Although the future update to Android P it is still a long way off, some details of possible changes in the system are beginning to emerge. One of the most notorious will be to stop showing the signal strength exact information provided by the operators.
Some operators are pressuring Google to hide signal strength
If right now you go to Settings, Phone Information, click on STATUS and you enter SIM status, you will be able to see various information regarding the card that your operator offers you. Among them stands out Signal strength, which is basically the information of how good or bad the coverage reaches you. However, several US carriers are pressuring Google to remove this option.
What the company prepares for Android P is to offer that option. Deciding whether or not this menu can be accessed will be the decision of each operator, who may configure in the vendor.xml file with which your restrictions are determined. In this way, the signal strength menu would be hidden, and the only method to know if we have good or bad coverage would be the bars of the notification bar.
Although most users do not access this menu, losing this option for the future would be harmful for the user. American operators should focus on offering a good network of connections and not on hiding their shortcomings by taking away options from the user. However, with this method so only the menu is hidden, so there will continue to be options to see the signal accurately.
If a third party app is able to read this information, it will be able to show it to the user without any problem. This is because the change does not affect the APIs that these applications use, so the Signal Strength number will remain accessible information. The only thing that can be desired then is that the operators do not decide to press also because that API is no longer accessible and those applications are left unusable.
For now, all this would happen in the face of Android P. It is possible that Google decide to backtrack on this option, but it appears that trader pressures have been sufficient for the time being. Meanwhile, we have to think about Android Oreo, which continues to arrive little by little to devices such as the Xiaomi Mi A1.