Android 11 review

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Introduction

Had it been a letter of the alphabet, it would have been an 'R'. Had it been a dessert, it would have been called 'Red Velvet Cake'. Thankfully, Google has moved past all that nonsense and we have the much nicer sounding 'Android 11' in our hands.

After months of preview releases, the final, stable build has just been released. It was a low key announcement and we'd understand if you missed it.

But yes, Android 11 is here for the Pixels and it's probably coming soon to other devices too. So we scrambled to check out the full list of new features and highlights first-hand.

Android 11 review

There comes a point in the life cycle of every operating system where major groundbreaking updates are no longer necessary and it is better instead to keep the existing parts in the machinery working smoothly rather than adding new ones. And that's exactly what Android 11 is all about.

In this review, we will discuss all of the new changes and features introduced by Android 11, particularly with regards to Pixel devices.

For now, the Pixel phones, starting with the Pixel 2 and above, are the only ones running the stable build of Android 11, and that's what we will be focusing on.

We have seen what some of the OEMs are doing with this update and we will take a closer look at their releases as and when they decide to come out of beta.

Android 11 new features:

Conversations

Android has always had an excellent notification system but with Android 11 it is getting a major shot in the arm. One of the new features responsible for this is Conversations, which should have a significant impact on your notification system if you send and receive a lot of messages.

Android 11 review

Prior to Android 11, the operating system made no distinction between notifications from messaging apps and those from other apps. This meant someone trying to get in touch with you had to share space with things like media controls, app update notifications, delivery notifications, random spam from a game you installed a while back, and anything else that your phone would keep popping up. Clearly, this is not ideal as for most people an incoming message would be a higher priority than any of those other notifications.

This is exactly what Conversations tries to fix. With this feature, Android 11 will automatically filter incoming notifications from messaging apps and show them in their own dedicated section at the top of the list. Conversations is designed to work with multiple messaging services, so all of your contacts from different messaging services can coexist together at the top of the list.

Conversations - Android 11 review Conversations - Android 11 review Conversations - Android 11 review
Conversations

Every app gets its own item in the Conversations list. If an app gets multiple notifications from different contacts, they are all grouped into a single item. You will see the name of all the people who messaged along with their pictures and the app icon.

If you want further control over the items in the list, you can press and hold on them to increase or decrease their priority. An app can be made always to have its notifications appear on top of the Conversations list. Conversely, an app can be made to never make a sound if a notification comes in.

Conversations requires support from the app developer. Once an app has added support for the required metadata and properties, Android will pick up any notifications coming in from it and place it in the Conversations section.

Of the apps that we had installed on our device, Messages, Telegram, and WhatsApp were automatically sorted into Conversations. However, notifications from Skype, Twitter, Instagram, and even email apps like Gmail and Spark were recognized as regular notifications. Also, and this likely due to some bug, but apps that do get placed in Conversations will occasionally appear outside of it, like Telegram in one of the screenshots above.

However, for some apps, it was possible to manually enable Conversations support as they did partially support the required metadata. For example, Skype was not originally placed in Conversations by default but going into the notification settings for the app inside the main Android Settings app allowed us to flip a switch that enabled the app to appear into Conversations but with a message that you won't be able to set the priority level for the app in the Conversations list and also there won't be any Bubbles support (which we will talk in the next section).

Skype settings - Android 11 review
Skype settings

What does and doesn't get recognized as Conversations worthy for now seems a bit up in the air at the moment. Not only is there the situation with developers not being up to speed with their app support but there's also the question of whether an app even qualifies to be in the Conversations section. For example, neither Twitter nor Instagram are messaging apps primarily but both have a messaging feature. Does this mean they can be in the Conversations section? What about Reddit or Twitch?

In the end, it will have to depend upon the developer to decide these things but it's entirely possible that an app that doesn't need to be there ends up in Conversations while an app you want to see support for never gets updated for it.

One thing to note is that Conversations does take a fair bit of space up top. This tends to push other notifications down quite a bit, especially if you use the new media controls, which we will also talk about a bit later. If you have a full stack of Conversations and media control, your other notifications may just exit the screen entirely, making it difficult to see things quickly at a glance without scrolling. Google does put a fair bit of spacing between sections here so it all feels spread out a bit and not the most efficient use of space.

That's a lot of space for just three notifications - Android 11 review
That's a lot of space for just three notifications

All things considered, Conversations is still a good improvement over the traditional method of listing all notifications together. However, the real improvements will be seen once more apps support it natively and also on devices with larger or multiple displays.

