Direct Share

The "Share" menu in Android allows users to send some kind of data about the current screen to someone else. This can be a photo, an app link from the Play Store, a URL, a Google Maps location, or any other piece of data an app wants to supply. The Share list always brings up a list of apps, though, and a lot of times you want to share something with a person. Typically the way this works in Android is you press share, pick the app icon, the app supplies a list of contacts, you pick a contact, and then press send.

"Direct Share" is a new feature that tries to cut down on the number of steps. Press share and, at the top of the share list, a list of contacts with app icons next to their names will pop up. Then just pick the contact and hit send.

Developers can define Direct Share targets in their app that launch a specific activity. In Google's examples, these are all contacts associated with an IM, e-mail, or social network app. Rather than open the main page of an app, these targets would open a conversation or compose view for that specific person. It's tough to nail down the specifics of this feature since almost nothing supports direct share right now. Google Hangouts of course doesn't, because Google doesn't care about Hangouts, but it is up and running on Android's Messaging app.

In Google's demos, it seems each app gets a row of contact icons that it can supply, and the contacts seem to be in order of when you last used them.

Volume and Notifications



















The above labeling is correct—the volume panel has been greatly simplified in Android 6.0. The Priority Notification controls that existed in Android 5.1 have been moved to the Quick Settings panel, leaving a simple volume bar. There is a down arrow on the bar, and tapping it will show three volume controls: Notifications, Media, and Alarms. These work out to be every volume control in Android, making it easy to see just how much noise your device will make before it starts making noise.

In the Quick Settings Panel, the notification controls now take the slot formerly occupied by a "SIM card" tile. Tapping on the SIM card tile in Android 5.1 just loaded the data usage screen, which made it redundant since it was right next to the cell signal tile doing the same thing. Other than the move, priority notification controls have been pretty much untouched. The labeling is a lot clearer now: while "none" might have been a little ambiguous, ("No notification sounds? What about media and alarms?") the "Total silence" label is much more definitive. If that was not clear enough, there's also a tooltip that spells out exactly what the mode blocks—everything, including alarms. When Android says "total silence," it means total silence.

One of the most welcome changes to the notification system in Marshmallow is control over app notification settings. You've been able to completely ban an app from creating notifications for a while, but now in Settings -> Apps -> [app name] -> Notifications, you can control the "peek" and "priority" settings for each app.

"Peek" is the new name for the "Heads-up notification" feature that was introduced in Lollipop. Peek would let incoming notifications overlap a top section of the screen. It was designed for the most important notifications, like phone calls and incoming messages from important people, but Google left the Peek notification setting up to developers. Developers all naturally assume their app is The Most Important App On Earth, so they all enabled Peek notifications for all of their users. Having every notification pop up on the screen became annoying to some users, so for Marshmallow Google gave users an on/off toggle for Peek notifications on each app.

In the "Sounds & Notifications" settings there is a new "Do Not Disturb" page. Most of the functionality on this screen arrived in the Lollipop "Interruption" settings, but the page has been redesigned with a few more features added. You've been able to set certain days and times for automatic priority or DND mode, but a new section called "Automatic rules" comes with pre-loaded common situations like "weekday." There's also the completely new ability to automatically silence the phone whenever there's an event in the calendar app. You can even pick which of your multiple calendars you would like the rule to apply to.

There also seems to be a new API for accessing the Do Not Disturb settings, or at least control over it. At the bottom of the "Sound & notifications" screen is a "Do Not Disturb access" link, which presumably controls which apps can change the phone silence settings. By default no apps are listed here, though.