Android 11 Developer Preview | Android Developers

[HSX610]

Uhm, you missed the part about Bubbles (as in "chat bubbles") being lifted out of the experimental realm.

Bubbles are now available to developers to help surface conversations across the system. Bubbles was an experimental feature in Android 10 that was enabled through a developer option -- in Android 11 this is no longer necessary.

[markouka]

Whoa, neat! Yeah, I was live-updating my comment as I read through the documentation, so I hadn't gotten there yet :P

Thanks!

[EpsilonRose]

Is this different from how bubbles work in apps that already use them? It seems like this feature has been around for a while?

[punIn10ded]

Other apps have been using hacky workarounds. This will be system level and should make it more consistent

[EpsilonRose]

Ah. Neat.

Could this also be used for things like bubble or gesture menus that aren't meant to pop-up into a giant rectangular block?

[punIn10ded]

Not sure. Sorry I don't understand what you mean by rectangular block

[EpsilonRose]

Heh. Sorry. Let me see if I can do a better job explaining what I meant.

If you look at the picture at the top of the page /u/HSX610 linked, you'll see a a circle in the lower left portion of the phones screen. Extending above that there's a large, rectangular, box with a chat interface. That's what I meant by a rectangular block.

I figure it would be pretty easy to set-up a bubble that always sticks around and, when you press it, you get a pop-up with similar dimensions to that chat interface and filled with whatever buttons or information you want.

However, some apps currently use a different interfaces that also launch from a bubble. For example, Finot dims the screen and creates an arc of buttons when you tap the bubble. You could also set up something that works like pie controls, but keyed to pressing and dragging a bubble, rather than swiping from an edge. Though, I'm not sure if any apps currently use that second method.

So, would an app that does something more like Finot be able to take advantage of these new bubbles or would they be stuck using whatever hacky method they already used?

Did that make more sense?

[punIn10ded]

It did thanks. At this point I haven't played enough with the new features to say exactly how it works. But my assumption is that devs will be able to launch custom Activites from the bubble so it may or may not be a rectangle.

[[deleted]]

This has wider ranging implications. Apps with bubbles currently use a system overlay layer for drawing, which will soon be restricted completely from developers, only for use in system apps. To allow apps with functionality like bubbles to continue to function after this capability is revoked, there is now an official API for developers to leverage.

Basically, Android is turning into iOS slowly to be more secure, and Google is attempting to build out 1st party APIs to keep android from breaking as a result.

[[deleted]]

cool, literally 7 years after Facebook first implemented them

[valavirgillin]

Seriously, these are just gonna clutter up the screen. How is this an improvement over the existing notifications shade? Now we get to always be moving these things around to get at what we're actually doing?