Chat Bubbles

An extension of the new Conversations feature is Bubbles. Bubbles creates a chat heads style floating UI for chats that show up in Conversations. The UI should be familiar to anyone who has used Chat Heads in Facebook Messenger or any other similar interface.

Android 11 review

Ideally, an app should automatically trigger a bubble when a message comes in as long as it is configured correctly. In our case, Telegram was able to create a bubble for a message that just arrived. If this doesn't happen, you can click on the icon that appears on the bottom right of the notification in Conversations. Again, the app needs to be configured for this icon to show up. A long-winded way of enabling it going into the notifications channel settings for the app in Android Settings and enabling Bubbles manually from there. There you can also choose to have it be enabled for all conversations from that app, selected ones, or none at all.

Unfortunately, like Conversations, Bubbles was a bit unreliable in our usage with the final stable release. Apps would occasionally show bubbles and other times not show them at all. Apps that supported Conversations would often not support Bubbles. Apps that we know should support Bubbles, like Google's own Messages app, didn't show bubbles at all even when the app was set to high priority in Conversations. Even Telegram, which worked fine initially, stopped showing bubbles for some of the chats. We guess devs still need extra time to fine tune things.

Bubbles - Android 11 review Bubbles - Android 11 review Bubbles - Android 11 review
Bubbles

While we expect this sort of behavior from early builds of the OS, Android 11 is now in its final release and has been in beta for months now. For a core feature to be this unreliable and spotty at launch is disappointing and really hope it's up to the app devs to fix it.

When Bubbles did work, it was every bit as useful as Google promised it would be. We could have our messages on top of any non-fullscreen app and could just expand and hide away the chat as required. This significantly improved multitasking. The fact that you can have bubbles from chats from different applications also makes it very versatile. Also, the UI within these bubbles is the full app layout and not a compromised experience. The only downside to this is the slightly cramped space, especially with the keyboard open.

We hope Google gets Bubbles working correctly and that app developers add support for it as it is easily one of our favorite features of this new OS.

Media controls

Just to roundup the trifecta of new notification features, we have the new media controls next.

Android has previously handled media controls in a somewhat clumsy way. Every time you play something in an app that hooks into the media controls, a new notification item appears with the controls in it. If you open a few of these, you now have multiple media controls littering the notifications. In comparison, iOS has had a more restrictive but cleaner solution, where it would have one set of media controls and they would only be assigned to the app currently using them. This way you are never confused with what the controls are for.

Android 11 review

With Android 11, Google has made some changes to how the music controls appear. First of all, the controls are now part of the Quick Settings panel at the top of the notification shade. This means they will always be above all the notifications. You get a more compact view with a single swipe and then a second swipe to expand the Quick Settings panel also expands the media controls.

The other interesting thing here is that multiple media controls can now be scrolled sideways on the media panel. So instead of stacking vertically and taking up more space, you can just swipe to go to a previously used media application.

There is also a new option in Settings > Sound > Media, which lets you hide the media player controls from the expanded Quick Settings panel. For example, if a media player hides its controls from the compact Quick Settings panel once it has stopped playback, the playback controls are still accessible if you fully expand the Quick Settings panel. This setting allows you to disable that behavior, where the media controls disappear completely from both, the compact and expanded Quick Settings panel, once the playback ends.

Media controls - Android 11 review Media controls - Android 11 review Media controls - Android 11 review Media controls - Android 11 review
Media controls

Lastly, the media player panel now also houses controls to let you quickly change your output device. This will include your phone's speaker by default but also any Bluetooth or Chromecast audio devices you may have paired with recently to let you quickly switch over to them. It's a setting that iOS has had for some time and can be quite handy. You can also adjust the volume here, which is great as the core Android UI had lacked software volume controls outside of the Settings app, unlike the always available volume bar in the iOS Control Center.

Oh, by the way, Android 11 no longer shows those blurry, low-resolution fullscreen album art anymore on lockscreen during playback. You will just see the new media control panel on top of your existing wallpaper.

Permissions

Over the years, Google has taken definite steps to secure the data on your device from unauthorized access from third-party apps. An important part of this process is having a robust permission setup. While iOS has always been several steps ahead of Android in this aspect, for its part, Google has eventually brought some of the advancements Apple has made in the permissions department over to Android.

Android 11 review

With Android 11, users will now have the ability to grant permissions to applications on a need by need basis. This means, if you want to use location-related features on an app, you can just grant that app permission to access your location one time, and as soon as that instance is closed, the app no longer has location access.

