Your phone is like a spy in your pocket

Consider everything your smartphone has done for you today. Counted your steps? Deposited a check? Transcribed notes? Navigated you somewhere new?

Smartphones make for such versatile pocket assistants because they’re equipped with a suite of sensors, including some we may never think — or even know — about, sensing, for example, light, humidity, pressure and temperature.

Because smartphones have become essential companions, those sensors probably stayed close by throughout your day: the car cup holder, your desk, the dinner table and nightstand. If you’re like the vast majority of American smartphone users, the phone’s screen may have been black, but the device was probably on the whole time.

“Sensors are finding their ways into every corner of our lives,” says Maryam Mehrnezhad, a computer scientist at Newcastle University in England. That’s a good thing when phones are using their observational dexterity to do our bidding. But the plethora of highly personal information that smartphones are privy to also makes them powerful potential spies.

Observational artillery

Along with the familiar camera and microphone, smartphones can pack a slew of other exquisitely sensitive sensors.

Fingerprint/TouchID: Scans the user’s fingerprint

Proximity: Measures the distance of other objects from the phone’s touch screen

Light: Gauges the light level in the phone’s environment

Barometer: Measures ambient pressure around the phone

Accelerometer: Measures acceleration of the device’s movement or vibration

Gyroscope: Evaluates degree and direction of a phone’s rotation

Magnetism: Reports the magnetic field intensity around the phone

Gravity: Measures the force of gravity

Online app store Google Play has already discovered apps abusing sensor access. Google recently booted 20 apps from Android phones and its app store because the apps could — without the user’s knowledge — record with the microphone, monitor a phone’s location, take photos, and then extract the data. Stolen photos and sound bites pose obvious privacy invasions. But even seemingly innocuous sensor data can potentially broadcast sensitive information. A smartphone’s movement may reveal what users are typing or disclose their whereabouts. Even barometer readings that subtly shift with increased altitude could give away which floor of a building you’re standing on, suggests Ahmed Al-Haiqi, a security researcher at the National Energy University in Kajang, Malaysia.

These sneaky intrusions may not be happening in real life yet, but concerned researchers in academia and industry are working to head off eventual invasions. Some scientists have designed invasive apps and tested them on volunteers to shine a light on what smartphones can reveal about their owners. Other researchers are building new smartphone security systems to help protect users from myriad real and hypothetical privacy invasions, from stolen PIN codes to stalking.

Message revealed

Motion detectors within smartphones, like the accelerometer and the rotation-sensing gyroscope, could be prime tools for surreptitious data collection. They’re not permission protected — the phone’s user doesn’t have to give a newly installed app permission to access those sensors. So motion detectors are fair game for any app downloaded onto a device, and “lots of vastly different aspects of the environment are imprinted on those signals,” says Mani Srivastava, an engineer at UCLA.

For instance, touching different regions of a screen makes the phone tilt and shift just a tiny bit, but in ways that the phone’s motion sensors pick up, Mehrnezhad and colleagues demonstrated in a study reported online April 2017 in the International Journal of Information Security. These sensors’ data may “look like nonsense” to the human eye, says Al-Haiqi, but sophisticated computer programs can discern patterns in the mess and match segments of motion data to taps on various areas of the screen.

For the most part, these computer programs are machine-learning algorithms, Al-Haiqi says. Researchers train them to recognize keystrokes by feeding the programs a bunch of motion sensor data labeled with the key tap that produces particular movement. A pair of researchers built TouchLogger, an app that collects orientation sensor data and uses the data to deduce taps on smartphones’ number keyboards. In a test on HTC phones, reported in 2011 in San Francisco at the USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security, TouchLogger discerned more than 70 percent of key taps correctly.

Since then, a spate of similar studies have come out, with scientists writing code to infer keystrokes on number and letter keyboards on different kinds of phones. In 2016 in Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Al-Haiqi and colleagues reviewed these studies and concluded that only a snoop’s imagination limits the ways motion data could be translated into key taps. Those keystrokes could divulge everything from the password entered on a banking app to the contents of an e-mail or text message.

A more recent application used a whole fleet of smartphone sensors — including the gyroscope, accelerometer, light sensor and magnetism-measuring magnetometer — to guess PINs. The app analyzed a phone’s movement and how, during typing, the user’s finger blocked the light sensor. When tested on a pool of 50 PIN numbers, the app could discern keystrokes with 99.5 percent accuracy, the researchers reported on the Cryptology ePrint Archive in December.

