The best Android 11 features you need to know - Android
The 2020 iteration of the Android operating system — known as Android 11 — is stable and official! Anyone who owns a supported Google Pixel device should already have the update. The new version should also arrive soon on devices from other manufacturers, including OnePlus, Xiaomi, Realme, and more.
For better or worse, Android 11 looks and feels very similar to Android 10. As such, you might not notice many differences when you first boot it up. That’s where this helpful guide comes in! Below, you’ll find over a dozen new features that make this latest version of the operating system the best yet.
Related: Android 11 is just a subtle upgrade, and that’s OK
Keep in mind that this list doesn’t cover every new feature. There are plenty of smaller updates as well as new features geared more towards developers instead of the general user. What’s listed here are the biggest changes that every user should know about.
In Android 10, the notification drawer contains all your notifications in a seemingly-haphazard list. Certain apps tend to get prioritized and shot to the top of the list, but there doesn’t appear to be any specific reason why. Meanwhile, lower-priority notifications get moved down to the silent section, which doesn’t send out any alerts.
In Android 11, that system changes. There are now three notification categories: Conversations, Alerting, and Silent. The Conversations section, quite obviously, houses all your conversations. This would mean any app where you are directly communicating with someone else, including text messages and chat apps. It would also apply to direct messages within other apps, such as Instagram.
Related: Android 11 is changing notifications in a big way
You can also prioritize conversations and apps within this section. This would allow you to give a higher priority to messages from your mom than messages from your distant cousin, for example. The whole point is to make sure that you never miss notifications related to your important daily interactions.
Meanwhile, the Alerting and Silent sections act as they have before in Android 10. You can also easily silence notifications from certain apps, which would push all future notifications to the Silent section. With Android 11, you now have more control over notifications than you ever had previously.
We’ve all done it: a notification comes through and you instinctively swipe it away. Later on, you think, “Hey, I probably shouldn’t have done that,” but by then it’s too late. The notification is gone.
Not so in Android 11! A new feature gives you the option of saving every single notification that landed on your phone over the past 24 hours. You can check the running list, find the notification you accidentally swiped, and see what you missed.
Now you can find that notification you accidentally swiped away when you woke up.
Unfortunately, this new notification history feature is not on by default. You need to go to Settings > Apps & notifications > Notifications > Notification history. Once you’re there, you can toggle the feature on. If it’s already on, you can view your notification history in that same section. Keep in mind, though, that it won’t start saving notifications until the feature is on, so you can’t turn it on and find notifications you swiped away earlier that day.
An interesting side-effect of this Android 11 feature is that the history will show you every single notification that goes through your phone, even totally silent ones that never make it to the shade. This is a great tool to see if there are apps you don’t use much hogging up system resources.
Are you sensing a theme here? Google has designed Android 11 to be all about communication, so the biggest new features all relate to notifications, chat apps, and other conversation-related systems.
Chat bubbles actually first appeared in Android 10. However, for whatever reason, Google didn’t prioritize them and they faded into the background when the stable version of the operating system launched. Now, though, chat bubbles are here in Android 11 and taking center stage.
Related: Here’s a list of Android 11 phones
If you’ve ever used Facebook Messenger on Android, you already know how chat bubbles work. With Messenger, a “chat head” appears on your phone that overlays on top of pretty much every other app. A quick tap of the icon launches the chat and then you can minimize the chat back to an icon. Done with the conversation? You can remove the chat head until the next conversation starts.
This is exactly how the system-wide bubble feature works, with the only major difference being that it can work for any chat app, not just Messenger or other apps that have a similar design.
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