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Nougat 7.0/7.1

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Android 7.1(.1) feature spotlight: System UI Tuner's Overview swipe-up split-screen gesture has disappeared

Phil Oakley

Split-screen multitasking on Nougat is great - I use it quite a lot when taking notes on my Nexus 6P in lectures or other talks that I may want to revisit later. However, one of the original multi-window features introduced back in the first N developer preview has disappeared in the 7.1.1 Beta; the swipe up split-screen gesture, found in System UI Tuner.

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PSA: Android 7.0 Nougat is NOT officially out for the Moto G4 and G4 Plus

Richard Gao

Android Nougat is still relatively new, and very few phones have officially been upgraded to it thus far. However, in the past few hours, we've been seeing reports by multiple tech sites that the mid-range Moto G4 and G4 Plus are now receiving Android 7.0 Nougat in various countries; this is completely false. While the G4 Plus has received a Nougat soak test, the software has not officially been released in any region yet.

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Camera no longer freezes when screen is rotated

Corbin Davenport

If you have used Google Camera before, you have probably noticed the lag when rotating your device. When auto-rotation is enabled on your phone, your entire display flips around - causing the Camera app to freeze for a second. This behavior has been fixed with the Google Camera application on Android 7.1.

Rotating the device from portrait to landscape results in the controls rotating, not the entire app UI. Flipping the phone 180 degrees in landscape causes a slight black screen, but only for a split second. I'm testing this on my Nexus 5X, so performance could vary from phone to phone.

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Storage now separates System into an entry all of its own

Phil Oakley

Android's storage management has steadily improved over the last few years, with a storage manager added in Marshmallow and adoptable SD cards as well. The next small, iterative improvement arrives in Android 7.1 Nougat, with System now separated out into its own entry in the storage management screen.

This means that, when viewing the storage that has been used, it will now show System storage and how much has been taken up by the System - on my 6P running 7.1, System takes up 4.57GB. On my Wileyfox Spark, which runs Marshmallow (albeit Cyanogen OS, but still) ... I can't tell because there's no System entry.

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Google implements hundreds of new emojis for professions, gender equality, more

Rita El Khoury

Android 7.0 marked the first time that Android had more emojis than iOS and although that gap was closed with the release of iOS 10, Nougat 7.1 is here to take the lead again. We're not talking about a couple of new emojis, but dozens of new ones and hundreds of variations on them and on existing ones. Without further ado, let's see what's new with Android 7.1's emoji situation.

Profession emojis with a focus on women

Several months ago, Google made a proposal to the Unicode's emoji subcommittee (PDF link) to include 13 female professions to the emojis in a bid to encourage gender equality and move beyond the traditional roles that women were depicted in in the existing emoji list (dancer, queen, getting a haircut, and so on).

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Verizon visual voicemail works in the stock phone app

Ryan Whitwam

It's the year 2016, so you really shouldn't have to dial in to listen to your voicemail like some kind of caveman. What's next? A telescoping antenna on top of your phone? As of Android 7.1, Verizon customers with Nexus (and Pixel) devices have access to visual voicemail in the stock phone app.

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Night mode enabler apps no longer work in Android 7.1

Ryan Whitwam

Offering developer previews is very beneficial to a platform, but it also comes with its own perils. For example, people get upset when a feature that was part of the preview is dropped before the final release. Google has been derided in many a comment section for the removal of night mode in the final Nougat release, and now the hacky night mode enabler apps don't even work anymore. Is Google doing this because it hates you personally? That must be it.

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Apps marked as Device Administrator can be easily uninstalled (Hallelujah!)

Rita El Khoury

"Hey Rita, you know phones, right?"

Internal answer: "Here goes another silly question. Brace yourself." External answer: "Uh... yes?!"

"So I'm not sure if my phone has a virus or something. There's this app and I can't uninstall it."

Internal answer: "F%#$$#^@ it's Device Administrator again." External answer: "Nah, don't worry, it's just not letting you uninstall because the app has some feature that needs to be disabled first. (Low mumbling: F^$%ing Device Administrator, WHY?!) Gimme... There, uninstalled."

"Oh, thanks!"

I can't tell you how many times this has happened over the past couple of years. The first time someone told me they couldn't uninstall an app from their phone, I had to Google it because I'd never encountered something like that before, and that's when I learned that apps that set themselves as Device Administrator (most often, these are apps that can lock the screen) can't be uninstalled unless you deactivated that capability first.

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The Best Of AP

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Google Pixel review: A very good phone by Google
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Chrome Canary now available on Android, if you live life dangerously
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PSA: Android 7.0 Nougat is NOT officially out for the Moto G4 and G4 Plus
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The Google app's second Dashboard tab gets renamed to "Upcoming," starts showing up for more users
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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: Send GIFs directly from the keyboard

Ryan Whitwam

Sometimes a few words just don't get across the depth and range of your emotions. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what's a GIF worth? I think it's either like a million words or negative words—whatever the case, you can send GIFs directly from the keyboard in Android 7.1.

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Android 7.1 feature spotlight: "Android is upgrading" optimization step is now a background task, doesn't block startup anymore

Phil Oakley

For many a year, Android users have been seeing a familiar dialog saying 'Android is upgrading' when the operating system updates or in the event a new ROM is flashed, stopping them from using the device until it has finished optimizing apps. Those days are over: with Android 7.1, the 'Android is upgrading' process is now carried out in the background.

In 7.0, this dialog was sped up considerably - as Ryan says, it's almost instant. However, the Android team has gone one step further and removed it completely in 7.1, allowing the process to be carried out mostly silently, apart from a notification in the shade telling you it's doing this, and a progress bar indicating how far it is from complete.

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