Other researchers have paired motion data with mic recordings, which can pick up the soft sound of a fingertip tapping a screen. One group designed a malicious app that could masquerade as a simple note-taking tool. When the user tapped on the app’s keyboard, the app covertly recorded both the key input and the simultaneous microphone and gyroscope readings to learn the sound and feel of each keystroke.

The app could even listen in the background when the user entered sensitive info on other apps. When tested on Samsung and HTC phones, the app, presented in the Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, inferred the keystrokes of 100 four-digit PINs with 94 percent accuracy.

Al-Haiqi points out, however, that success rates are mostly from tests of keystroke-deciphering techniques in controlled settings — assuming that users hold their phones a certain way or sit down while typing. How these info-extracting programs fare in a wider range of circumstances remains to be seen. But the answer to whether motion and other sensors would open the door for new privacy invasions is “an obvious yes,” he says.

Tagalong

Motion sensors can also help map a person’s travels, like a subway or bus ride. A trip produces an undercurrent of motion data that’s discernible from shorter-lived, jerkier movements like a phone being pulled from a pocket. Researchers designed an app, described in 2017 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, to extract the data signatures of various subway routes from accelerometer readings.

In experiments with Samsung smartphones on the subway in Nanjing, China, this tracking app picked out which segments of the subway system a user was riding with at least 59, 81 and 88 percent accuracy — improving as the stretches expanded from three to five to seven stations long. Someone who can trace a user’s subway movements might figure out where the traveler lives and works, what shops or bars the person frequents, a daily schedule, or even — if the app is tracking multiple people — who the user meets at various places.

Accelerometer data can also plot driving routes, as described at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks in Bangalore, India. Other sensors can be used to track people in more confined spaces: One team synced a smartphone mic and portable speaker to create an on-the-fly sonar system to map movements throughout a house. The team reported the work in the September 2017 Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

“Fortunately there is not anything like [these sensor spying techniques] in real life that we’ve seen yet,” says Selcuk Uluagac, an electrical and computer engineer at Florida International University in Miami. “But this doesn’t mean there isn’t a clear danger out there that we should be protecting ourselves against.”

That’s because the kinds of algorithms that researchers have employed to comb sensor data are getting more advanced and user-friendly all the time, Mehrnezhad says. It’s not just people with Ph.D.s who can design the kinds of privacy invasions that researchers are trying to raise awareness about. Even app developers who don’t understand the inner workings of machine-learning algorithms can easily get this kind of code online to build sensor-sniffing programs.

What’s more, smartphone sensors don’t just provide snooping opportunities for individual cybercrooks who peddle info-stealing software. Legitimate apps often harvest info, such as search engine and app download history, to sell to advertising companies and other third parties. Those third parties could use the information to learn about aspects of a user’s life that the person doesn’t necessarily want to share.

Take a health insurance company. “You may not like them to know if you are a lazy person or you are an active person,” Mehrnezhad says. “Through these motion sensors, which are reporting the amount of activity you’re doing every day, they could easily identify what type of user you are.”

Sensor safeguards

Since it’s only getting easier for an untrusted third party to make private inferences from sensor data, researchers are devising ways to give people more control over what information apps can siphon off of their devices. Some safeguards could appear as standalone apps, whereas others are tools that could be built into future operating system updates.

Uluagac and colleagues proposed a system called 6thSense, which monitors a phone’s sensor activity and alerts its owner to unusual behavior, in Vancouver at the August 2017 USENIX Security Symposium. The user trains this system to recognize the phone’s normal sensor behavior during everyday tasks like calling, Web browsing and driving. Then, 6thSense continually checks the phone’s sensor activity against these learned behaviors.

If someday the program spots something unusual — like the motion sensors reaping data when a user is just sitting and texting — 6thSense alerts the user. Then the user can check if a recently downloaded app is responsible for this suspicious activity and delete the app from the phone.

Uluagac’s team recently tested a prototype of the system: Fifty users trained Samsung smartphones with 6thSense to recognize their typical sensor activity. When the researchers fed the 6thSense system examples of benign data from daily activities mixed in with segments of malicious sensor operations, 6thSense picked out the problematic bits with over 96 percent accuracy.

