One of the great things about Reddit is that it gives us a convenient one-stop location where we can check in on all different kinds of fan communities to get a sense of what they like and don’t like about their favorite products. Reddit user xuelgo has started a terrific thread in Reddit’s Android community that lists some of the features that they would like to see Google add with the next major version of Android. Below we’ve listed six of their best suggestions for features great and small that we’d really like to see Google incorporate into Android 4.5 when it’s presumably announced later this month at Google I/O.
- A faster way to switch between the notification center and the quick settings tiles. Right now when you swipe down to open up your notifications center, you have to click on a small icon at the top right-hand corner of your phone to bring up the quick settings. Since we Android users spend a lot of time fiddling around with the quick settings to do things like adjusting brightness and managing data connections, it would be cool if there were a way to just swipe over to the settings menu once we no longer have any pending notifications.
- A Google “smart camera.” The quality of cameras on Android phones varies greatly, but but xuelgo would at least like to see all of them come with some killer software, such as the Google Goggles feature that lets you search for things you see through your camera.
- Letting app developers create their customized Google Now voice commands. This is pretty self explanatory — instead of saying, “OK Google, open Spotify,” you could simple say, “OK Spotify, play my favorite playlist.”
- Add a GPS toggle in the quick settings menu. This would give you a quick way to turn GPS on and off when you need it and save you some major hassles when it comes to saving battery life.
- A bigger variety of default apps. Sure, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive and the Google Play Store are nice but xuelgo would also like to see “a default voice recorder app, a level, something like healthkit, an share app.”
- The ability to backup all app data without rooting your phone. Reddit user thoomfish makes the case that Google should create “a built-in system service that could… backup app data and restore [it] on the same or another device” without forcing you to root it. They note that iPhones have done this for a long time and that it’s really time for Google to catch up in this regard.
These all seem like good suggestions. Is there anything else that Android-using BGR readers are similarly dying to have that they’ve missed?
