What Streaming Providers Should Know About Android 12
One of the great things about working in technology is getting to see what is coming down the pipe for consumers before they see it. It’s awesome to be involved in betas, play with new features, watch providers make refinements and enhancements, and generally just witness technology and services evolving over time. I, for one, love to grab beta releases for new software and poke around in all of the nooks and crannies to see what changes are on the horizon.
It isn’t all fun and games though. Betas have a definite purpose that isn’t always just about previewing new features. It’s also to give developers and engineers a chance to look under the hood and see how forthcoming changes might impact other products, systems, and interactions. It provides time before the changes go live --for those of us whose business it is to innovate in that space-- to ensure none of our capabilities are negatively impacted by the updates. At the same time though, we have a sort of obligation to the community to ensure that our products do not, in turn, have any negative impacts on other technologies in the ecosystems in which our technology operates.
This year, as always, both Apple and Google are planning major updates to their mobile operating systems and our team has spent some time going through early releases to get a picture of what is changing, how it will affect our technology, and what we can do to ensure our customers have a seamless, easy way to take advantage of any new features, as well as a smooth transition to the new operating system versions when they decide to add support for them.
It is important to us that when our partners make the move to support these new releases, we are right there with them, not just helping take advantage of new features, but ensuring that no functionality is lost or unexpected behaviors surface.
Android is on the move with version 12.
Our android team is deeply involved in looking through the upcoming Android 12 release. There are a lot of big changes in this one to try and make developers’ lives easier, and that means a number of under-the-hood changes are included. Our SDK is being updated to both take advantage of new APIs and processes, as well as removing deprecated methods, cleaning up our own APIs and working to make the integration as smooth and light as possible.
Some of the biggest changes on the horizon are going to be how Android manages operations across process boundaries, background vs. foreground threading, and a host of other changes that could affect an action as simple as moving an app from foreground to background while a download is in progress.
Job scheduling and management is being taken over by WorkManager and Google is working to make sure that the operating system is as memory and power-efficient as it can be. While those efforts will be great for Android users, especially those that end up on the new Tensor silicone, it means Google is making efforts to ensure applications are managed more closely and can’t hang on to system resources such as memory and CPU time as long as they could before. This means that we need to make sure our operations are using WorkManager not just appropriately, but also to the best possible effect. We’re internalizing and changing a lot of things to ensure our partners get the same level of performance they’re used to seeing from Penthera’s patented technology.
Our engineers have been busy digging, designing, and testing, for months now, to make sure we’re ready to go when the time comes. We expect to have full support for Android 12 as soon as it is available to the public. Will you be there with us?
