of smart home toggles and I happen to have some compatible smartphone stuff that I can control so I can turn on my Smart lights on and off and they work pretty quickly. It seems like and Nest Thermostat also work to clean easily and you can even preview Nest cameras now again, I don't know if putting them here in the power button long-press menu is what I expected or what most users will expect to find here, but I'm cool with it side note. If you aren't you can go into the system settings under the power menu. You and take away the things that you don't care about having here.

Number One

Number one the biggest new change in yet. Another Android update is a new notification shade classic Android update. So in Android 11, the notifications get separated into three categories, there are conversations alerting notifications and Silent notifications. So conversations is for messaging basically, so text messages Twitter DM s-- or whatever other apps end up supporting this imagine slack and other messaging apps then Alerting notifications is basically all the standard stuff. That's where you'd have them pile up normally and then silent notifications are the ones that are persistent happening in the background more background stuff like whether or Google Now cards, it's also got these more jelly animations are pretty sloppy actually at the moment in this beta but I think they can clean them up and they'll look nice and that's the real main change here. There are also some other little things like you can do bubble notifications now, so basically chat heads are being supported. For messaging apps this is the thing you can turn on and off in the settings and then there's also a new fancy screen on and off animation CSL. There's a lot of little things definitely little things and that is it for Android 11.

My Favorite Feature

My favorite new feature of these is definitely the New Media controls up in the top, nice little compact widget up there because I'm always listening. I feel like to something music or podcast, but I'm curious. Let me know in the comments section what your favorite feature of these five is now at the end of the day the unanswered question is when will you get this update? Like when will you try this new stuff? Because I'm testing it right now on my pixel 4. Some people are literally daling this beta but there's kind of no way to know when a Samsung phone HTC phone a Motorola phone and one plus phone are all going to get it when the carriers will allow it. So, I don't know if you want to guarantee that you get these latest features in your phone. You have to have a pixel basically and that's the way it's been for a little while. But other than that, that's about all we know. That's the Top 5 Android 11 Features. And if you have any questions, feel free to drop them below, thanks for reading