What you need to know
- A small update to Developer Preview 2.1 brings small fixes for developers.
- Fixes focus on specific app and view crashes in the system.
- Updates will not arrive over the air, so you must flash 2.1 manually.
Google is releasing a small supplemental update to the Android 11 Developer Preview, bumping the version to 2.1, with "minor" changes for developers tweaking apps to be ready for the new platform. It made a similar small point release to Developer Preview 1, showing its propensity to get fixes out the door as they're ready rather than wait for a full release to put them all out at once. The change log is short and simple:
- Fixed an issue where a crash would occur when long pressing to select an element within the recent apps overview.
- Fixed an issue where the status bar could crash in the background if its components weren't all initialized yet.
- Fixed an issue where too many WindowTokens were created by SystemUI causing jankiness and dropped frames when navigating and scrolling apps.
- Fixed an issue where the Wear OS app could crash when trying to pair a Wear OS device.
- Fixed an issue where the Settings app could crash after tapping the search bar in the app.
You can grab the latest version of the Developer Preview over at the Android Developers website, and use the new Android Flash Tool if you don't want to fiddle with things. As a reminder, the Developer Preview will not update over-the-air, and is only available for specific Pixel devices right now.
If you're looking for a more stable and usable version of Android 11 and the simplicity of OTA updates, you'll have to wait for the software to hit "beta" status a bit further on in development. The next major release is slated for sometime in April, but that will still be a Developer Preview. We can expect the first beta release in May.
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