TechTwist

Android 7.0 Nougat is the major revision of Android for 2016/2017. The upgrade first became available for phones in August 2016. However, depending on the device you have, there's a good chance you're still waiting. If this is the case, there's one question you'll want answered: is this Android OS update actually worth getting excited about?

If you've been hankering after a super-flashy revamp to make it seem we’ve entered a new era of Android, you may be disappointed. Android 7.0 Nougat’s goals are more about preparing for the future of Android app development, adding little tweaks here and there, with the end result being that in use your device will feel faster.

We'll start with a flashy tentpole feature, one that you may well have met before.

On-screen multi-tasking has finally been added to Android. I say “finally” because I remember using something similar in an Android device so long ago that the memory sits in a hazy fog.

The Samsung Galaxy S2, released in 2011, featured the “two apps on screen at once” multi-tasking capability that Google has just added to this update. It’s almost funny to think that the feature that once had people accusing Samsung of overloading Android is now becoming a core part of the system.

However, it isn't that simple. Google’s application of Multi-Window makes far more sense now that 5.5-inch phones cost as little as £150 – and you’d hope that its implementation is far more slick.

But is it? Yes and no.

You start Multi-Window multi-tasking by long-pressing the square soft key that normally lets you flick between apps quickly. This splits the screen in half, with the new half then displaying the usual app-switching carousel. You flick through this app Filofax and then tap the app you want.

YouTube and Settings: A truly dreadful use of Multi-Window

It fills the spare half of the screen and you can alter how much space each app receives by dragging the border between them back and forth.

So far, this is almost exactly like the multi-window implementations we’ve seen in the past. The importance of it coming to Android 7.0 Nougat, though, is that soon it will work with almost all apps.

Right now, compatibility is patchy. Using the Pixel C, Multi-Window makes your Facebook feed’s contents disappear completely. Android tells you “this probably won’t work” with most apps at the moment, but I was surprised to discover that in the silly-but-addictive 3D obstacle course Faily Brakes it works fine.

Facebook says no, Faily Brakes says yes

It should take only a minor tweak on the developer’s part to get virtually all apps Multi-Window-ready. And given how long we’ve been waiting for this feature, its application seems disappointingly prosaic – until you look closer.

In a handful of Google apps, you can actually drag and drop images and text from one pane to the other. This is the big one, and provides a view of how we may use Android apps in the future.

If Multi-Window is to take off, such inter-app communication needs to happen on a wider and deeper scale. I want to be able to drag pics from Google Photos into a Facebook album, for example, even if it is a feature that I may personally never use. It is in this type of interaction that the fundamental gaps between a computer OS such as Windows and a mobile OS such as Android become apparent.

The Android Developer website details this feature as follows: “Users can drag and drop data from one activity to another while the two activities are sharing the screen.” But what's the limit of "data"?

Once again, though, we've already seen this capability with Samsung. The Samsung Galaxy S6, for example, allows drag-and-drop image transfer between multi-window panes when used with the Samsung email and Samsung Gallery apps.

I’ll admit that drag-and-drop multi-tasking hasn't really been a huge deal for me with regards to older Samsung phones or tablets. But when it’s available to the wider ecosystem it could, and should, have a real effect on how future Android apps are designed and used. Being part of the standard API set changes everything.

I have a personal interest here, too. I was a little heartbroken when I realised years ago that there was no simple way for the many fantastic iPad music-making apps to talk to one another without the use of external hardware. I'm not talking here about GarageBand, but instead about the slightly less-friendly but more serious synthesizer and sequencer apps such as the Korg iMS-20 and Steinberg Cubasis.

Mobile devices now have the processing power and RAM – at least on Android – to become miniature studios, with synth and drum apps effectively becoming plug-ins, but mobile operating systems are too restrictive at present. Although we remain a hundred miles from that, we appear to be heading in that direction.

Unless you’re an app developer, you may as well forget about such advanced multi-tasking for now. No third-party apps currently support it, and its implementation is clunky and limited in Android 7.0 Nougat. It’s something that we’ll see honed in Android 8.0, or smaller iterative updates. Hopefully.

Still, after trying out Multi-Window with a Google Pixel C for a few days, I do find today’s Multi-Window useful for taking notes on an article I'm reading. In its present state, though, I can’t imagine using it too much on a phone such as the Nexus 6P.

What you’ll probably appreciate more in the short term is a far simpler multi-tasking trick. By quickly double-tapping on the multi-tasking button, it's possible to flick between your two most recently used apps.

This works well, and is frankly the most cogent use of multi-tasking for phones at the moment.

ANDROID 7.0 NOUGAT – NOTIFICATIONS

The changes to multi-tasking can pretty much be ignored, if you like. However, the new notifications style can't. Notifications have become far more involved and complicated in Android 7.0 Nougat. It’s a step away from the "Material" interface style that Google introduced with Android 5.0 Lollipop.

In Android 5.0 and 6.0, notifications are like white Post-it notes. They tell you what’s up, and you bin them with a swipe when you’ve read the message. That’s it.

In Android 7.0, most notifications are now expandable. For example, next to a Gmail notification you’ll see a tiny drop-down arrow. Tap it and you’ll see all the email headlines you’ve missed since you last checked your inbox.

