Android Nougat Quick Settings: More flexibility
Quick Settings now occupies a smaller bar at the top, carrying the icons for those Quick Settings, but with no labels or anything else. You're just expected to know what they mean and that's fair enough - as these are quick settings, you're likely to know what they're there for.
On the Nexus 6 you get five icons, with a drop down arrow to expand the Quick Settings area to the full pane, also deployed with a second swipe. This betters Marshmallow, because you're presented with those top options immediately.
The full Quick Settings pane is similar to the current offering in Marshmallow, offering a brightness slider and nine icons, but here they flow over the page and offer up an edit function. This will let you drag icons around so you can choose the order, remove those things you don't use, or add extras. It's very much like Samsung's arrangement in TouchWiz.
Some of the options available are hidden in the System UI Tuner - an area where Google likes to hide features it's even less sure about.
There are no drop down options on things like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but with a tap you get a neat overlay menu - a little like the Do not Disturb pane in Marshmallow. Tap the battery, for example, and an overlay pops up with a graph and your estimated time left. Tap Bluetooth and it will show paired devices that are available. In both cases, a long press will take you through to those sections in the settings menu. This means more options for less space and a cleaner UI, which we're all for.
There's a neat animation that sees the top quick settings you get on the first swipe shifting location to reveal the full set when you open the full panel.
Android Nougat settings menu: More information
The settings menu has had a makeover, removing some of the division bars and bubbling up more information. When you open up the settings menu, you're now faced with a bit more information. The new Nougat arrangement makes Marshmallow look at little sparse, so this is a change we like.One of the interesting elements is that there's now a status banner at the top of the page, perhaps to let you know what's going on if you're heading in to the settings to change something. If you're in data saving mode, that's labelled here, as is Do not Disturb. If you were heading in to fix something like not getting updates or alerts, there's now that quick option at the top to turn those major device behaviour features off.
There's also a suggestions bar. If you don't have security set-up on your device, it's here that Android will suggest you do something about it. At the moment it's difficult to know what the range of suggestions will be - but rather like the BlackBerry Priv with its suggestions from DTEK, perhaps this is Android looking to guide users a little more around things like security.
Otherwise the settings menu is laid out using the same sort of icons as it was before and in the same sort of arrangement. But as we said, there's more information, so you don't have to go digging. We can see at a glance that on this test device, there's 74 apps installed, we're using 7GB of storage, the battery will last for another day and so on. There's no diving in and out of sub-sections, because this information is all there at a glance.
However, there's a new navigation option for settings. Once you're in an area - like Bluetooth for example - you get a side menu. This will let you jump to any area of the settings quickly. We can't really see that it's that useful at the moment, as hitting back to return to the top level isn't that tricky.
Android Nougat notifications: Easier management
Continuing this theme of bubbling up more information, the notifications are now richer than they were before, containing information on where they came from. If you have a number of notifications from one app, these can be bundled together much more cleanly than they were before.They can still be pinch expanded, but there's also long press options to control notification behaviour. Press and hold and you'll get access to manage how much priority any individual app's notifications should get. You can have it set to automatic, or slide up and down between 6 levels of power notification controls. These range from blocking all notifications to interrupting anything, and showing up everywhere.
This can also be done from the lock screen, so if you're getting notifications you don't want, it looks as though it's going to be easier to individually manage them. Power notification controls can be switched on or off in the System UI settings, suggesting that - for now - it's not a nailed on feature for when Android Nougat is released to the public.
The Do not Disturb system is still in place, but it looks like the language is changing as Google tries to refine a system that's very powerful, but has certainly been confusing through Lollipop and Marshmallow. There's now the option to have an app's notifications "override do not disturb" which is a little more direct than it might have been phrased in the past.
We've not seen the full range of notifications, but we can already see from a mass of Gmail notifications, that it's going to be much easier to open the email you want and action it. There are also going to be direct reply notifications. This is something that Android has been talking about for some time, and Messenger sort of went there with a reply outside of the app, but this is now expanding.
Notifications has always been a strong part of Android and it looks like Nougat is no exception.
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