What's New in Android 5.0 Lollipop

By Ankur Kotwal, Developer Advocate

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!