When Google started rolling out Android Q Beta 5 at the start of July, the corporate conjointly declared plans to host a Reddit AMA where the team would answer queries about Android, Q, and even future releases. A few attention-grabbing tidbits came out of the AMA.
To begin, some Redditors inquired about when Android users could expect a built-in screen recording. Android Q briefly had the feature in early versions of the beta, but it disappeared in Beta 3, although enterprising users could bring it back with an ADB command. The product manager for Android UI, Allen Huang, answered the question, saying that screen recording should come with Android R. Since Android’s vice president of engineering, Dave Burke, signed the team up to include scrollable screenshots in Android R, Huang also mentioned that the team will look at improving the whole screenshot experience in R. Interestingly, scrollable screenshots were earlier called ‘infeasible’, despite makers adding the feature to skinned versions of Android.
The AMA also touched briefly on Android Q’s dark mode and whether or not Google would add an automatic trigger for the feature. The search giant initially considered switching between dark and light mode based on sunset and sunrise, but ultimately decided against it because it would require fairly accurate location data. The team is trying to letting users switch to dark mode based on time of day, but that won’t be in Android Q.
Towards the fall of 2018 and into early 2019, Google updated its privacy policy around which apps could access call and SMS logs on users’ devices. The modification restricted access to the potentially sensitive data in those logs. At the time, several developers and users expressed frustration regarding the modification, which affected popular apps like Tasker. Redditors conjointly expressed considerations over how Google deals with problems raised by developers and also the public on platforms just like the Google Issue Tracker. Google’s head of AOSP, Jeff Bailey, noted that the Issue Tracker could be easily overwhelmed, but also said some staff might work directly with “external bugs” in the future. Finally, Redditors asked if Google had any plans to make Wear OS open source. Bailey aforementioned there was “nothing new to share at this point.”
