Developer Preview 2 came out on 13 April 2016, builds NPC91K and NPC91O,
for the same devices as the first; the Nexus Player followed several days
later. Devices in the Android Beta Program got it over the air. It still
required Android Studio 2.1 and was still not meant for daily use.
What Developer Preview 2 added
- Vulkan became part of the platform: a low-overhead 3D API that Google helped develop at Khronos. Google said some synthetic benchmarks reached up to 10 times the single-core draw-call throughput of OpenGL ES.
- Launcher shortcuts.
ShortcutManager.setDynamicShortcuts()andaddDynamicShortcut()let an app publish intents into specific screens. This API did not survive: see Developer Preview 3 and 4. - Emoji. Unicode 9 glyphs, skin tones and a new human-looking design for
people emoji. Apps check for a glyph with
Paint.hasGlyph(). - Multi-window gained a separate minimum height and minimum width for an activity, and several of its API names changed.
It also fixed bugs developers had filed against Preview 1, among them hidden Wi-Fi networks that would not connect (AOSP 203116), YouTube pausing when multi-window focus changed (203424) and Direct Reply closing an open activity (204411).