ANDROID M HANDS-ON: A FIRST LOOK AT THE BIGGEST NEW FEATURES

Google officially unveiled Android M at its developer keynote in San Francisco on May 28, and it didn’t take long for the promised preview builds to make their way to the public. So, like the intrepid technology journalists we are, we quickly installed M on a spare Nexus 6 we found lying around the office and dived deep into the preview.

We quickly learned there wasn’t much to uncover, though. Google’s exceptionally brief Android announcement at I/O seems to reflect the changes, or lack thereof, present in M so far. There are definitely a few notable additions worth mentioning, a new app drawer and permissions management among them, but unlike Lollipop, M seems very much a refinement of Android rather than a reimagining.

The new app drawer declutters your collection

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the new app drawer. Unlike every major release of Android since Ice Cream Sandwich, apps scroll vertically, not horizontally, in the drawer. Open it, and you’re presented with a long list of shortcuts arranged alphabetically. Big uppercase letters on the left-hand side indicate groupings, and a search bar now resides at the top for faster access to specific apps.

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Our first impressions are pretty good. In terms of design, the new drawer isn’t the most efficient — the app icons are larger and there’s more white space between them — but the result is a cleaner, less cluttered collection.

App permissions let you decide

The new app drawer is the most obvious interface change in M, but there’s a subtler one with far bigger implications: a permissions management screen for every app. The permissions feature represents a fundamental change to the way Android has handled app access to user and sensor data to date.

Basically, instead of having to approve a bunch of suspect permissions before you can install an app, you’re now able to be a little more selective, cutting off an app’s access to specific data — your location, for example, or the content of your text messages. Even better, you can enable and disable those permissions at will — The system’s simple enough.

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Google has pared its previously lengthy list of permissions down to eight key types, all enabled or disabled either on a per-app basis within the app’s settings page or as blanket policies (if you wish to, say, prevent all apps from reading your contacts). Permissions management worked well enough in our testing, but be forewarned that disabling permissions essential to an app’s function will have predictably undesirable results. It turns out Google Maps needs to access GPS for turn-by-turn navigation. Who knew?

Other small improvements and more to come

There are other, smaller enhancements worth mentioning. Android now backs up all app and settings data to a dedicated Drive folder by default, which should make restoring your account on new devices easier. Apps can opt out of Doze, a battery-saving feature. And the (sometimes very obtrusive) heads-up notifications introduced in Lollipop can be switched off for apps individually.

Otherwise … that’s pretty much it. Besides tweaked volume controls and the triumphant return of a proper silent mode, the first developer preview of Android M is pretty bare. Absent is Now on Tap, which Google doesn’t plan to enable until Android M’s finalization later this year. Android Pay is MIA, too. Google’s promising over-the-air updates over the course of the preview period, so there’s hope that future versions will pack more changes, but Android M as it stands is practically indistinguishable from Lollipop. If you can’t get it right now, don’t fret — you’re not missing much yet.