Random Musings on the Android 5.1 SDK

With each Android SDK release, Google issues an API differences report,
outlining things that were added, changed, or removed in a new API
level compared to the previous one. Android 5.1 is no exception,
with its differences report
available for analysis.

I always review this to see what’s different beyond the sorts
of changes that get more disclosure.

Android 5.1 is tiny, in terms of updates. In fact, most of the API changes
stem from one thing: making HttpClient officially deprecated. If you
are still using this, consider switching to
OkHttp and their HttpClient
compatibility layer, or consider switching to
Apache’s separate Android edition of HttpClient.

Beyond that, here are a few other tidbits that I found interesting:

The official multi-SIM support will be welcome, as that is a popular line
of inquiry on Stack Overflow, given the prevalence of multi-SIM devices
in various parts of the world.

One of my issues
with Android itself was addressed, as
boolean support was moved from Bundle to BaseBundle,
making them available to PersistableBundle. Many thanks to whoever did that!

A new version of createChooser() on Intent
was added, providing a hook to find out what the user chose in the chooser.
This has been a popular question out on Stack Overflow.

Activity now has a getReferrer() method
that will return a Uri identifying what app or Web page started this activity.
Bear in mind that this may still return null, and the value can be spoofed,
so do not rely upon this, particularly for any sort of security stuff.

We have a couple of new Settings action strings,
to try to launch the battery-saver mode settings and the notification
listener settings.

As I said, Android 5.1 is pretty small overall. That being said, these are
generally welcome changes. And, I don’t have to race to push a book update
out the door, which is always nice. :-)