The third Android 11 Developers' Preview is here - this is an early form of the new operating system, generally only issued to app developers, and it's giving us a sneak peek at the new features set to come to compatible Android phones later this year.
One of the most useful new features that could be arriving, as spotted by 9to5Google, is the ability to swipe away all notifications if you want to, giving yourself a clean notifications bar.
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In older builds of Android, there are some notifications that can't be removed, like alerts that your phone is connected to a device via Bluetooth or that WhatsApp Web is currently running, for example. These can be useful reminders in some cases, but they can also clutter up your notification bar if there are lots of them, which is rather annoying.
Other Android 11 tweaks
The Developers' Build includes a few more interesting-looking features that could make their way to Android 11 in the future.
In your 'Recents' list of apps, sometimes you can accidentally swipe one to get rid of it, thereby closing an app you may have wanted running, and another feature in the build is an undo option to revive accidentally-killed apps.
This Recents menu also features bigger windows with more tools, including a screenshot button so that you can take a snap of an app screen without having to actually open it.
A new 'Ethernet tethering' function has also been spotted, suggesting that you'd be able to share your phone's internet connection with other devices via a cable, so not only by hotspotting your device and sharing connectivity wirelessly.
Various icons, buttons and arrows are getting their sizes changed as well, by the looks of it, likely for ease of use, and the 'Volume' menu has been changed to the 'Sound' menu for some reason, although this just looks like a name change only.
Not all of these changes will definitely make it into the final release of Android 11 - the Developers' Build lets Google test out new features to see how they work, and if some don't work properly they won't be included in Android 11 when it gets its full release.
Before then there will be a beta too, which will give us another look at the new operating system. We bring you news of all the new features set to come to your Android phone as we hear about them, so watch this space.
Via 9to5Google
