Android 12’s new swipe-down gesture lets you quickly access notification shade from any screen

The Android 12 season is officially upon us. The latest iteration of Android brings with it some fresh UI changes and many useful features. Some of the biggest highlights of Android 12 include a one-handed mode that shrinks the UI for better one-handed usage, a native scrolling screenshot functionality that finally lets stock Android users take long screenshots, new Material NEXT design, improved widgets, and a lot more.

One of the pre-dominant themes of Android 12 seems to be better one-hand usability, as along with a dedicated one-handed mode, we’re also seeing Google optimizing various aspects of the UI to make it easier to reach with your thumb. In line with this trend, Google has also added a new swipe-down gesture to spare your thumb from doing awkward gymnastics for pulling down the notification shade. Google Pixel owners are probably familiar with swiping down on the home screen to pull down the notification tray. This new gesture works the same way except that you’ll be able to use it in any app — instead of just on the home screen.

As you can see in the quick demo below, you can now simply swipe down from the bottom (from just above the gesture navigation bar) to bring down the notification shade instead of reaching all the way to the top.

I found another gesture – swipe down for notifications. You know how the Pixel Launcher lets you swipe down on the home screen to pull down the notification shade? Yeah, this does that – but in any app. pic.twitter.com/VpmRESJkkM

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) February 19, 2021

This is likely intended as a replacement for the fingerprint swipe-down gesture offered by Google Pixel phones — which doesn’t work without a physical fingerprint scanner. Moreover, this swipe-down gesture seems to be an alternative to Android 12’s native one-handed mode as we found that they’re not compatible with each other.

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Android 12 tests “Automatic” sound status for notifications

Google dropped the first developer preview of Android 12 last night, and boy is there a lot of cool things to talk about. We have already detailed some of the major changes in the latest iteration of Android, including the scrolling screenshot feature, a native one-handed mode, UI optimizations for better one-hand usage, iOS-style widget stacks, and a whole lot more. As we continue to dig deeper into the new software, we keep finding new features and subtle changes that didn’t catch our attention immediately.

Many of the features we found are half-baked or still work in progress and hence not yet live in the first preview. One such interesting feature we found in Android 12 Developer Preview 1 is that the system can automatically decide the sound status of an incoming notification.

Right now, in Android 11, when you half-swipe on a notification and click on the gear icon, you see two options: Default and Silent. The default status corresponds to the system-wide sound profile and may allow the notification to ring or vibrate depending on the selected sound profile. Meanwhile, choosing the silent option here entirely disables the sound and vibration for the said app — regardless of the system sound profile. In Android 12, however, Google is working on adding a third option called Automatic, which, unsurprisingly, automatically decides if the notification should make sound or vibration.

Our Editor-in-Chief, Mishaal Rahman, found some strings related to this new feature and even managed to get it working. Here are the screenshots that show the feature in action and how it compares with Android 11:

<string name="feedback_alerted">This notification was automatically &lt;b>promoted to Default&lt;/b> by the system.</string>
<string name="feedback_demoted">This notification was automatically &lt;b>ranked lower&lt;/b> in your shade.</string>
<string name="feedback Ok">OK</string> <string name="feedback_promoted">This notification was automatically &lt;b>ranked higher&lt;/b> in your shade.</string>
<string name="feedback_prompt">Was this correct?</string>
<string name="feedback_response">Thanks for your feedback!</string>
<string name="feedback_silenced">This notification was automatically &lt;b>demoted to Silent&lt;/b> by the system.</string>

This feature isn’t live in the Android 12 Developer Preview 1 yet as it likely needs some more time in the oven. We don’t know when Google plans to implement it, but it’s definitely something that we would like to see making its way to the final release. In the meantime, stay tuned to XDA Portal as we still have a lot more Android 12 news coming up your way!

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Vaio Z laptop with 11th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, 14-inch 4K display goes official

Vaio has unveiled a new flagship laptop featuring top-of-the-line hardware in a 14-inch design. The new Vaio Z is one of the most expensive offerings from the Japanese brand packing the latest 11th-gen Intel Core i7 processor with Iris Xe graphics and a sharp high-resolution 4K display. The company had recently made its comeback in India through a partnership with e-commerce platform Flipkart, however, the products were running on older Intel and AMD chipsets. The new Vaio Z, on the other hand, comes with shiny new silicon.

The new Vaio Z comes with a unique 3D molded carbon fiber construction, and according to the company it offers “exceptional toughness” as well as a lightweight design. The laptop can apparently survive a 4.1ft drop which is slightly better than the MIL-STD-810H requirement. At the same time, the overall weight of the laptop is just 1.04kg.

As mentioned earlier, the notebook comes with a 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels) LCD display measuring at 14-inches and offers HDR with a 99.8% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. The notebook isn’t a 2-in-1 but you can open the display at up to 180-degrees so it can lay flat on a desk.

