The first Android P Developer Preview debuts features you can try right now

Google just launched its first Android P Developer Preview, meaning the next update to your smartphone is here – if you're willing to download very unfinished software.

New Android P features include turning your phone into a wireless keyboard or mouse, support for new photos and video compression codecs and Wi-Fi Round-Trip-Time. That last one will enable support for indoor position tracking, so your smartphone can guide you through even more mapped-out adventures.

Here's another one Google is bringing to Android straight from the nearby Apple campus: with so many new smartphones coming out with multi-lens camera setups, and a couple with screen notches akin to that found on the Apple iPhone X, Android P has built in support for display cutouts. It also will make those dual-lens cameras more useful with an API that will let developers build apps that can take advantage of both cameras.

Google continues to refine the way it displays notifications with Android P. It features a new notification system that makes incoming messages easier to spot and interact with from the drop down menu.

Beyond these new features, Android P naturally comes with myriad optimizations, security improvements and efficiency increases. But, this is still early days for Android P, thus this release being the Developer Preview.

You can use this link to download a copy of the Android P Developer Preview for your Pixel device or to test in Android Studio. Be warned, if you're not a developer, Google doesn't intend for you to upgrade to the latest operating system this way.

Over the last several years, Mark has been tasked as a writer, an editor, and a manager, interacting with published content from all angles. He is intimately familiar with the editorial process from the inception of an article idea, through the iterative process, past publishing, and down the road into performance analysis.