This feature was previously seen on iOS 13 and it works quite brilliantly. More often than not, we only need to use certain features of an app a handful of times but end up granting it eternal permission to do what it pleases with it in the background. Even if you are diligent about it, it was still a hassle to manually revoke a certain permission after use.

Permission options - Android 11 review Permission options - Android 11 review Permission options - Android 11 review
Permission options

On Android 11 devices, you will now see a new prompt for permissions every time an app requests it. You can deny permission, allow it only while using the app, or just for this one time.

If an app requires constant access to permission, you also get a fourth option that takes you to a setting page where you can provide it. The way this is done prevents the user from accidentally selecting this option while blazing through the permission dialogs.

For most applications, you don't really need to give constant access to most features, so the allow while open option should suffice.

Google has also reworked how background location permission works. For an app to require background location, it first needs to ask permission for foreground location. Once the user grants that, then a separate dialog will appear, which will take the user to the Settings app to grant background location access. Once again, these deliberate steps will prevent users from just rushing through the permission dialogs and give access to something they don't want or need.

The next feature is something that even iOS does not have. With auto permission resetting, your Android 11 devices will eventually revoke permissions for apps that you haven't used in the foreground for the past few months. Of course, the system allows exclusion from the auto revoking for apps that are primarily used in the background such as family safety apps, data syncing apps or apps communicating to smart bands or watches.

Android 11 review

Both changes to permissions are excellent and help close the gap between Android and iOS when it comes to user privacy. Whether you are an existing Android user or someone switching over from iOS, no longer do you have to worry about apps having unrestricted access to your data in the background.

Having said that, Google still needs to do better in terms of showing when your data is being accessed in the background. Starting with Android 10, you get a generic icon and a notification if an app accesses your camera or microphone in the background. These are easy to ignore, dismiss, or even disable. Some OEMs like OnePlus instead show a permanent camera icon in the status bar if the camera is active whether in the foreground or background. And Apple recently added icons to show both microphone and camera access with orange and green icons respectively, which appear on the status bar. Something along those lines would be a lot more helpful than a generic notification telling you an app is running in the background.

Screen recorder

For those on OnePlus, Xiaomi, Samsung, and a whole bunch of other OEM devices, this isn't going to be very important news but Android finally has a built-in screen recorder, which should be great news for anyone on a Pixel phone.

Android 11 review

Google hasn't tried to reinvent the wheel here, and the implementation is similar to what we have seen on other Android phones (and on iOS before that). You access the option from the Quick Settings panel, which then shows a popup menu where you can quickly toggle a couple of options. You can choose to have the audio recorded from the device, device, and the microphone, or not at all. You can also choose to have touches be visible on the screen.

There are no options here to choose your resolution, frame rate, or bit-rate like some other OEMs offer. We don't really think those are important anyway so you're not really missing out on those here. Videos are recorded in 60fps at the display's native resolution every time.

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Screen recorder

It's unfortunate that Google took such a long time to include this feature in Android. Apple had this feature with iOS 11, and other Android OEMs had it within a year of that. Google was also slow to incorporate native screenshots back in the day (it was added in Ice Cream Sandwich while the iPhone had it since day one), so we should probably be glad it didn't take that long for screen recording.

Device control

Android 11 has a completely overhauled the power button menu. The focus now is less on turning your device off and more on all the smart home devices around you. Depending on what you have configured, you will see things like your smartwatch, lights, security cameras, smart locks, etc. along with any Chromecast or Google Nest devices in your house. The goal is to give you a single, easy to access place to control all of your smart devices.

Android 11 review

Admittedly, we don't have any smart home tech installed, so other than a few Nest and Chromecast devices, we didn't have a ton of devices showing up in our Home section. The Google Pay service is also not present in this region to test the payment system, which is also visible in this section if you have it configured.

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Device controls

The redesigned power menu with the device controls could be useful to those who frequently use smart home devices or use the Google payment system. However, if you are not one of those people, it does seem like a dramatic overhaul of a UI that is mostly of no use to you. If all you need to do when you press and hold the power button is access the power and restart buttons, then those are now just a bit harder to reach.

Privacy

Android 11 introduces two new privacy-focused features. The first is expanded Google Play update modules that include double the number of updatable modules, including 12 new ones. With this, Google will be able to push more security and privacy-related features to you through Google Play Store and can be updated and installed the same way you update your apps.