Powered by an Intel Core i7 processor, the laptop will be offered with up to 32GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 2TB of PCIe SSD storage. The company is also offering ‘TruePerformance’ technology that is said to offer a boost to the CPU power at the same time controlling the thermals. As for the ports, you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a full-size HDMI, and a 3.5mm headphone and mic combo jack. Other notable features include Wi-Fi 6, an IR camera for Windows Hello along with a physical shutter, and up to 10 hours of battery life.

As for the pricing, the Vaio Z starts at $3,579 for the base model that includes 16GB RAM and 512GB storage. Pricing goes up to $3,779 for 1TB of storage, $3,979 for 2TB of storage, and a whopping $4,179 if you want 32GB RAM and 2TB storage. The laptop can be pre-ordered in the US from the official Vaio website.

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Android 12 includes a permission management hub, but its not intended for users

Android 12 “Snow Cone” is going to be the flavor of the rest of this month, with Developer Preview 1 giving us our first official taste of the upcoming dessert OS update. We’ve spotted a ton of changes in our Developer Preview 1 Hands-On, but there are even more hidden treats all through the update. One of these is a neat permission management hub, but it looks like Google does not want to open it up for users any time soon.

Before we talk about the premission management hub in Android 12, let’s rewind a bit — by two years, actually. Back in January-February 2019, we managed to get our hands on a leaked build of Android Q ahead of Google’s official Developer Preview release. Within this build, we could spot a new permission management hub. A lot of what we spotted ended up being released in Android 10’s official stable release, but one particular page remained missing — that of the “Permissions Usage Dashboard”. This Dashboard presented an overview of the permissions used on your device by various apps, giving you a fairly broad idea to see what remains the most requested (or abused) permission on your device. As mentioned, the official builds of Android 10 and later since then did not contain this Permissions Usage Dashboard. Well, until now.

On Android 12 Developer Preview 1, the Permissions Usage Dashboard has made a return, but only as an internal tool for debugging purposes as Mishaal found out.

As very clearly alerted on the settings page, the Permissions Usage Dashboard is intended for internal debugging use only. It’s very clear that Google does not intend to release this as a public-facing tool. Why? That is something we do not know, but we can take a few guesses. The Dashboard shows the apps that have accessed any particular permission, but it does not give us any clues on the scope of information that they have accessed, giving us incomplete information. The warning also mentions that the data might not be accurate, which does kind of defeat its overall utility.

Still, it’s a nice bit of information to have on your device, even if you may not be relying on it that heavily. We hope that Google considers adding in a more polished experience for users as well.

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This may be our first look at Android 12’s new lockscreen and notifications UI

Earlier today, Google released the first Android 12 Developer Preview for Pixel smartphones, and we’ve been digging into the release to find everything that’s new. One of the most anticipated changes to the next Android release is a brand new UI, and we’ve already caught glimpses of Android 12’s newfound one-handed friendliness. Now, we’ve managed to enable a new UI for the Always on Display, lockscreen, and notifications, further confirming that Google has plans to radically change Android’s UI this year.

Note: This user interface changes shown in this article are a work-in-progress. The new UI is not live in Android 12 Developer Preview 1 — Google intentionally disabled the new UI in the Preview. As we’ll explain below, it is likely that several elements of the UI will change before the Stable release.

Last week, we obtained images that we believed to be design mockups of Android 12, showcasing the new OS’s rumored theming system. One of the images that we shared showed off a brand new UI for the notifications panel. The mockup showed a light beige-colored opaque background, rounded corners on the notifications, privacy indicators for the camera and microphone, and swapped positioning of the date and time.

On Monday of this week, we published an article with exclusive information on Google’s efforts to redesign Android in Android 12. That article detailed the many changes coming to the Always on Display, lockscreen, lock pattern view, and more. After analyzing Android 12 Developer Preview 1, I can confirm that all of these changes are in development, but we haven’t been able to enable all of them just yet. However, we’re ready to share a sneak peek at some of the ways that Google is tweaking the Always on Display, lockscreen, and notifications.

Android 12 DP1’s current lockscreen and notification UI

As we explained previously, Google is experimenting with the design and layout of the lockscreen in Android 12. Some of the possible changes include putting the digital clock front-and-center in the middle. The hours are now above the minutes, and the font is enormous. Meanwhile, the At A Glance widget has been moved to the top left corner. When a notification comes in, the clock shrinks and moves to the top right of the lockscreen. On the Always on Display, notification icons are displayed in the top left underneath the At A Glance widget rather than in the center. Personally, I’m not a fan of this new design in its current iteration, though I recognize that it’s still a WIP and is subject to many changes. It’s possible this design will look a bit better once Google enables lockscreen clock customization, but we haven’t managed to get any other clock types to show up in this view.

Android 12’s in-development lockscreen and AOD interface

We also haven’t been able to get the Device Controls feature to show up on the lockscreen, though we’ve confirmed that Google is working on integrating the feature more tightly into the lockscreen. We also don’t see any radical changes to the lock pattern view, though we did spot a subtle tweak to the animation during our hands-on.

