What's New? Android 11 Public Beta 1 is Out!

Hi everyone,

Today Android 11 beta 1 was released to anyone that has a device that’s compatible and that means anything from the pixel 2 to XL three XL three a three a XL four and four XL currently those are the only supported beta devices and if you have one of those you can download it pretty easily and if its over-the-air you enroll your device into androids beta program you’ll see there’s the website there and it was about 293 megabytes to download if you’re going to install it yourself using a computer it will be about 2 gigabytes now let’s take a look at the build number and then well take a look at everything new the build number as you can see it says 11 and then RPB1.200504.018 and this particular update has some new features in it compared to the developer previews that were out before it now. 

I covered most of those previews and if you haven’t seen those there’s a bunch of little details covered in each one of those I’m going to cover the major changes now if you want to try this for yourself just be warned that it may have stability battery or performance issues and they particularly warn against anyone that’s using accessibility because some of those features may not work now with this update the first thing they’ve changed is they’ve updated it with a bunch of different changes under styles and wallpapers so if you go to style and maybe you want to create a new style or a custom style you can do that well hit next hit next again there’s some new options and there’s a bunch of new shapes as.

Well so if you don’t want your icons to be round you want them to be sort of a skwerkel or a square or any of these other shapes you can do that and then you can customize everything else if that’s what you want so you have that option as well so that’s really nice now they’ve also updated dark mode on this particular device. 

So if you’re in dark mode well go to settings and you’ll see there’s some glitches here and there but well go into display and then well turn on the dark theme now you can do that from the menu here at the top as well so if you want to just switch between dark theme or not you can do that but I wanted to show you that there’s a new menu where you can turn it on based off sunrise to sunset and that’s something I usually leave so it just changes throughout the day now if I go back to the home screen you’ll see that they’ve updated it so that the menus look more as though.

They’re dark so if I press and hold you’ll see everything’s nice and dark to match the dark theme it’s a nice little update now also when were in that dark mode they’ve updated the menus as well when you’re in settings so settings icons have been updated they look a little bit nicer and it’s just updated specifically for dark mode now I usually don’t have dark theme on when I’m using a video because it’s too reflective and you can see everything so I do use it throughout the day but it switches by itself.

Now with Android 11 beta 1 there’s now apps suggestions and I’ve actually moved my icons up one so that I can show you apps Austin’s because it was turned on by default but then once I turned it off because it was sort of invasive it actually kept my icons up here then when I went to turn it back on after I had repositioned my icons it didn’t work properly so there’s a little bit of a bug there but if you go into app suggestions on the home screen it’s been in the app list for a while turn it on go home you’ll now see suggestions so it’s based on the most used app and then if you press and hold you can actually pin the app based on the suggestion of course so its whether or not you want to use it its fine it just gives you suggestions. 

But it does take up another row instead of having whatever you want on the bottom row so just keep that in mind but it’s a nice little feature if you want to see the suggestions throughout the day if not we just turn it off they disappear and then you have to reposition your app icons now with notifications there’s some significant updates as well and something I really appreciate is they’ve broken it into sections now you can see at the top here I have something different going on now this is actually media resumption options and they have to be turned on in developer options but maybe you have Google Play Music or switched over to YouTube music or maybe you’re using Spottily. 

It will show up here and with media resumption if you have that option turned on just search for it in your settings you can now pick which device you want to send the audio to just by tapping on the table button at the top so again if we go up here we can hit phone and it will pop up the same is true if we go over to say what’s playing on YouTube you can do the same thing pick where you want the odd to go so it’s a really nice option it’s in the top here and it’s in media resumption like I said now some people are actually seeing it on the lock screen with media resumption as well I’m not seeing this. 

