Features To Look Out For In Android N (Nutella)

While most devices in the market are yet to get Android Marshmallow update, the next version of Android OS is already on the way. At the moment, most OEMs are yet to push Android Marshmallow update to their devices. Google is still working on Android N and it doesn’t have an official name yet, but there are indications it’s going to be called Android Nutella. Also, it’s still unclear whether we’re seeing Android 7.0 or Android 6.1.

Even with all the uncertainties, there are features we may likely see in the next version of Android OS. Some are assertions directly from Google while others are rumors and speculations.

Multi Window Support

Well, Jide beat Google to this with the release of Remix OS. This proves Android OS can definitely support multi-window multitasking and Google might officially introduce this feature in Android N. In a Reddit AMA thread, Android and Chrome UX director Glen Murphy admitted that split-screen multitasking is already in the works.

There are many things, like multi-window, that we’ve been spending a lot of time on — hopefully we can share more about this soon… We’re working on lots of things right now for N that, of course, we wish we had, you know, yesterday… But we’d spoil the surprise of N if we shared all of them. Split screen is in the works!

This will particularly make Android tablets and 2-in-1 devices a lot more productive. By the way, this feature is already hidden in Marshmallow but not enabled by default. It is experimental and Google may likely perfect it with the launch of Android N.

A Video Editor

Android OS has an inbuilt image editor but one thing it lacks is a video editor. Android users have to rely on 3rd party apps to edit videos but this may be coming to an end with Android N.

A New Messaging App

Hangouts is going through a redesign and this includes removal of the SMS/MMS feature. It has been reported that the revamped messaging app will include chatbots. This will work based on artificial intelligence and the bots will be able to respond to natural language queries.

Android For PC?

When Google decided to merge Android OS with Chrome OS, we expect this and it may become a reality soon. A report on the Wall Street Journal suggests this will finally happen in 2017 when the final version of the optimized Android version for PC gets released. However, there’s going to be a preview of this before this year runs out.