What's New in Android 5.0 Lollipop

Android 5.0 Lollipop is the biggest update of
Android to date, introducing an all new visual style, improved
performance, and much more. Android 5.0 Lollipop also extends across
screens big and small, including phones, tablets, wearables, TVs and
cars, to give your users access to information when they need it most.

To get you started on developing and testing on Android 5.0 Lollipop,
here are some of the developer highlights with links to related videos
and documentation.

User experience

• Material design for the
  multiscreen world — Material Design is a new approach for designing apps
  in today’s multi-device world that takes a comprehensive strategy to
  visual, motion, and interaction design across a number of platforms and
  form factors. Android 5.0 brings Material Design to the platform, with a
  full set of tools for implementing material design
  in your apps. The system is incredibly flexible, allowing your app to
  express its individual character and brand with bold colors and a
  variety of responsive UI patterns and themeable elements.
• Enhanced notifications
  — New lockscreen notifications let you surface content, updates, and
  actions to users at a glance, without needing to unlock their device.
  Heads-up notifications let you display content and actions in a small
  floating window managed by the system, no matter which app is in the
  foreground. Notifications are refreshed for Material Design and you can
  use accent colors to express your brand.
• Concurrent documents in Overview
  — Now you can organize your app by tasks and present these concurrently
  as individual “documents” on the Overview screen. For example, instant
  messaging apps could declare each chat as a separate document. Users can
  flip through these on the Overview screen to find the specific chat
  they want and jump straight to it.

Performance

• Android Runtime (ART)
  — Android 5.0 runs exclusively on the ART runtime. ART offers
  ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, more efficient garbage collection, and
  improved development and debugging features. In many cases it improves
  performance of the device, without you having to change your code.
• 64-bit support — Support for 64-bit ABIs provides additional
  address space and improved performance with certain compute workloads.
  Apps written in the Java language can run immediately on 64-bit
  architectures with no modifications required. NDK r10c includes 64-bit support, for apps and games using native code.
• Project Volta
  — New tools and APIs help you build battery-efficient apps. Battery
  Historian, a tool included in the SDK, lets you visualize power events
  over time and understand how your app is using battery. The JobScheduler
  API lets you set the conditions under which your background tasks and
  other jobs should run, such as when the device is idle or connected to
  an unmetered network or to a charger, to minimize battery impact. More
  in this I/O video.
• OpenGL ES 3.1 and Android Extension Pack
  — With OpenGL ES 3.1, you get compute shaders, stencil textures, and
  texture gather for your games. Android Extension Pack (AEP) is a new set
  of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop-class graphics to Android
  including tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture
  compression across GPU technologies. More on what's new for game
  developers in this DevBytes video.
• WebView updates — We’ve updated WebView to support WebRTC,
  WebAudio and WebGL will be supported. WebView also includes native
  support for all of the Web Components specifications: Custom Elements,
  Shadow DOM, HTML Imports, and Templates. WebView is now unbundled from
  the system and will be regularly updated through Google Play.

Workplace

• Managed provisioning and unified view of apps
  — to make it easier for employees to have a single device for personal
  and work use, framework enhancements offer a unified view of apps,
  notifications & recents across work apps and personal apps. Profile
  owner APIs, in the workplace context, let administrators create and
  manage work profiles and defined as part of a new managed provisioning
  process. More in this I/O video.

Media

• Advanced camera capabilities
  — A new camera API gives you new capabilities for advanced image
  capture and processing. On supported devices, your app can capture
  uncompressed YUV capture at full 8 megapixel resolution at 30 FPS. You
  can also capture raw sensor data and control parameters such as exposure
  time, ISO sensitivity, and frame duration, on a per-frame basis.
• Audio improvements
  — The sound architecture has been enhanced, with lower input latency in
  OpenSL, the addition of multichannel-mixing, and USB digital audio mode
  support. More in this I/O video.

Connectivity

• BLE Peripheral Mode
  — Android devices can now function in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
  peripheral mode. Apps can use this capability to broadcast their
  presence to nearby devices — for example, you can now build apps that
  let a device function as a beacon and transmit data to another BLE
  device. More in this I/O video.
• Multi-networking
  — Apps can dynamically request networks based on capabilities such as
  metered or unmetered. This is useful when you want to use a specific
  network, such as cellular. Apps can also request platform to re-evaluate
  networks for an internet connection. This is useful when your app sees
  unusually high latency on a particular network, it can enable the
  platform to switch to a better network (if available) sooner with a
  graceful handoff.

Get started!

You can get started developing and testing on Android 5.0
right away by downloading the Android 5.0 Platform (API level 21), as
well as the SDK Tools, Platform Tools, and Support Package from the Android SDK Manager.

Check out the DevByte video below for more of what’s new in Lollipop!