Balancing act

Distorting sensor data with the security system DEEProtect curbs the ability of an app, such as a speech-to-text translator, to use sensor readings. But more distortion for more privacy comes with less accuracy.

As privacy increases, accuracy drops

For people who want more active control over their data, Supriyo Chakraborty, a privacy and security researcher at IBM in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and colleagues devised DEEProtect, a system that blunts apps’ abilities to draw conclusions about certain user activity from sensor data. People could use DEEProtect, described in a paper posted online at arXiv.org in February 2017, to specify preferences about what apps should be allowed to do with sensor data. For example, someone may want an app to transcribe speech but not identify the speaker.

DEEProtect intercepts whatever raw sensor data an app tries to access and strips that data down to only the features needed to make user-approved inferences. For speech-to-text translation, the phone typically needs sound frequencies and the probabilities of particular words following each other in a sentence.

But sound frequencies could also help a spying app deduce a speaker’s identity. So DEEProtect distorts the dataset before releasing it to the app, leaving information on word orders alone, since that has little or no bearing on speaker identity. Users can control how much DEEProtect changes the data; more distortion begets more privacy but also degrades app functions.

In another approach, Giuseppe Petracca, a computer scientist and engineer at Penn State, and colleagues are trying to protect users from accidentally granting sensor access to deceitful apps, with a security system called AWare.

Apps have to get user permission upon first installation or first use to access certain sensors like the mic and camera. But people can be cavalier about granting those blanket authorizations, Uluagac says. “People blindly give permission to say, ‘Hey, you can use the camera, you can use the microphone.’ But they don’t really know how the apps are using these sensors.”

Instead of asking permission when a new app is installed, AWare would request user permission for an app to access a certain sensor the first time a user provided a certain input, like pressing a camera button. On top of that, the AWare system memorizes the state of the phone when the user grants that initial permission — the exact appearance of the screen, sensors requested and other information. That way, AWare can tell users if the app later attempts to trick them into granting unintended permissions.

For instance, Petracca and colleagues imagine a crafty data-stealing app that asks for camera access when the user first pushes a camera button, but then also tries to access the mic when the user later pushes that same button. The AWare system, also presented at the 2017 USENIX Security Symposium, would realize the mic access wasn’t part of the initial deal, and would ask the user again if he or she would like to grant this additional permission.

Petracca and colleagues found that people using Nexus smartphones equipped with AWare avoided unwanted authorizations about 93 percent of the time, compared with 9 percent among people using smartphones with typical first-use or install-time permission policies.

The price of privacy

Tricky widget

A deceptive smartphone app might show the user a camera button several times, then switch to the video camera button, tricking a distracted user into giving the app access to the mic as well as the camera.

The Android security team at Google is also trying to mitigate the privacy risks posed by app sensor data collection. Android security engineer Rene Mayrhofer and colleagues are keeping tabs on the latest security studies coming out of academia, Mayrhofer says.

But just because someone has built and successfully tested a prototype of a new smartphone security system doesn’t mean it will show up in future operating system updates. Android hasn’t incorporated proposed sensor safeguards because the security team is still looking for a protocol that strikes the right balance between restricting access for nefarious apps and not stunting the functions of trustworthy programs, Mayrhofer explains.

“The whole [app] ecosystem is so big, and there are so many different apps out there that have a totally legitimate purpose,” he adds. Any kind of new security system that curbs apps’ sensor access presents “a real risk of breaking” legitimate apps.

Tech companies may also be reluctant to adopt additional security measures because these extra protections can come at the cost of user friendliness, like AWare’s additional permissions pop-ups. There’s an inherent trade-off between security and convenience, UCLA’s Srivastava says. “You’re never going to have this magical sensor shield [that] gives you this perfect balance of privacy and utility.”

But as sensors get more pervasive and powerful, and algorithms for analyzing the data become more astute, even smartphone vendors may eventually concede that the current sensor protections aren’t cutting it. “It’s like cat and mouse,” Al-Haiqi says. “Attacks will improve, solutions will improve. Attacks will improve, solutions will improve.”

The game will continue, Chakraborty agrees. “I don’t think we’ll get to a place where we can declare a winner and go home.” 

