Android 11 Preview 3 hands-on—Strange changes to Recent Apps and notifications

[DudeAsInCool]

There's a new Android 11 Developer Preview. This one is Preview 3, and it launched yesterday for Google's Pixel line. Previous Android 11 previews haven't had a ton of new additions, but this version has a lot of strange and interesting UI changes for us to discuss and puzzle over.

Recent Apps loses the app drawer

In Android 9 Pie, the Recent Apps screen turned into a horizontally scrolling list of thumbnails with an expandable app drawer at the bottom. In the Android 11 Preview 3 release, the app drawer is gone. It has been replaced with a pretty weak selection of two buttons: "Screenshot" and "Share."

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  Preview 3 Recent Apps dumps the bottom app drawer in exchange for two buttons, share and screenshot. It looks incomplete. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Removing the app drawer from Recent Apps is a pretty interesting decision, considering just two years ago Recent Apps was rearchitected to support this access to the app drawer. The app drawer and app icons are all a part of the home screen launcher, so to make the feature work in Recent Apps, the Recent Apps were pulled out of the core System UI and made a part of the launcher code. This saved Google from having to make any kind of special API allowing another app to access the app drawer—everything was just bundled into the launcher app.

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