What's new with Android 12? Key-Value Additions and Changes on Offer

Android 12 has been released, followed by a loud pre-release buzz. The latest Android operating system launched with the Pixel 6 series represents many of Google's ambitious mobile app design and performance enhancement attributes. 

For any Android app development agency, it is Irita to take a close round look at all the features and enhancements offered by this new Android update. Let's describe and explain the most significant changes and value additions brought by Android 12. 

Lock Screen Clock

Android 12 now offers the all-new lock screen clock. When you have already cleared all the notifications from the locked home screen, it will show a big-sized digital clock just in the center of the home screen. By taking a quick swapping look at the screen, you get to know the time.  

Improved PIN code keys

Another design enhancement that Android 12 offers is a fresh and bold design of the PIN-code keypad. The keypad has large buttons but provides a minimalist look and feel of pastel shades. The shades are decided as per your preferences.

Improved Notifications

With the Android 12, the notifications underwent a complete design overhaul. The notification windows come with a new look allowing automatic grouping against every app. Only the notifications of conversational messages are presented separately. In case you want to snooze notifications, all you need is to tap on the new snooze control button instead of swiping. 

Material You

Android 12 offers a new customer-centric material design implementation concept called Material You. This is a more powerful design language than the earlier Material Design, and it is going to be used across multiple Google services instead of just Android. It is bringing several crucial design changes for Android users. 

Material You of Android 12 will offer a broader scope of customization with options for users to choose preferred color schemes, contrast, layout size and line width, sizes of various design elements, etc. 

Wallpaper-based themes 

Just following the customer-specific design principles established through the Material You protocol, Android 12 will also allow using design themes based on the wallpaper used by Android 12. Based on the current wallpaper in the phone, Android 12 will choose the correlated color scheme. 

Privacy Dashboard

The latest Android version is more focused on championing the causes of privacy. Following this principle, Android 12 offers a detailed Privacy Dashboard and several other changes required to address privacy needs. Through the Privacy Dashboard, you can easily see a detailed timeline of various device features and their uses by the apps. Apart from this, there will be indicators when an app accesses the phone's camera or the microphone.  

Android 12 users can simply tap on the new toggles offered through Quick Settings for disabling the camera, microphone, and similar device features with simple commands. Once these toggles are only limited to Google's Pixel, devices will be available for the more prominent Android audience. 

For sharing location data also, Android 12 offers more privacy options. There will be a new setting to help you share the gross location data with any app instead of sharing the accurate location data. 

Private Compute Core

Another significant value addition brought by Android 12 is an entirely new Private Computer Core to help users keep all their information completely private and secure. Since private data is required by AI-based features such as Live Caption, Smart Reply, Now Playing, and a few others, this will help safekeeping your private data. 

The Private Computer Core apps can maintain a partition right within the operating system platform, just the kind of partition used for securely keeping away passwords and biometric information for machine learning programs to access. The partition will help maintain security for certain private information hackers, and malicious programs often target. 

Hibernating Apps 

It is often observed that apps that remain unused for months may compromise security when targeted by malicious programs. They also end up consuming a lot of space unnecessarily. The new App Hibernation feature of Android 12 helps hibernate the inactive or unused apps quickly. The apps, after getting hibernated, will free up the storage space, and they need fresh permissions for revoking. 

For months, all unused apps will automatically hibernate unless the users toggle the feature in settings so that new apps don't enter into the hibernation state. Bringing an app out of hibernation is quite simple. All you need is just to run it like any other app.

Device Performance Class

This feature has been introduced to address the performance-based differences and make a standardization of performance across a multitude of Android devices. Since the vast and varying ecosystem of Android is often challenging for the app developers to make a correct and quick estimation of device performance, Google, for solving this, brought the new performance standardization protocol called Device Performance Class. 

Android 12 with this Device Performance Class defines an array of performance attributes and capabilities that are well above the basic requirements of the Android operating system. This means developers can create more dynamic and performance-demanding content and features for Android devices equipped with performance class requirements. Now each Android OS version offers its own 

performance class helps developers to decide on the compatibility and capabilities they need to address. 

Summing It Up 

Android 12, if you notice the offerings of this operating system closely, mostly focuses on the personalized user experience and device-specific performance enhancements. On the other hand, the new Android version also focuses on improving the design elements and design-centric innovations to a great extent. Android 12, after several Android updates over the years, brought some serious value additions for developers and users.