What's new in Android 4.4 kitkat

Android 4.4

            Android 4.4 is designed to run fast, smooth, and responsively on a much broader range of devices than ever before — including on millions of entry-level devices around the world that have as little as 512MB RAM.
              KitKat streamlines every major component to reduce memory use and introduces new APIs and tools to help you create innovative, responsive, memory-efficient applications.
              New karnel(karnel 3.4) said to be used lower ram to run kitkat on lower end devices. It is to be said that the devices must be power by 1ghz processor (armV7) to perform smoother.
             The android kitkat releases with the new LG's nexus 5 on last month (31 October 2013  ).
Android apps can now print any type of content over Wi-Fi or cloud-hosted services such as Google Cloud Print. In print-enabled apps, users can discover available printers, change paper sizes, choose specific pages to print, and print almost any kind of document, image, or file.
Android 4.4 introduces native platform support for printing, along with APIs for managing printing and adding new types of printer support. The platform provides a print manager that mediates between apps requesting printing and installed print services that handle print requests. The print manager provides shared services and a system UI for printing, giving users consistent control over printing from any app. The print manager also ensures the security of content as it's passed across processes, from an app to a print service.
          
           A new storage access framework makes it simple for users to browse and open documents, images, and other files across all of their their preferred document storage providers. A standard, easy-to-use UI lets users browse files and access recents in a consistent way across apps and providers.

Box and others have integrated their services into the storage access framework, giving users easy access to their documents from apps across the system.

Cloud or local storage services can participate in this ecosystem by implementing a new document provider class that encapsulates their services. The provider class includes all of the APIs needed to register the provider with the system and manage browsing, reading, and writing documents in the provider. The document provider can give users access to any remote or local data that can be represented as files — from text, photos, and wallpapers to video, audio, and more.
If you build a document provider for a cloud or local service, you can deliver it to users as part of your existing Android app. After downloading and installing the app, users will have instant access to your service from any app that participates in the framework. This can help you gain exposure and user engagement, since users will find your services more easily.
             Android 4.4 introduces platform support for hardware sensor batching, a new optimization that can dramatically reduce power consumed by ongoing sensor activities.
            If you develop a messaging app that uses SMS or MMS, you can now use a shared SMS provider and new APIs to manage your app's message storage and retrieval. The new SMS provider and APIs define a standardized interaction model for all apps that handle SMS or MMS messages.
            To get the most impact out of your content, you can now use new window styles and themes to request translucent system UI, including both the status bar and navigation bar. Notification listener services can now see more information about incoming notifications that were constructed using the notification builder APIs.

           Android 4.4 includes a completely new implementation of WebView that's based on Chromium. The new Chromium WebView gives you the latest in standards support, performance, and compatibility to build and display your web-based content.
Chromium WebView provides broad support for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It supports most of the HTML5 features available in Chrome for Android 30. It also brings an updated version of the JavaScript Engine (V8) that delivers dramatically improved JavaScript performance.
             Now it's easy to create high-quality video of your app, directly from your Android device. Android 4.4 adds support for screen recording and provides a screen recording utility that lets you capture video as you use the device and store it as an MP4 file. It's a great new way to create walkthroughs and tutorials for your app, testing materials, marketing videos, and much more.
           
For high-performance, lower-power audio playback, Android 4.4 adds platform support for audio tunneling to a digital signal processor (DSP) in the device chipset. With tunneling, audio decoding and output effects are off-loaded to the DSP, waking the application processor less often and using less battery.
Audio tunneling can dramatically improve battery life for use-cases such as listening to music over a headset with the screen off. For example, with audio tunneling, Nexus 5 offers a total off-network audio playback time of up to 60 hours, an increase of over 50% over non-tunneled audio.
Apps can use new monitoring tools in the Visualizer effect to get updates on the peak and RMS levels of any currently playing audio on the device. For example, you could use this creatively in music visualizers or to implement playback metering in a media player.
              Android 4.4 support for two new Bluetooth profiles to let apps support a broader range of low-power and media interactions. Bluetooth HID over GATT (HOGP) gives apps a low-latency link with low-power peripheral devices such as mice, joysticks, and keyboards. Bluetooth MAP lets your apps exchange messages with a nearby device, for example an automotive terminal for handsfree use or another mobile device. As an extension to Bluetooth AVRCP 1.3, users can now set absolute volume on the system from their Bluetooth devices.
           Android 4.4 updates its SELinux configuration from "permissive" to "enforcing." This means potential policy violations within a SELinux domain that has an enforcing policy will be blocked.

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kitkat