What the iPhone X and iOS 11 mean to app developers

The excitement of Apple launch day always reminds me of the Willy Wonka “opening of the gates”, you know – where the public gets a peek inside Apple’s secret factory for a brief moment. But this year the Apple event feels a bit different. Maybe it’s the recent leaks, maybe it’s because we all know Apple is facing a ceiling of innovation they have to punch through – and really nail, or be faced with the heat of growing competition. Or maybe it’s just because I’m expecting more of the same, video intro with someone talking in a Harry Potter accent, keynote from Tim, operating system update from various team members, and hardware updates from Tim – with some release dates still up in the air.

So I decided to pick a few of the top iOS hardware and software rumors that are likely to come to fruition today, and introduce the elephant in the room for each from a developers eye.

3 new iPhone releases (rumored iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X)

When I hear “new iPhone”, I hear – new screen size to support! It’s already maddening enough keeping up with the scaling issues, but if Apple does announce a new “big and tall, full face OLED screen”, get ready to create a new set of screenshots and video previews. Oh and if the rumor is true about a smaller status bar too – you’ll have to make an entirely new set of screenshots anyway. 

But if Tim says “edge to edge OLED”, it will be as if a million voices all cried out at once, “take my money!” Especially considering that rumors are “X” means exclusive.

No more home button

This will take some getting used to for sure, as I know most people would opt straight in for the iPhone X because who wouldn’t want an edge-to-edge screen. But closing apps, switching apps, activating Siri, logging in to all of those “touch ID” ready apps and websites are all in question here. The replacement of touchID to facial recognition will surely usher in praises of high-security professionals, but developers be aware, this one could get weird. My guess is users can still get a “virtual” home button if they do axe it from the hardware.

Costs over $1000

Some of the media are gasping at the potential price tag, but I paid really close to a grand for my 6 plus, and over a grand for my 7 plus. Given, I did buy the largest amount of built in memory I  could get at the time, but I think most of us power users have already paid $1000 for a high-end device. No, we don’t like it and as developers it would sure be nice if Apple finally gave us a break on pricing -especially when they already privy themselves to 30% of our revenue. It would be nice not being thrown into the general pool with non-developers too, or to offer a monthly program so you can get the latest hardware without having to do the whole buy & sell like everyone else?

A11 processor with up to 6 cores

What this means is your games will rock! More physics on the screen, more shading, more lighting effects, and eh-um, you get to put rewriting those heavy handed CPU sucking functions off a bit. I’m also sure the new ARkit will benefit greatly from the added horses as well.

New Airpods 

Longer battery life, and even more amazing sound, to me this will be a “misc bug fix” style update. I kinda hope they shorten the stem that hangs down from the ear. I wish I could just get an earpiece like they used in the hit TV show “Person of Interest”, where I just graze the ear with my finger and magically I’m talking to someone over my phone, and the entire device is invisible.

Animojies (yawn)

Isn’t MSQRD already doing this? Hopefully they will open this usability up for developers to capitalize on too, but I think regardless -the feature will be used alot at first and I can’t wait for my annoying friends to get a hold of it.

USB-C coming to new iPhones (please Apple, noooooo) 

This better not be true, but it does open the conversation up to when are we finally going to get wireless building to device? You have made such an emphasis on wireless – but what about developers being able to build and send to any connected device over wifi at the same time? The benefits of this are obvious.

Apple Watch LTE

Not interested in another data plan at the moment thanks – though it would be more Dick Tracey than ever. Besides, why would I orphan my new iPhone X? I guess for runners and those people on the move all the time, this will come in handy. Not to mention apps like our Chirp GPS location tracking app will benefit from it as well.

New Apple TV with 4K

I like the Apple TV, but shouldn’t Apple just buy “Channels” already and actually make the Apple TV feel like “TV” with real channel numbers? And please make the remote fatter or less slick feeling.

iOS 11 and the new app store redesign

Among the many cosmetic, and usability changes in the new OS 11 – including major overhauls in some areas like Control Center, the changes in app store visibility through the iOS devices are among top interest to developers. Will it change the way your apps are presented to potential customers? Yes. Will it look completely different than it does now? Yes. Is it going to help or hurt your app store ranking? Only time will tell.

