Privacy, convenience top Google's priority list for Android Q

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Rather than release the first beta only for developers, all Pixel users have recently been granted access to Google’s Android Q beta program. Now before you take out your Pixel and start updating to Android Q, you need to understand that the latest version of Google’s Android OS is still in its first beta phase, which means features can likely be changed or removed; and we’d only recommend updating if you know what you’re doing or have a spare device.

All of that aside let’s look at some of the improvements in some key smartphone settings.

The beta version of Android Q does away with the hassle of sharing a Wi-Fi network password every time someone visits. The new feature lets guests or friends scan a QR code to join your Wi-Fi network. This feature is available directly in Wi-Fi settings.

Android Q also attempts to tackle privacy woes by brings changes to the location settings for the app. This feature allows you to decide how often an app can access your location data. The options for this feature will ‘Allow all the time’, ‘Allow while app is in use’ and ‘Deny’.

You know how notifications can often be annoying, well on Android Q they don’t have to be. By simply long-pressing an alert from a particular app, you can choose to block the alert, silently show it or continue being alerted. You no longer have to dig into ‘Settings’ to tailor an app alert, a simple long-press gets you there.

Privacy has become a major concern for smartphone users, and Android Q is introducing a dedicated ‘Privacy’ feature to help secure users’ data. Opening this feature reveals the various permissions apps can request for things like location, camera, contacts, calendar and microphone.

Android Q also gives you a few seconds to retrieve an app you might have accidentally removed. An undo button along the bottom of the screen will provide a few seconds to get back the app you recently removed.

The latest version of Android is also bringing native support for HDR 10+ and open source AV1 video codec. Which is excellent news for your data plan as streaming high-quality videos is going to require less bandwidth than before.

File sharing on Android has always been frustrating. But Android Q attempts to fix that with a new sharing menu. The new menu offers a quicker and more convenient sharing system, while also adding a new ‘Share Shortcuts’ mechanism.