This is significantly better than bundling security updates in the monthly patches. As we know, most OEMs don't actually release those updates monthly as they should and just bundle them all at once every 2-3 months in the best-case scenario. Decoupling the security updates from the OS patches and releasing them as Play Store updates means users can get them much faster.

Android 11 review

Even for Pixel owners, this is a good thing as you won't have to wait for a critical patch at the beginning of the next month if it's something Google can just push through the Play Store today.

Speaking of updates, Google is also making seamless updates mandatory for devices launching with Android 11. This feature was introduced in Android 7.0 but wasn't included by some brands like Samsung. With seamless updates, your device will download an update in the background and install it on a separate partition. The next time you restart your device, it boots into the other partition, which makes the experience of updating the device feel seamless to the user as there was no downtime specifically for installing the update.

The other privacy-focused change applies exclusively to enterprise users. With this change, you can now have a work profile on your company-owned device, which will allow the IT personnel to manage your device but not have access to any of your personal profile data or activity on the phone.

Android 11 review

Separate work and personal profiles have been in Android since version 5.0. Before Android 11, however, this feature was only available on devices owned by the employee in an enterprise environment. With Android 11, Google is now making this feature available even on company-owned devices, so employees get the same separate work and personal profiles as they would if they owned the device themselves.

Pixel-exclusive features

For Pixel device owners, Android 11 has a few extra features. One of them is app suggestions. App suggestions will appear on your app drawer and your home screen. The first one is pretty standard, and something we have seen in the past; the phone learns from your usage and shows a row of apps at the top of the app drawer that it thinks you use most often. These tend to be a bit weird at times as apps you don't open all that often could end up here while apps you are constantly using get ignored. You can disable this feature if you want.

Suggested apps in app drawer - Android 11 review Suggested apps in app drawer - Android 11 review
Suggested apps in app drawer

The other one is a bit more interesting. Google now uses the bottom row of the home screen to show suggestions. Most of us generally keep apps there so we wouldn't notice anything. But if you were to remove one of the apps from there or if you keep your bottom row partially or completely empty, then Google will place a suggested app there. This happens pretty much instantly; just remove an app if you have a full bottom row and instantly a suggested app will appear in its place. This app icon has a different colored ring around it to identify it as a suggested icon and the icon itself isn't actually there so you can treat it as a blank space when moving icons around or adding your own icon in that space.

Suggested apps on home screen - Android 11 review Suggested apps on home screen - Android 11 review Suggested apps on home screen - Android 11 review
Suggested apps on home screen

As you can see above, the suggestions aren't particularly intelligent. When I removed Telegram, it replaced it with Instagram, even though Instagram is already pinned elsewhere on the homescreen. The suggestions don't seem to take into consideration what else is happening on the homescreen.

Google has also overhauled the multitasking overview screen. If you use the gesture-based navigation UI, you swipe up and hold as usual to access the overview screen. Here you will notice that the phone no longer shows suggested app icons at the bottom as it used to, nor can you swipe up again to enter the app drawer. Instead, you will see the same familiar card-style UI but with two new options at the bottom. One of them will take a screenshot of the app currently highlighted. The other makes you enter a text selection mode that instantly highlights all the text on the screen in that app. You can then just use the editing tools to copy the text and paste it elsewhere. You can also share that text or search it online. This also works for any visible images on the page.

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New overview screen

There's also a cool new animation for the wallpaper when you swipe down on the notifications or swipe up for the app drawer, where the wallpaper zooms in and out to create a sense of depth and motion.

One thing we would have liked Google to change is to let users adjust the color of the search bar at the bottom of the screen. You can choose a custom color for the Google Search widget, but the search bar on Pixel phones is always white or gray depending upon your day/night settings.

Launcher customization options are largely unchanged - Android 11 review Launcher customization options are largely unchanged - Android 11 review Launcher customization options are largely unchanged - Android 11 review Launcher customization options are largely unchanged - Android 11 review Launcher customization options are largely unchanged - Android 11 review
Launcher customization options are largely unchanged

All things considered, the Pixel launcher is still fairly basic. There is no folder support in the app drawer, no ability to hide app icons, and no custom icon support. All you get is basic color, font, and icon customizability from a small list of available options and the only thing Android 11 added is a handful of extremely odd icon shapes. For anything else, you are looking at installing a custom launcher.

Android 11 (Go edition)

Alongside the standard release, Google also announced the Go edition of Android 11. Limited to just... well, Go edition devices, this version brings some of the new features of the standard release, including Conversations, and also introduces things like gesture navigation, and Safe Folder in the Files app to password protect files.