What we’re seeing here is the Android system becoming more involved with the deeper elements of apps. It plays to the vision of future multi-tasking I talked about earlier.

For now, the neatest part is that you can reply to certain messages right from the notifications drop-down, without the need to open the app at all.

Rather like the double-tap app switching, this seems a good fit for the almost frantic pace of normal mobile use. It allows you to do far more from your Android homescreen, with less time spent dipping in and out of actual apps. The real test will be whether this affects user behaviour as Google hopes, though.

Before we look at the deeper features of Android 7.0 Nougat, let’s look at another familiar feature. You can alter the feature toggles that form part of the notifications drop-down.

This is something we’ve seen in custom Android interfaces many times over the years. You choose which switches appear – Aeroplane mode, Data Saver and Wi-Fi on/off, for example – and the order in which they're arranged.

Although this is nothing new for Android 7.0, Google’s implementation is pretty good. When you scroll down the notifications screen to see your latest messages, the first five toggles appear in micro-size icon form at the top of the display. It provides super-quick access to functionality such as Do Not Disturb, Bluetooth and even the battery monitor.

Tap the battery icon and a full battery widget pops up, showing a battery-drain graph and how long Android expects your charge to last.

And that's it. The aforementioned are the notable changes to the OS, the updates that are most likely to affect your day-to-day Android use.

There are some little extras, though. One I’ll definitely make use of is Data Saver. Rather than taking an “on" or "off” approach to background data, this feature lets you specify the apps that do and don't have access to your connection while the screen is off.

Given the stories we hear about Facebook’s background data shenanigans, this one could be a lifesaver for both your data allowance and your battery. If you only really want to know about new emails and WhatsApps while your phone is in your pocket, Data Saver offers a way to control this.

The other light and breezy change in Android 7.0 Nougat is how its keyboard emojis look. “People” emojis look more like people while still being cartoony blobs, and there are more fruit and veg emojis too.

Next up is how Android 7.0 Nougat affects your phone performance – but before we get all serious, have a look at some of the new emojis.

There’s another side to Android 7.0 Nougat that could – in my head, at least – prove as important as advanced app interaction. It’s Vulkan.

This is a graphics API that developers use to exploit a device’s hardware when coding an app or game. Until Nougat, Android had used OpenGL ES – a rival API.

The big difference between it and Vulkan is that the latter is a lower-overhead API, providing more direct control over the hardware. This should result in better performance and less reliance on the need for optimisation for specific GPU types.

Apple has made the same move with the Metal API, introduced during WWDC 2015.

Vulkan isn’t a single-platform API such as Metal, though. It will be used across Android, Windows, Linux, and SteamOS too. Valve is a major backer of Vulkan, which is potentially great news for those keen on seeing a greater number of ports of high-performance and indie-style games we’ll see on SteamOS. If it ever really gets off the ground.

As with any back-end change of this type, the direction that developers choose to take will be important. The issue will be DirectX 12, the rival API used by Windows 10 and Xbox One exclusively. Microsoft wants game developers to use DirectX 12; Valve wants them to use Vulkan.

No matter which dominates, we’ll have to wait and see how this affects future Android ports.

Android device hardware has to support Vulkan too, but this has already started because Vulkan and Google’s support for it were announced in 2015. The Snapdragon 820 supports Vulkan, for example. That SoC is used in the Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5 and Sony Xperia XZ.

Android 7.0 Nougat also changes the day-to-day performance of devices in a fairly fundamental way. Google has added a JIT compiler, which changes how apps are installed, loaded and run. This is a switch from using ART, which promised to improve performance with Android L – and frankly didn't. Funnily enough, the run-time used prior to ART, Dalvik, did use a JIT compiler. Is this Google back-tracking?

JIT stands for just-in-time, meaning data required for an app is compiled as needed, rather than doing so beforehand as an AOT (ahead-of-time) compiler would.

Using the Google Pixel C, I haven’t noticed any obvious change in performance. It ran fairly quickly with Android 6.0, and it does so with Android 7.0 too.

The pertinent issue is how well Android 7.0 will run on phones with limited RAM. Android Lollipop and Marshmallow often cause significant day-to-day performance issues on phones with less than 2GB of RAM. Phones with 1GB of RAM often run horribly, as you'd imagine.

With any luck Android 7.0 will improve the experience for those who can only afford bottom-rung phones, because at present very cheap Androids are often harder to recommend than they were in the Android 4.4 era. Display and camera quality may have improved, but ultra-low-end Androids just don’t run well.

Android 7.0 Nougat also features a new version of Doze, which Google introduced with Android Marshmallow. It’s a feature that puts a device into a kind of hibernation when it’s left sitting on standby for a while.

With Android 7.0, Doze is meant to kick in even if the phone is in your pocket. It restricts background data calls to managed intervals, which should reduce power consumption. However, you may see a more marked effect using the Data Saver function.

Android 7.0 Nougat is actually a more dramatic change than it at first appears. On the surface, it looks like Google has simply adopted its own versions of features we’ve seen before, such as Multi-Window multi-tasking and customisable drop-down feature toggles.