Tag: Android Nougat

Paranoid Android, the name of the team and AOSP-based ROM for a number of Android devices, has announced that they have setup a partnership with Nextbit and have released a ROM for the device.

The device lineup has been updated to include yet another device – The Nextbit Robin. Huge thanks to Nextbit for hooking us up with devices and believing in the open source project. This release is only for the Robin & the OnePlus 3.

The news is exciting for those who like what is arguably one of the cleanest and more robust ROMs available for Android devices.  Having the addition of the Nextbit Robin and the OnePlus3 will give those tech savvy users an option over the stock Android builds from each manufacture.

It may sound a little harsh but reality is reality. The Android experience on tablets has been, well, sucky.  The problem for the most part is that Android, when it comes to larger display devices, simply “blows up” the screen to make it work for that form factor. That’s not 100% true to be fair but it is by-and-large and that means that apps, especially under KitKat and Lollipop were ugly at best on Android tablets. Marshmallow improved things a lot and developers were also developing tablet versions of apps which helped at the same time.

The other big issues was productivity. Although you have more screen real estate on a tablet, Android was never really able to take full advantage of it. You could only view one app at a time which meant you were constantly having to use the Recent button on your table to navigate between apps. Productivity, which better than on a phone, was still hamstrung when it came to reaching its full potential.

If there is a banner feature that represents the entire Android Nougat release, it is multi-window viewing. Google, in this case, is very much catching up to Apple’s iOS for iPads as those devices have had the ability to view two apps at once for about a year now. However, what Google has done is fully and properly implemented this for tablets and phones that truly makes productivity much easier than it ever has been on an Android powered tablet.

In this How To, I will show you how to enter into multi-window view in Android Nougat and how to switch between apps once you are in multi-windows mode.  Once you get the hang of it, it is pretty straight forward.

Last night the all new LG V20 was announced and this flagship device has a some serious specs for those looking for a high end, high performing device.  The first phone to run Android Nougat will be hitting the market later this month and will be carried by a few carriers here in the US as well as being available unlocked.  The 5.7″ device is powered by the Snapdragon 820 processor, has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 16MP main shooter and a removable battery.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The September 2016 Android security patches have been released for both Android Marshmallow and Nougat today.  This month there are three different patches available, an increase from the two that we have seen over the past few months.  Google has been working to spur on manufactures to get the security updates out quicker and by further subdividing the patches, it is further eliminating reasons on why they aren’t released.

According to the Security Bulletin released by the Android team, the patch 2016-09-01 will primarily deal with remote code execution and elevation of privileges within the Android platform.  This patch contains two critical updates and five high priority updates.

The Skype app for Android has been update with full support for Android Nougat as well as a host of other fixes and improvements.  The updated build is version 7.14 for those keeping score at home and if you have the messaging app installed already, you should see the OTA update come to your phone or tablet over the course of the next few days.  While support for the latest version of Android is great, that really isn’t the banner item in this update.  Rather, it is a number of user related issues that the team addressed as well as cross-app suggested contacts.

The suggested contacts gives you suggestions on contacts you can reach through Skype from other Skype apps.  For example, if you have Skype for Business installed on your phone, you can now see suggested contacts for your business contacts in Skype.  You can have this setting set to automatically add your contacts or you can manually add them.

One big change in Android Nougat is the ability to adjust the urgency of notification.  In Android Marshmallow, you can you somewhat have a binary decision when it came to notifications.  With Nougat, you have far more granular controls around notifications and, in fact, have six levels of notifications that you can set for applications.  The nice thing is that you can set this for each and every app on your device should you want to go through that process.

In this How To I will show you how to access the Power Notifications Controls and how to configure them for applications.