Android 11 review

Google also claims this version improves app launch up to 20% over the previous update, although you will need a device with 2GB memory, which is now also being supported with this update. We didn't have a Go edition device with us to test these changes.

Miscellaneous

We went through the new highlight features of Android on the previous pages, but there is a laundry list of small tweaks and changes here and there. Here are some of the more notable ones.

Android Auto now works wirelessly for all phones that are running Android 11. All you need to ensure is that your vehicle's head unit is compatible with this feature and you are good to go. No more having cables cluttering your car.

Android 11 review

New consolidated keyboard suggestions will allow autofill apps and keyboard to provide context-specific suggestions within the keyboard's suggestion strip. For example, if you are trying to log into a website, the website's username and password will appear in your keyboard's suggestion strip so you can fill it in with a single tap.

Android 11 also includes enhanced 5G support for developers so they can take advantage of the faster speeds and lower latency of the 5G networks in their apps. Developers will know when you are on a 5G network, if the connection is metered, and the estimated bandwidth.

Android 11 also expands support for more display types. Google specifically mentioned hole-punch and waterfall or curved edge screens. Developers will be able to design their apps specifically for these types of displays and avoid potential pitfalls using the preexisting display cutout APIs. Buried in the developer notes, we also found improved support for foldable displays in the form of a new hinge angle API, which measure the hinge angle and lets the developers design granular animations as the user adjusts the screen.

For curved screens, developers can design their apps to use the entire width or just the non-curved portion, and a new waterfall insets API allows developers to manage interactions near the edges. All this means developers now have better tools to design apps that are less painful to use on curved displays.

Android 11 also introduces synchronized IME (input method editor) transitions, which allows developers to synchronize their app's contents to the keyboard and system bar animations. Currently, if you open or hide a keyboard inside a messaging app, the rest of the UI jarringly snaps up and down as the keyboard appears and disappears. If a developer takes advantage of this new feature, the UI of the app will smoothly animate up and down with the keyboard. Anyone who has typed on an iOS device has already seen this, but now Android users can also get in on that smooth keyboard sliding action.

Android 11 also adds support for low-latency video decoding, which is critical for streaming apps and cloud gaming services like Stadia and Xbox Game Streaming. Developers can use the new APIs to check and configure for low-latency playback for specific codecs.

Android 11 also introduces support for variable refresh rates. The OS will now adjust its refresh rate based on the app's preferred frame rate, assuming the device has a high refresh rate display.

Android 11 review

There is now a new UI for screenshots. Similar to iOS, newly captured screenshots will go to the bottom left of the screen, where you will also find quick options to edit or share the image. Unfortunately, unlike iOS, Google doesn't implement capturing, editing, and sharing multiple screenshots at once, so you can only interact with the last screenshot you took even with this new UI. Also, if you take another screenshot, the screenshot dialog from the previous one will be part of the new screenshot, so you have to manually dismiss it before quickly taking another one.

More importantly, there is still no scrolling screenshot support, which other Android OEMs have had for years now.

Android 11 includes a notification history feature. You can go to Settings > Apps & notifications > Notifications > Notification history where you will find all of your recent notifications. This is handy for when you accidentally swiped away a notification without interacting with it and want to see what it was. You can disable this feature if you don't want your device to keep track of your notifications.

Notification history - Android 11 review Notification history - Android 11 review
Notification history

You can now pin apps inside the Share sheet. This way, the apps you frequently share to are always there and not overrun by unrelated items. Yay!

Apps can be pinned to the share sheet - Android 11 review
Apps can be pinned to the share sheet

You can now adjust the sensitivity of the back swipe gesture. This lets you adjust how close you have to be to the edge of the screen to initiate the gesture. This would probably help in the cases where you have a bulky protective case getting in the way of your back gestures. Then, increasing this sensitivity may result in unwanted back gestures inside apps that use side swipes for other things so there is a tradeoff.

Back gesture sensitivity - Android 11 review
Back gesture sensitivity

If you ever go into the Developer settings to change the codec of the connected Bluetooth headphones, you will now see that the menu now lists only the codecs compatible with the BT headphones you have connected instead of all of them.

The Easter egg isn't all that interesting this year, as has been the case for a few years now. You just turn the dial all the way a few times until it shows the 11.

