There has been a long request going on over at Android’s Issue Tracker forum, requesting the team to add the developer options like Show layout bounds, Show touches, Force RTL, etc. to Quick Settings tiles, which would help developers a lot when doing the testing work.
The request is dated March 9, 2016, but the Android team didn’t acknowledge it ever. But today, that changes.
The team has marked the request as ‘Assigned‘ and has forwarded it to the development team for consideration. While that doesn’t mean that developer options (only some, not all, obviously) would definitely make it to next version of Android, which should be Android O (8.0), you can reasonably expect it to come true.
If you remember, with Android N Developer Preview 4, Google changed the Wi-Fi toggle’s functioning to show SSID list in the Quick tiles itself, rather than simply switch the Wi-Fi on and off, which resulted in users created a thread on Android Issue tracker. That was assigned to developer team, and the latter removed the said feature to bring back the simple Toggle functionality back to the Wi-Fi icon in Developer Preview 5.
So, Android team does pay full attention to requests in this forum, as things do happen when a thread is assigned for consideration. Which is why we think Android team could bring some of the necessary developer options as Quick tiles in next version of Android.
Okay, why Android O, and not Android 7.1?
Well, Android 7.1 Nougat looks already finalized — we already have the build no. available (NDE63H). Rumors have it that it’s already running on Pixel devices, the upcoming #madebygoogle Android sets.
So, Android team won’t bother bringing it to Android 7.1, but there’s also a reason why this new feature won’t make it to Android 7.2 or Android 7.3 either.
Google reserved tweaks to Marshmallow’s Quick tiles for Android N preview this year, like System Tuner. So, this being not a very small UI change or something, this has more chances of baking in straight into Android O’s code than 7.x. And guess what, by March-April we would already have the Android O developer preview out if Google follows Android N preview’s release.
What do you think?
Features requested so far includes:
- Show layout bounds
- Show touches
- Force RTL
- Show overdraw areas
- Profile GPU rendering (as bars)
- Don’t keep activities
Do add if there is a feature you would like to see under Quick tiles.
Source: Android Issue tracker
