By Stefan Frank, Ph.D., Senior Product Manager, Android UI

We’re bringing you the #11WeeksOfAndroid series, which delves into Android’s key technology points so you won’t miss anything. This issue focuses on connections and identities.

Important update

One of the goals of Android 11 is to make phones more “people-oriented,” because keeping in touch with loved ones is so important to people. This is a core human need, especially at a time when our face-to-face interactions are limited, and we need to socialize more than ever. Android 11 adds new features that help you use multiple devices as the same person, giving you a whole new way to communicate with others on your phone.

We’re rolling out some new features in Android 11 that will let you stay in touch with your loved ones and colleagues at work as much as you want. The core of this release is the Android Conversation Shortcut API and Identity Services Library. These new tools let you instantly connect with your best friends, share funny photos of your dog, tell your friends about that delicious seafood recipe you found, or celebrate a promotion at work. At the same time, these tools provide new password management capabilities to make it easier for your users to register and log in.

One of our most popular features is the ability to display chat messages from people who are most important to you on your lock screen. You can easily recognize them from your profile picture and quickly reply to your family, friends or colleagues. These are the people you really want to keep in touch with. We know this new feature will help you, and we’ve been overexcited by the feedback we’ve received from those participating in the beta. Adding the Conversation Shortcut API to improve communication between users was one of the “easiest” decisions we made with Android 11.

When you receive the notification, the Bubble pops up and you can click on it to access the content of the chat message.

One of the new features built on shortcuts is a new chat area at the top of notifications. This feature lets you focus on the most important thing, your chat messages. In Android 11, users can trigger another new feature – Bubbles – directly from these notifications. Bubble is a small chat icon that floats above other content on the side of the screen and can be extended to quickly access the chat without affecting what you’re doing on the device. This feature comes in handy when you are chatting with others while performing tasks on your device.

△ New chat pane

Shows which chats are marked as priorities and displayed on the lock screen.

Long-pressing chat notifications allows users to mark priority chats to prioritize messages from important people. The chat to be processed first will show the person’s profile picture on the right side of the lock screen and move to the top of the notification. These chats can be set to pop up even in do not disturb mode. Another use for chat shortcuts is to share targets in system share tables, which is already available in Android 10.

Another important point this week is Identity. The complexity of users and developers makes it difficult for developers to authenticate, and to address this, we are exploring the One Tap and Block Store in the new Google Identity Services Library. One Tap is our cross-platform login mechanism for the Web and Android that supports and simplifies various types of credentials. The Block Store is our new token-based login mechanism, which is built around backup and recovery. With this feature, you can keep your users logged in across multiple Android devices.

We’re excited about these new features because they help all of us connect, communicate and express ourselves with the people we care about and the apps we use, which is as important to us as ever.

Video resources

To learn more about these “people-centric” features, we recommend you check out the Android 11 release highlights about contacts. Earlier, we also posted a new video on chat notifications, where Artur talks about how to use the chat shortcut and Bubble. In addition, you can watch Dan give a great overview of the new chat features and other system UI updates. Finally, you can also listen to Chet’s podcast to hear him talk to us about contacts and Bubble.

If you’re interested in learning more about Identity, we’ve also published a video titled “Exploring Identity in Android: A New Feature for Logging in.” In this video, Vishal introduces the new libraries in Google Identity System: One Tap and Block Store.

The two teams that worked with us early on around chat were Facebook’s Messenger team and Twitter’s messaging team. You can check out the official documentation for examples of how the two teams implemented these features.

  • Official documentation: Twitter team to achieve the function of related cases: android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/06/bri…
  • Official document: Facebook team case relative to the implementation of this feature: android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/06/mes…

Begin to learn

If you want an easy way to follow this week’s highlights, check out the Contacts and Identities program. Developers can complete an orderly tutorial of predefined modules, which are completed with quizzes, including Codelabs, videos, articles, and blog posts. After passing the quiz, each user will receive a virtual badge. How much do you know about “contacts and identities”? Join the quiz and win a limited edition badge.

knowledge

Android 11 is the starting point for us to continually improve important features like users, contacts, and chat. Many partners in the ecosystem are launching wonderful apps and services to connect and chat. As People at Android, we want to further highlight these partners to support this goal. Therefore, if you are looking at applications that allow real-time communication between users, we strongly recommend that when designing for API 30, we use chat shortcuts for notifications, Bubble, and sharing to make your users’ chats visible for quick access to your app. You can check out the developer documentation to learn more.

For applications that handle user accounts, we encourage you to integrate One Tap to simplify credential management and Block Store to handle device updates to help users avoid the messy process of retrieving passwords and forgetting credentials. These features work on Android 6.0 and later devices.

More wonderful

You can check out the full list of #11WeeksOfAndroid videos, or head over to the official website to learn more about each topic. We will continue to focus on new directions. Stay tuned and thank you for being with us!