Next up, here’s a sneak peek at some of the notifications panel changes that could be coming in Android 12. Instead of the mostly transparent background of the current UI, Google is instead testing an opaque background that matches your day/night theme. The background color may match your wallpaper once Android 12’s rumored theming system goes live. If so, that would explain the light beige background shown off in the design mockups we posted. In any case, we’ve confirmed that Google is working on a wallpaper-based theming system under the code-name “monet”, but we haven’t managed to activate it yet.

Apart from the opaque background, we’ve also spotted the thicker brightness bar that we previously mentioned. Stock Android’s current brightness bar is a thin bar, while the new design is more of a thick pill. The Quick Settings tiles haven’t changed, though the labels have disappeared from this iteration. We know that Google is working on another design that places the labels on the sides, but we weren’t able to get that working yet.

Android 12’s in-development notifications panel interface

One thing we’ll note is that some of Google’s in-development changes broke notifications when we enabled them. It seems that Google is working on a new notification pipeline and also a two-column notification UI, the latter of which we previously revealed. We weren’t able to get the new notification pipeline or layout working with the other UI changes, but we’ll keep trying in this and future Previews.

We’ll continue to dig into the first Android 12 Developer Preview to see what we can find. I’ll be posting many of the changes I find on Twitter in this running thread on all the changes I found so far. We’ll also have more detailed writeups on all my findings published on XDA in case you aren’t a fan of Twitter’s layout.

Thanks to PNF Software for providing us a license to use JEB Decompiler, a professional-grade reverse engineering tool for Android applications.

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Android 12 might add support for iOS-esque widget stacks

Widgets have been around on Android since… well, forever, since it was basically one of Android’s very first features. And iOS was constantly scorned for lacking support for widgets until iOS 14 came around, and that was just last year. But iOS widgets work a tad bit differently than how Android widgets work. In iOS, you can actually create what’s called “widget stacks”, which allows you to stack a lot of widgets in the same place to save space, and swiping between them. In Android, on the other hand, every widget will take up its own space, and while Android launchers are way more customizable, it’s still been pretty much the same for several years. Apparently, with Android 12, we might be seeing that sweet iOS feature jump ship too.

Is…is this the beginnings of a widget stack? This is an "enhanced" and "expanded" smart space. pic.twitter.com/9tnfK2kA5a

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) February 18, 2021

This was uncovered while digging through the first Android 12 Developer Preview, and it doesn’t get much more complicated than that. We enabled hidden flags in Pixel Launcher that enable an in-development “enhanced” and “expanded” smartspace (smartspace is the code-name for the Pixel Launcher’s At a Glance widget). The expanded smartspace flag “expands [the] smartspace height to two rows.” This “enhanced and expanded” widget doesn’t tell us much on what its final purpose could be, as right now it holds a “placeholder” tile, which can only tell us how unfinished it is. When it does make it to a near-final product, it could resemble a lot of what we’ve seen on iOS 14 with widget stacks.

While it’s still early days to tell what exactly is going to be done with this feature (after all, Android 12 is set to look quite a bit different from Android 11), it would be pretty cool if it ends up being what we think it is. Android 12 is changing a lot of things that have, until now, seemed standard on Android, and this might be just one of them. (And it’s also a launcher update, so you know, you might just be able to get it without updating your phone).

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Android 12 DP1 preps a Conversations widget, but it isn’t ready yet

We got our first look at Android 12 earlier this month when an alleged early draft summarizing all the upcoming changes surfaced online. The document included several screenshots that showcased the new notifications panel UI, a couple of new privacy features, and a new Conversations widget. Now that Google has finally rolled out the first Android 12 developer preview, we can confirm that Google is indeed working on adding the Conversations widget in Android 12.

The following screenshot confirms the existence of the Conversations widget in Android 12, and it sheds some light on how the widget will work once it rolls out with a future release. Based on the screenshot, we believe that after you place a Conversations widget on your homescreen, you’ll get the option to pick a particular conversation to add to the widget. Once added, the widget will let you keep track of that particular conversation by showing recent messages, missed calls, or activity statuses.

The Conversations widget currently seems to be a work in progress as it doesn’t list any conversations, and we haven’t managed to add it to the homescreen yet. Nonetheless, we now have a good idea of what to expect once it rolls out with a future release of Android 12. Until then, you can check out the leaked screenshots attached below to get an idea of what the Conversations widget may look like.

What’s your take on the new Conversations widget in Android 12? I honestly don’t see the appeal of cluttering up my homescreen with multiple 2×1 widgets to keep track of conversations, no matter how important they are. I would much rather prefer a larger 4×2 widget with pages that would let me check multiple conversations without taking too much space on my homescreen. Do you agree? Share your thoughts in the comments section below. Also, check out this post to learn about all the new features included in the first Android 12 developer preview.

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