Android Lollipop(5.x)

  What is Android Lollipop(5.x)?  

Android Lollipop is the latest version of Android which was previewed at Google I/O.
It features a number of significant updates, the most obvious of which is a new look with Google rolling out a new design language called Material Design which allows developers create layers within their apps.
Google has also deeply integrated its Android Wear platform with Android Lollipop, allowing users unlock smartphones without a pin code if they are wearing a smartwatch.
Notifications have also been given a make-over, allowing users respond to notifications directly from the lock screen.
Under the hood, Google is also working to improve battery life (Project Volta) and now supports 64-bit chips and promises to improve performance thanks to a move entirely to Android Runtime (ART).

.....Improvements.....

User Interface

Material Support in Lollipop
• The material theme
• View Shadows
• The RecyclerView Widget
• Drawable animation and styling effects
• Material design animation and activity transition effects
• Animators for View properties based on the state of the view
• Customizable UI widgets and app bars with color palettes that you control

Lockscreen Notifications
• Presence of notification on lockscreen
• Turn on/off sensitive notification content to be shown over a secure lockscreen

Notification Metadata
• Uses metadata associated with your app notifications to sort the notifications more intelligently

Concurrent documents and activities in the recent screen
• App can open more tasks as needed for additional concurrent activities for documents
• Facilitates multitasking by letting users quickly switch between individual activities and documents from the Recents screen

WebView Updates
• Updates the WebView to Chromium M36, bringing security and stability enhancements as well as bug fixes
 
ART (Android Runtime)

• Replacement of old Dalvic application runtime with ART(Android Runtime)
• Introduced in 4.4(Kitkat) as optional developer feature, further improvement in Lollipop release
• Dalvic uses JIT(Just-in-Time) compiler whereas ART uses AOT(Ahead-of-Time) compiler
• Improved garbage collection (GC)
• Improved debugging support

Power Efficiency

Scheduling Jobs
• The app has non-user-facing work that you can defer
• The app has work you'd prefer to do when the unit is plugged in
• The app has a task that requires network access (or requires a Wi-Fi connection)
• he app has a number of tasks that you want to run as a batch on a regular schedule
You can schedule task under such conditions-
• The device is charging
• The device is connected to an unmetered network
• The system deems the device to be idle
• Completion with a minimum delay or within a specific deadline

BatteryStats
• History of battery related events
• Global statistics for the device
• Approximated power use per UID and system component
• Per-app mobile ms per packet
• System UID aggregated statistics
• App UID aggregated statistics
 
Graphics

Support for OpenGL EL 3.1
• Compute Shaders
• Separate shader objects
• Indirect draw commands
• Multisample and stencil textures
• Shading language improvements
• Extension for advance blend mode and debugging
• Backward compatibility with OpenGL 2.0 and 3.0

Android Extension Pack
• Guaranteed fragment shader support for shader storage buffers, images, and atomics (fragment shader support is optional in OpenGL ES 3.1.)
• Tessellation and geometry shaders
• ASTC (LDR) texture compression format
• Per-sample interpolation and shading
• Per-sample interpolation and shading


Wireless and Connectivity

Multiple Network Connection
• let your app dynamically scan for available networks with specific capabilities, and establish a connection to them
• useful when your app requires a specialized network, such as an SUPL, MMS, or carrier-billing network, or if you want to send data using a particular type of transport protocol

Bluetooth Broadcasting
• Android device can now act as a Bluetooth LE peripheral device
• Apps can use this capability to make their presence known to nearby devices
• build apps that allow a device to function as a pedometer or health monitor and communicate its data with another BLE device

NFC enhancement(enable wider and more flexible use of NFC)
• Android Beam is now available in the share menu
 

Multimedia

Camera API for advanced camera capabilities
• Introduces new API to facilitate fine-grain photo capture and image processing

Audio playback
• Supply audio data in floating point format
• This permits grater dynamic range, more consistent precision and grater headroom