Android 11 reviewImage courtesy of Emojipedia

Finally, Android 11 adds support for the Emoji 13.0 set, which has 117 new items, including "smiling face with tear", "disguised face", bubble tea, transgender flag, and more. Google has also redesigned several of the existing emoji. You can find the full list of emoji changes here.

Availability

Unfortunately, as of this writing, Android 11 is only available in a stable form on Pixel devices. This includes all Pixel phones starting from the Pixel 2 and above but not the original models, which will remain on Android 10.

Android 11 review

At the time of launch, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, and Xiaomi released beta versions to the public. Other than being beta, these support just a handful of their devices; we are talking nine phones here in total, with no word on when the rest will be getting the beta, let alone the final build. Similarly, other OEMs have only announced plans to release the update, but we don't know when it will be coming.

By now, we are all acutely aware of this familiar song and dance. Every year Google releases an update, the Pixel phones get it first, some OEMs release a beta, and the vast majority of people don't receive the final stable update for months or even a year after release. That is if their device is eligible to get the update at all. This year is no different, and it is disappointing to see virtually no progress on this front at all.

Android 11 review

Sure, some of the OEMs have released betas that are in varying stages of development. Maybe we have a participation trophy lying around somewhere that we can give them. A beta barely qualifies for an OS release, especially considering how long ago Google released the first developer beta for Android. And as usual, Samsung - the biggest smartphone manufacturer on the planet - had nothing to show for on launch day, with the public beta still some time away.

What disappoints the most is the state of the Android One program, which was touted as a platform that will get all the latest updates for two years after launch. None of the Android One devices have received the update on launch day. Nokia, one of the biggest supporters of the Android One platform, only said it will be bringing the update to its devices still within the 2-year window. When that will happen is yet unknown. As for other OEMs on the Android One program, the less said the better.

Bottom line is, nothing has changed on the Android update front. Things are still as bad as they have always been.

Conclusion

It is easy to look at some of the changes here and not be thrilled. Android 11 is indeed one of the more subtle updates we have seen to the OS since its release. But, as we alluded to in the beginning, that is perfectly fine.

The features we did get this year are fairly remarkable. Conversations and Bubbles are going to greatly impact the way we communicate with people. Android has always had a great notification system, but these new features push it way beyond the competition to the point where it's not even close anymore. We particularly liked the inclusion of Bubbles; while it isn't a brand new invention that Google deserves credit for, it can be extremely useful, and as more apps add support for it, it will completely revolutionize the way you communicate and multitask.

Android 11 review

The focus on privacy was also noteworthy. Google has always been inching forward at a slower pace than Apple in this regard but this year saw a handful of very important changes. Features like one-time permissions and auto-reset permissions should keep nefarious developers on their toes and making things like background location access harder to obtain should prevent users from accidentally giving permission to things they shouldn't.

The rest of the changes are just great quality of life stuff. Things like improved media controls, the long-overdue addition of screen recording, better access to smart home devices in an increasingly automated world, and improved support for modern hardware features such as 5G, high refresh rates, and all the different display form factors.

We didn't even touch on what the OEMs will be doing; OnePlus has already showcased a significantly revamped and impressive open beta for its OxygenOS 11, and some of the other OEMs are also onboard the Android 11 beta train. There will be more to discuss on that front once all the companies get their act together and release the stable version.

Unfortunately, slow updates to the latest OS release are still an issue. Sure, a beta is a sign of something that's underway, but it's not for everyone, not just because of the lack of stability but also because it's only available on a handful of devices from a handful of companies.

It will be several months from now before we see some stable builds, and that's just from the companies who released the public betas. For the rest, early 2021 is probably a better estimate.

We also think Google could have done better with the stock Android 11 release for the Pixel devices. Things like scrollable screenshots, customizable launcher, expanded always-on display settings that are anything other than on or off, double-tap to sleep, and improved indicators for when permissions are being used in the background could have been included in this build, and some of them feel like they were left off for the next major release.

Android 11 review

We would also like Google to improve the process of accessing and adjusting the notification and permission settings for apps. Some of these options are buried so deep that most people would never end up down there on their own. It just feels like these controls have been obfuscated on purpose.

Still, all things considered, Android 11 is a net-positive update, especially for Pixel owners who have been missing out on some of the functionality from other devices. The changes to notifications and privacy should be hugely impactful as well, assuming the OEMs don't muck around too much with them. The improved support for modern display types should help propel us faster into the foldable future, too.

Now all that remains to be seen is when most people get this update. Hopefully, it's before the next one releases.

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