Introducing Android Q: New Privacy, Connectivity, Media, and Performance Features

Android Q is positioned at the center of the current mobile innovation cycle, offering developers new APIs and system behaviors that leverage 5G, full‑screen, and foldable devices while emphasizing user privacy and security through Google Play Protect, runtime permissions, and encrypted storage.

The release expands privacy features such as file‑based encryption, camera/microphone access restrictions, lock‑down modes, and enhanced location controls that let users grant permissions only while an app is in use, never, or always (including background).

New capabilities include shared shortcuts for faster content sharing, a Settings Panel API that lets apps display key system settings (e.g., Wi‑Fi, NFC, volume) without leaving the app, and refined handling of background activity launches via high‑priority notifications.

For camera and media, Android Q introduces a dynamic depth image format (JPEG + depth + confidence metadata) enabling advanced blur and AR effects, adds support for the open‑source AV1 video codec, Opus audio codec, and HDR10+ video, and provides a simpler MediaCodecInfo API to query supported resolutions and frame rates.

The platform also offers a native MIDI API through the NDK for low‑latency, non‑blocking MIDI processing, and extends connectivity APIs with fine‑grained location permissions for Bluetooth, cellular, and Wi‑Fi, plus Wi‑Fi performance modes (high‑perf and low‑latency) and WPA3 support.

Under the hood, Android Q improves the ART runtime with cloud‑based profile‑guided optimizations, generational garbage collection, and faster Zygote startup, resulting in quicker app launches and reduced memory usage.

Security enhancements include expanded passive authentication methods, explicit and implicit authentication flows, and default TLS 1.3 support, while continued efforts to limit non‑SDK API usage encourage developers to adopt public equivalents and use StrictMode’s detectNonSdkApiUsage() for compatibility testing.