The smarts of Android on screens big and small
Tailor your Android phone to fit your life – from the size of your icons and keyboard to the games and apps on your home screen.
Welcome to Android 5.0 Lollipop—the largest and most ambitious release for Android yet!
This release is packed with new features for users and thousands of new APIs for developers. It extends Android even further, from phones, tablets, and wearables, to TVs and cars.
For a closer look at the new developer APIs, see the Android 5.0 API Overview. Or, read more about Android 5.0 for consumers at www.android.com.
Android 5.0 brings Material design to Android and gives you an expanded UI toolkit for integrating the new design patterns easily in your apps.
New 3D views let you set a z-level to raise elements off of the view hierarchy and cast realtime shadows, even as they move.
Built-in activity transitions take the user seamlessly from one state to another with beautiful, animated motion. The material theme adds transitions for your activities, including the ability to use shared visual elements across activities.
Ripple animations are available for buttons, checkboxes, and other touch controls in your app.
You can also define vector drawables in XML and animate them in a variety of ways. Vector drawables scale without losing definition, so they are perfect for single-color in-app icons.
A new system-managed processing thread called RenderThread keeps animations smooth even when there are delays in the main UI thread.
Android 5.0 introduces a refreshed notification system. Individual notifications are now displayed on cards to adhere to the material design language, and batches of notifications can be grouped by the app that produced them. Notifications are now displayed on the lock screen as cards, and "heads up" notifications can also be displayed as large banners across the top of the screen, along with their respective action buttons. A do-not-disturb feature is also added for notifications. The recent apps menu was redesigned to use a three-dimensional stack of cards to represent open apps. Individual apps can also display multiple cards in the recent menu, rather than only one entry per app; for example, a web browser can show all of its open tabs as individual cards.
Lollipop also contains major new platform features for developers, with over 5,000 new APIs added for use by applications. For example, there is the possibility to save photos in a raw image format. Additionally, the Dalvik virtual machine was officially replaced by Android Runtime (ART), which is a new runtime environment that was introduced as a technology previewin KitKat. ART is a cross-platform runtime which supports the x86, ARM, and MIPS architectures in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. Unlike Dalvik, which uses just-in-time compilation(JIT), ART compiles apps upon installation, which are then run exclusively from the compiled version from then on. This technique removes the processing overhead associated with the JITprocess , improving system performance.
Lollipop also aims to improve battery consumption through a series of optimizations known as "Project Volta". Among its changes are a new battery saver mode, job scheduling APIs which can restrict certain tasks to only occur over Wi-Fi, and batching of tasks to reduce the overall amount of time that internal radios are active. The new developer tool called "Battery Historian" can be used for tracking battery consumption by apps while in use. The Android Extension Pack APIs also provide graphics functions such as new shaders, aiming to provide PC-level graphics for 3D games on Android devices.[9][17]
A number of system-level, enterprise-oriented features were also introduced under the banner "Android for Work": Samsung contributed its Knox security framework for segregating personal and work-oriented data from each other on a device, along with accompanying APIs for managing the environment. Devices can also be configured so that users do not have to unlock their device with a PIN or pattern if it is within a trusted, physical location, or is in proximity to a user's Android Wear device. Device encryption will be enabled by default.