Whenever Apple changes the app store, they also change the way apps get discovered. But Apple has taken a clear tone that they want to be more engaged with the developers publishing to their app store through developer’s interviews, spotlights, game of the day, etc. 

But Apple is changing the developer rules some too. There will be new limits put on developers when asking users to review your apps, plus users can turn off reviews completely in device settings if they wish. Tips are being introduced as a new way to monetize. Tips let users give you a tip (sorta like a cap driver). They are basically in-app purchases but can be ongoing and on-demand.

ARKIT is going to be huge, and used everywhere. I think there will be a time that we remember as “pre ARKIT”. AR is amazing, and Apple is onboard. Too bad not all of their latest devices will support it because developers will be publishing to a small audience at first.

Offloading unused apps is a part of iOS 11, which could get your app uninstalled if a user doesn’t open it enough.

The camera can automatically read QR codes now too – woot! So developers will finally not have to use a 3rd party utility to read codes for coupons, discounts, more info, etc.

High Sierra

Finally, Sierra gets updated! But why the name, why Apple, why? I can’t get past imaginary meetings in my mind when they finally landed on the title “High Sierra”. The good news for one of the leading manufacturers of outdoor gear “High Sierra”, they are no-doubt going to benefit from the name change through accidental landing page impressions.

We know the name sings “minor release” and keeps in tune with other OS releases of the same blend. Overall there will be no more 32 bit, we get a new file system, an update to photos, better videos, Safari and more. Biggest note to mention is VR, which ties nicely into ARkit.

AVG gets into smartphone antivirus and privacy

AVG promises to protect privacy as well as detecting malware – and claims that Android mobile devices are just as vulnerable as Windows PCs.

AVG, an antivirus and security company which focuses on consumers and small businesses, held a press event in New York to announce its latest wave of products. I spoke to AVG’s new CEO, Gary Kovacs, who comes from Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser. Why the move from the open web to the dark world of PC security?

“Mozilla’s role was to try to be a standards bearer for the open web for everybody,” he told me. At AVG he remains focused on being open, but with his attention now on privacy and transparency. Whether it is a social media platform like Facebook, or general web browsing, people have no idea what information they are sharing and with whom, he says, which deprives them of choice.

“The reason why we don’t have choices today is that we don’t have transparency and we don’t have tools to be able to control those choices. Those aren’t commercially available. This is going to be an exercise for AVG in delivering products that enable consumer choice around privacy and identity.”

Among the products announced in New York is PrivacyFix, a free add-on for Google Chrome, Firefox, Android and iOS, that analyses Facebook, Google and LinkedIn settings, and checks web sites for advertising networks that track your browsing habits.

But do people care enough about privacy that they will pay for tools to manage it? PrivacyFix is free, but AVG’s business model is “freemium”, free products but with paid-for premium versions, and some commercial variant is likely in future.

“It will be marketable. It is starting to be marketable. But we’re still in the very early stages of this evolution,” says Kovacs. He speaks of a future “privacy tsunami” that will wake people up to what is happening to their privacy, in the same way that early PC malware created a market for antivirus products.

“I’m not sure exactly what, but stealing privacy, stealing identity, stealing personal financial data, we see a lot of that activity in the underground world. When I refer to a tsunami, it’s going to be something of that nature that’s going to come up. It will become very evident to people that they need to be thinking about their personal security,” he says.

In the meantime though, to what extent is AVG’s business model still built on mainly Windows antivirus and security, and how will it manage the transition to a post-PC world?

“I don’t believe PCs are going to go away in the next three to five years. I believe they’re going to be supplemented,” says Kovacs. “But the big push for us, with 44 million downloads in the Google Play store, is antivirus and other products on Android. We’re right in the middle of that transition.” He adds that in future, cloud-based security and privacy tools that work across all devices “will make the platform discussion irrelevant.”

AVG does not break down its revenue, but says its overall business is flourishing, with revenue for the second quarter of 2013 up 22%.

Users are all-too familiar with malware on their Windows PC, but one of the attractions of the new mobile platforms is that the more locked-down operating system and curatable app stores such as Apple’s and Microsoft’s, where any malicious apps that get through initial vetting should quickly be removed, means that malware is less likely and security software less necessary – or is that a false assumption?

