UPDATED 13:00 EDT / FEBRUARY 18 2021

APPS

Google announces the first developer preview of Android 12

Google LLC’s Android team has just made the first developer preview of Android 12 available for developers to tinker with and provide feedback on its new features.

The idea is to help software developers ensure their apps are compatible with the latest version of the operating system’s features, which include a raft of user experience innovations as well as security and stability upgrades.

In a blog post today, Android Vice President of Engineering Dave Burke stressed the importance of privacy, hence Android 12’s focus on adding more transparency and control for users. The new release of Android consequently gets a smattering of new privacy-related features, including some new controls over identifiers that can be used for tracking, and safer defaults for application components.

The most anticipated updates have to do with the user experience, though, and on this front Android 12 provides some bells and whistles. Among the headlines is a new feature to enable compatible media transcoding for applications that don’t support the High Efficiency Video Coding format.

“With the prevalence of HEVC hardware encoders on mobile devices, camera apps are increasingly capturing in HEVC format, which offers significant improvements in quality and compression over older codecs,” Burke explained.

Not every app supports HEVC, so Android will now be able to transcode any video file into the AVC format that’s much more widely compatible. Developers will be able to opt in to this new service simply by declaring which formats their apps do not support.

Another new format being added to Android is the AV1 Image File Format, which helps to ensure higher image quality with more efficient compression. Burke explained that AVIF is a container format for images and sequences of images encoded using AV1, which takes advantage of intraframe encoded content from video compression in order to “dramatically improve” image quality while retaining the same file size as older formats such as JPEG.

Comparison of AV1 vs JPEG image formats

In addition, Burke said Android 12 now enables what he calls “rich content insertion” in Android apps. “To make it simple for your apps to receive rich content, we’re introducing a new unified API that lets you accept content from any source: clipboard, keyboard, or drag and drop,” Burke wrote.

These are just a taste of the user experience upgrades Android 12 will deliver, with others focused on limiting foreground service starts in certain apps that can affect the performance of the device, and on faster and more responsive app notifications. The new version also adds some new spatial audio and new audio-coupled haptic feedback features to Android that should help developers create more immersive gaming and audio experiences.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE he’s impressed with the list of updates on both the platform stability and the user experience side.

“It’s good to see Google keeps working on improving Android’s notification system, which is a key UX element for any smartphone OS,” Mueller said. “AV1 support will make pictures look better despite smaller image sizes, something that both users and telcos should be happy about, while the built-in transcorder should help developers to build more video powered apps.”

On the app compatibility, Burke said that one big change with Android 12 is that from now on, more of Android will be updated through the Google Play store as part of an ongoing effort to give apps a more consistent and secure environment across various types of devices.

“In Android 12 we’ve added the Android Runtime (ART) module that lets us push updates to the core runtime and libraries on devices running Android 12. We can improve runtime performance and correctness, manage memory more efficiently, and make Kotlin operations faster, all without requiring a full system update,” Burke explained.

Android 12 will also make it easier for developers to optimize their apps for different devices, such as TVs, tablets and foldable notebooks, Burke said.

Burke said the Android team has set a platform stability milestone for August 2021, by which time they’ll deliver the final SDKs and APIs as well as the final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviors.

The first Android 12 developer preview is available to download now, but it will only work on a Pixel 3/3 XL, Pixel 3a/3a XL, Pixel 4/4 XL, Pixel 4a/4a 5G, or Pixel 5 device. Developers who don’t own a Pixel device can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator available in Android Studio.

Image: Joe Tsai/Flickr

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