Android Lollipop Features

Android "Lollipop" Developer Preview

Android 5.0 introduces a refreshed notification system. Individual notifications are now displayed on cards to adhere to the material design language, and batches of notifications can be grouped by the app that produced them. Notifications are now displayed on the lock screen as cards, and "heads up" notifications can also be displayed as large banners across the top of the screen, along with their respective action buttons. A do-not-disturb feature is also added for notifications. The recent apps menu was redesigned to use a three-dimensional stack of cards to represent open apps. Individual apps can also display multiple cards in the recent menu, rather than only one entry per app; for example, a web browser can show all of its open tabs as individual cards.

Lollipop also contains major new platform features for developers, with over 5,000 new APIs added for use by applications. Additionally, the Dalvik virtual machine was officially replaced by Android Runtime (ART), which is a new runtime environment that was introduced as a technology preview in KitKat.[14] ART is a cross-platform runtime which supports the x86, ARM, and MIPS architectures in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments. Unlike Dalvik, which uses just-in-time compilation (JIT), ART compiles apps upon installation, which are then run exclusively from the compiled version from then on. This technique removes the processing overhead associated with the JIT process, improving system performance.

Lollipop also aims to improve battery consumption through a series of optimizations known as "Project Volta". Among its changes are a new battery saver mode, job scheduling APIs which can restrict certain tasks to only occur over Wi-Fi, and batching of tasks to reduce the overall amount of time that internal radios are active. The new developer tool called "Battery Historian" can be used for tracking battery consumption by apps while in use. The Android Extension Pack APIs also provide graphics functions such as newshaders, aiming to provide PC-level graphics for 3D games on Android devices.

A number of system-level, enterprise-oriented features were also introduced under the banner "Android for Work": Samsung contributed its Knox security framework for segregating personal and work-oriented data from each other on a device, along with accompanying APIs for managing the environment. Devices can also be configured so that users do not have to unlock their device with a PIN or pattern if it is within a trusted, physical location, or is in proximity to a user's Android Wear device. Device encryption will be enabled by default.

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