“There is going to be some protection. I believe we’re going to have to be thoughtful about security and how we update those products to make sure we’re covered against the most recent threats,” says Kovacs.
Marketing VP Judith Bitterli is even more insistent, saying that Android is just as vulnerable as a Windows PC. “We don’t see the threat going down. I’m not being a fearmonger. We don’t see the decline in the instances of malware,” she tells me.

Is iOS more secure than Android? “I never worry too much about that question because it’s an irrelevant question. Eighty-something percent of the world is on Android, so I need to envision how we protect on Android,” says Kovacs.

No end to antivirus software, even in a post-PC world? It is a depressing thought; but to AVG’s credit, its commitment to the freemium model means that a meaningful level of protection is available without charge.

Android 8.0 Oreo Top Features

Twist Lick Dunk! Google sort of stole the Solar Eclipse 2017’s thunder last night, when it finally announced Android Oreo. First showcased at Google I/O 2017, Android 8.0 was launched  via a live stream, which was streaming alongside the live stream of The Great American Eclipse by NASA. And cunning Google chose the same theme for the Android 8.0. An Oreo cookie eclipsing the sun lands on earth, and all the droids are in awe to see it, when one of them touches the cookie, it turns into a superhero of a droid, with the cookie at its heart.

Google has traditionally used sweet treats for the names of its major Android releases. This time the company says that Android Oreo smarter, faster, more powerful and sweeter than ever. So, here’s taking a look at some of Andriod 8.0’s sweetest features.

Two times faster

If you believe Google, the Oreo-droid running smartphones will offer two times the boot speed when powering up. Though that feature comes with a little asterisk on top, which Google clarifies is a boot time measured on a Google Pixel smartphone. But hey, if Google Pixel 2, or Pixel XL 2 are in your plans, you’d be one of the first ones to get the update too.

Background limits

The behind the scenes will be taken care of by the new Android. Google says Oreo will help minimize background activity in the apps you use least. It says “it’s the super power you can’t even see”.

Autofill

Now iOS had this, so did Google Chrome, but Android had been waiting for this experience for a while. Android Oreo now comes with the autofill feature. Which means, with your permission, the new Android iteration will remember your logins, so that you can get into your favorite apps with so much less effort. Because less effort is good.

Picture-in-picture

This one was possibly the most awaited feature of Android O. The feature allows its users to perform two tasks simultaneously. This may include texting someone while watching videos on YouTube or any other similar tasks. Currently, such tasks can only be performed in a multi-window view.

Notification Dots

Just like 3D touch on iOS, Android Oreo now has a shortcut to view the notification. Just press the notification dots to quickly see what’s new, and easily clear them by swiping away.

Android Instant Apps

Google started its Instant Apps effort sometime ago, but with Android Orea, it has finally been integrated to the Android devices compatible with the new OS. Essentially, with the Android Instant app you can teleport directly into new apps right from your browser, no installation needed.

Connectivity

Connectivity will also be better with the new OS. Other than using an LDAC codec for high-quality Bluetooth audio, Android Oreo comes with Wi-Fi Aware, a feature that will allow nearby devices to communicate through Wi-Fi without an internet access.

Google Play Protect

At Google I/O 2017, the company put a lot of stress on its new Play Protect program. It is essentially Google’s initiative to keeping its users safe from malware and fake apps. Google recently rolled out its Play Protect security features to all devices running Google Mobile Services 11 and up, and on the Google Play Store. Android Oreo now also comes protected with the program.

Longer battery life

A better battery life with Android 8.0 was probably the most attractive promise Google made about the new iteration of the operating system. “Whether you’re talking, playing, working or streaming, you can feel confident about keeping your battery strong and full of life.”

Notification channel

Users can now organize notifications into custom channels, and modify the alerts for the entire channel. This can be specifying the sounds if the notification triggers a vibration, and if the notification is allowed to override the do not disturb setting. Developers can specify the importance of notifications, with a weightage from 0-4. There are also badges on the applications, known as notification dots that indicate which applications have unread notifications.

Keyboard Navigation

Google has built an easier way of navigation in Android O using an ‘arrow’ and ‘tab’ model. As per Google, this will help improve the reliability and predictability of the navigation process in Android OS.

Emoji

And finally, what makes a conversation sweeter than just sweet words? Emojis! Android 8.0 comes with a fully redesigned emoji set, including over 60 new emoji.