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(The pictures are a mix of Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 screenshots, so don't worry about any size differences.)

The most prominent change is the fixed app drawer, which looks much better than the Preview 1 version. The original implementation removed an entire column of icons to make room for huge index letters. It looked ugly and was a waste of space, so we're glad to see them gone. There's still the nice-to-have search bar at the top of the screen, and it actually looks like a search bar now.

The top row of apps in the app drawer, which isn't alphabetical and changes all the time, is apparently the "predictive apps" bar. We'll have to see how well it actually predicts what we want to use.

The new homescreen finally supports auto rotate, so you have a horizontal home screen now.

The other big additions are the new System UI Tuner options. The UI tuner was introduced in the first version of Android M and only let you rearrange the power control pulldown, but now it has been expanded with status bar options. There's an option to show a percentage readout in the battery status bar icon, which has been a favorite feature of modders. This has been built into AOSP forever but turning it on before required a rooted phone—now it's very easy.

There's a whole set of options to hide stock status bar icons, so if you want to hide your signal bars or alarm clock icon you can now. It might seem a little weird to hide important status bar indicators, but we're guessing this is aimed at OEM skins, which like to fill the status bar with crap. Now you'd be able to turn it off, assuming OEMs don't mess with this feature.

There's also a "demo mode" which pops up a fake status bar for more presentable screenshots. It blanks out all the notifications and shows a 100% battery and sets the time to 5:20. Google's Android press shots almost always set the time to be a representation of the current version, so 5.0 showed 5:00, and 5.1 showed 5:10. A time of 5:20 suggests Android M will be called "Android 5.2."

The one feature that seems removed (or at least hidden) is the "Theme" options that were in the developer settings. They're just gone now.

Other than what's above, the official developer release notes show a few new permission types that have had their protection level tweaked, but it doesn't look like there's anything too major. There's a new "ShouldShowRequestPermissionRationale" method, which checks to see if the user denied an app a permission and then can explain to the user why the app needs that permission, which sounds like something developers will be very happy with.

That seems to be it for Android M. Like Google said, it's "incremental." This is still just a developer preview, so it's still missing all of the consumer facing Google apps that will debut with the OS. There's more Android M versions to come. The next one is scheduled for "late July."

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham