Android L Release Date: Its One of the Prime Enhancement to Android

By Noriel Espinueva Sep 29, 2014 09:59 AM EDT

Android L Release Date: Its One of the Prime Enhancement to Android

Google will soon launch its upcoming new mobile innovation to the market - Google Android 5.0, also known as Google Android L. Its developers say that its one of the prime enhancement to Android.

Google Android L showcases its big four features:

Material Design

In the Google I/O Conference, the developers coined a new design language for Android L, and that is material design. The Android L offers new themes, new widgets, and new APIs.

Providing new style for the app, android L users can choose between dark material theme and light material theme.

New widgets are also installed, such as the RecyclerView widget and the CardView widget. The RecyclerView widget offers a high-quality enhancement of dynamic views. As a more advanced version of the ListView widget, the RecyclerView widget provides extra convenience to the users.

On the other hand, the CardView widget allows users to display data in cards. This allows easier and more convenient browsing of data.

Android L also introduces the Z property, which defines the 3D property of views, shadow sizes, and drawing order.

New APIs also let users make their personalized animations, which are built as standard views, for the touch feedback.

Notification and lock screen integration

Google android L presents one of its most interesting features in the form of lockscreen notifications. In android L, all notifications appear in the phone's lock screen. This enables you to see every updates in just a single glance!

Users are given the power to control the notification that can be shown in the lockscreen for security and privacy. Visibility of information can be private, public, or secret. Users can select this feature via settings to adjust notification contents to be shown.

Speed Boost

Google ensure dthat Google Android L is the fastest smartphone in the market. Android's current process virtual machine system, Dalvik, will be replaced by a new Android runtime, ART. In Android L, ART now becomes the default runtime.

ART implements new features such as ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, improved garbage collection, and enhanced development and debugging. Ahead-of-time compilation boosts device and app performance. Garbage collection ruins an apps performance. To solve this, ART controls garbage collection pause and processing time. ART also improves debugging by adding support to the device sampling profiler (such as Traceview), initiating filter events, and setting field watchpoint.

ART also supports ARM, x86, and MITS in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. It also improves application performance, thus, optimizing battery life.

With regard to the exact release date, there is no official announcement from the developer company or from any authority. However, there are rumors that the device will be released next month, together with Nexus 6 smartphone and the Nexus 9 tablet. More than that, the new operating system is set to be released next month as well.

The trend is that operating systems are named after candies or sweets, such as Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean, and KitKat, just to name a few. People thought at first that the operating system following KitKat would be Lollipop. Interestingly, the next operating system is confirmed to be Lemon Meringue Pie. Unfortunately, it will not be accessible for download until the first day of November.