You’ll see it just shows what it is and then it unlocks quickly and I don’t really see anything different but you have some new options in the notification center if you have that now another thing is they’ve categorized notifications so let me text myself quickly so I can show you what I mean so you’ll see with notifications we now have some new sections we now have our conversations as they’re calling it although sometimes its labeled sometimes it’s not then we also have alerting notifications and then silent notifications and so you have these sections now and you can select what you’d like to do with them so if we press and hold or long press we can now make this a priority and it will show on top either as a conversation or a bubble which were not seeing bubbles just yet but I’ll show you that in a moment. 

We can have it alerting or silence so if its priority it will actually override do not disturb if we go into our settings here you see that we have bubbles and we can turn bubbles on or off or make this a conversation we have some new options how to handle this now this will work within other messaging apps as well now if you’ve ever used Facebook Messenger you’ll have this option for a bubble and this is what the bubbles look like if you have bubbles turned on for your different messaging apps and now developers will need to enable this allow it to work properly and then you’ll be able to move the Bubble round if an individual messages you it's getting to simply pop it as a bubble and just in case you want to dismiss it you can just dismiss it like that it’s a nice new feature that will be there hopefully once.  

Its launched now there’s another option as well whether or not it sticks when the final version is released is hard to say but if we swipe over here you’ll see that we have a screen record and if we hit screen record we can record audio and show touches on the screen if were recording that screen recording so we can turn this on hit start and now you’ll see that it shows touches it’ll show swipes will tap on here to stop and then we can go to our screen recording well open it with photos and you’ll see that its working and it kind of works okay the audio isn’t great hopefully it will improve over time but it’s something that’s there and I hope they keep it now another feature that’s new to picture-in-picture is something I hope they keep as well and that’s that you can resize it so here’s my video on the pixel feature drop. 

We’ve got our window and I had a hard time getting this to resize but basically you can drag it around and you should be able to resize it sometimes it works you can’t just do it with two fingers you can sort of drag and get it to resize I did get it to work once but then it sort of froze up so it is something that’s there whether or not its fixed in the future is hard to say but hopefully they keep the option to resize it and we can resize the window all the way around the display now there’s some new controls when you hold the power button and if we hold power you’ll see that we now have emergency at the top we have power off.

Restart and if I tap the three menu buttons here we have bug report we can also add our card for Google pay and also we have controls for home so for example we’ve got my nest controls built in here you can also have home controls anything linked to home itself if I tap on backyard it takes a second it connects and then it will show you my backyard and so there’s not much to see but it shows you that in real time right from this menu so it’s a really nice way to do that now within the power menu you may have noticed that screenshots is no longer here and if you want a screenshot something they’ve moved that to recent or multitasking. 

So if we swipe up here maybe we want to take a screenshot we take a screenshot and now we have the option to share or edit if we tap on the screenshot we can edit it and this is very similar to iOS what we could circle that and then we could share it or export it or we can just delete it so it’s a nice way to do that something a little bit new and they’ve also added another option here such as select so if we go to this menu here tap on select it will show you all of the text and you can actually select so if I tap on this we can select this text for maybe sharing it somewhere else this works on webpages and everything else so it’s a nice little way to quickly select something and then of course we can just share.

Anything here with anything suggestion so it’s a really nice way to do that very simple and intuitive now there are a few more things they’ve changed when it comes to permissions and permissions has been updated so that it allows you to set one-time permissions for example if I open this app for the first time it’s a GPS app and it says do you want to allow it to use your location so you can say when using the app only this time deny and you can also go into the permission settings and have it ask you every time now if you hit deny multiple times and it recognizes that Android will prevent this app from actually asking you if you want to use the location over and over so it’s a nice.

Way to do that and keeps it more secure and its really nice to see that they’re updating privacy now as far as anything else well they’ve updated core OS components and what that means is it can now update through Google Play services and systems so that it updates particular parts of the components of the operating system in fact twelve new modules to keep everything up to date and secure so we should see more updates seamlessly brought through Google Play services and you won’t necessarily need a full system update and that is everything new in Android 11 beta 1 now if you want to see all the different controls and granular things that are changed check out the developer preview videos I showed before but these seem to be more finalized well see some more betas before the final release as. 

I’ll see you next time