Alphabet of Google: 'M' means Marshmallow
This year when I traveled US in the month of April, 15, while shopping few munching sweets for family, I questioned why M for Milkshake, Muesli, Marmite, Marmalade etc.. and why not Marshmallow? And here it is :)
Google officially announced their latest official 6.0 OS version as "Marshmallow" and rather than 5.x, they are considering it as major release albeit there are hardly any noticeable changes which were during lollipop launch. Yes, Official Android 6.0 SDK & Final M preview are live since yesterday. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/08/m-developer-preview-3-final-sdk.html
Here are few major features of Android M, 6.0, API 23:
- App runtime permissions with new user interface - hopefully all devs should test their android apps to allow dynamic feature permission
- Fingerprint APIs for touch based authentication - This may bring good security feature change thereby avoiding the manual password entries for login enabled apps in future. However, at the same time hardware fragmentation of Android is going to be a big issue and even if it is enterprise app or consumer app, testing effort with this feature due to Hardware dependency will increase dramatically. Today mainly samsung and iOS devices are equipped with this but one year down the line, I suspect many china hit OEMs would launch their new models with this and hopefully with stronger APIs and uniformity on error handling, android will do better job there.
- Power Optimization: Through Doze mode like putting the android system to sleep state and app standby features, system takes the priority to dismiss the tasks running in background when device is really inactive and behaves like sleep mode. There are configurations dev can do and also GCM takes priority but this looks like dev accessible feature on code unlike volta battery saving project of last year launch.
- Auto backup of app data: Up to 25MB of app data can be saved to google drive at free of cost and I guess that is going to be for mobile apps especially for consumer apps where android backup manager service uploads all available backup data to the cloud.
- There are couple of other behavioral changes Android 6.0 comes with like Apache HTTP Client removal (push to android volley http framework, switch from OpenSSL to BoringSSL, HttpURLConnection thereby enforcing efficient network operations within app rather than vanilla bundles of java), default native text selection (already overridden by custom UI of many OEMs so personally I am not excited of this feature but yes APIs are available for devs now), Wifi and networking Changes, Android keystore changes, adoptable storage devices and much more. http://developer.android.com/preview/behavior-changes.html would give more in depth info on that.
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