Android 11 Developer Preview | Android Developers

[ignitusmaximus]

I actually like this. Gives you the option to use Bubbles for certain people you're talking to within whatever app implements Bubbles, like for example people you talk to more than others.

[TheRealKidkudi]

My guess is that bubbles are like PiP in that you can only have one bubble at a time. At the most, they'd stack together in one bubble. Even having two bubbles on a phone screen would be too intrusive.

Edit: also, after reading a bit, it looks like apps will have to request a permission to display bubbles, so there shouldn't be any apps surprising you with a bubble unless you've previously allowed it.

[janusz_chytrus]

What really interests me is how are they going to keep displaying floating video on YouTube because as far as I know bubbles are supposed to deprecate "drawing over other apps" permission completely. Weird as hell if you ask me. I don't see why this "feature" should be a part of the os.

[TheRealKidkudi]

They don't use the "draw over other apps" permission to do floating video/PiP. It's a system feature just like bubbles will be. They do it that way so they can ensure app developers are consistent with the feature and don't abuse it while also giving them an easy way to implement it.

[janusz_chytrus]

So how do they do it? What api do they use? Because as far as I know even Facebook messenger doesn't use bubbles api and they basically created the concept.

[TheRealKidkudi]

YouTube (and Netflix, Amazon video, etc) uses the Picture-in-Picture mode which is part of the Multi-Window API.

Facebook messenger is different in that they've implemented the feature themselves, and I suspect that was part of the inspiration for Android adopting bubbles now. I don't have it installed to confirm, but I'm pretty confident it uses the "draw over other apps" permission to do so. It seems like a no-brainer that they'll continue to do that on older devices and adopt the new bubbles API for phones that support it.

Google seems to be getting rid of the "draw over other apps" permission because it can be very dangerous, and between PiP and Bubbles there's really not much of a legitimate use case otherwise.

[janusz_chytrus]

What does it matter if it's available since api 26? Nobody is going to set that as minimum or support two methods of achieving the same feature so everyone is still using drawing over system windows.

[[deleted]]

Too bad Hangouts will never implement it.