It has been months since the developer preview of Android Oreo came up. By now, we have a pretty good idea of how the upcoming Android OS upgrade will turn up. But, there is still more to feel excited about it.
A significant feature of Android 8.0 is the ‘Task Snapshots.’ It is basically an infrastructure feature for the operating system. Therefore, there is no need to mess with the settings from your side.
Task Snapshots in Android Oreo
The Task Snapshot aims at bettering your overview thumbnails and represents your views while returning to an app. It is a combination of Saved Surfaces and Recent Thumbnails. Also, it does not consume much memory.
With the help of this functionality of Android Oreo, users will be able to keep better track of CPU usage regarding background apps. The Window Manager takes a snapshot of the app that is going into the background.
The snapshot directly finds its place in the graphics buffer. You can retain it anytime when the app remains in memory. You will get to see the snapshot while having a glimpse over the app in the multitasking interface.
As the graphics buffer hosts the screenshot, you don’t have to additionally copy it for display in the overview. This makes it use less memory, which readily makes the image bear higher quality.
Before the introduction of this feature, the overview thumbnail would not have a better quality display. It would have been compressed by 64% to save memory. This naturally hampers the quality parameters.
Now, the transition from a thumbnail to a full app is going to be smoother than before. Also, the thumbnail matches the graphics buffer. You will get to that point of the app with one tap – exactly what the screenshot displays in the thumbnail.
There is no requirement to enable the Task Snapshots. The feature is available by default in Android Oreo.
