Day after day, billions of people all over the world use their Android smartphones to assist them in accomplishing their goals. Android’s ability to perform effectively for each of them is due in part to a collaborative effort with you, our developer community, who share input to help us improve Android.
With the Android 13 Developer Preview 1, we’re giving you a first peek at the future version of Android. We’re continuing some essential themes in Android 13, including privacy and security, as well as developer productivity. We’ll also expand on some of the more recent changes from 12L to help you make use of the 250 million or more large-screen Android smartphones now in use.
This is only the beginning of Android 13, and we’ll have plenty more to offer as the rollout progresses. Read on for a taste of what’s new, then go over to the Android 13 developer site for more information on Pixel downloads and the release schedule. As always, getting your input early is critical to ensuring that it is included in the final version. We’re excited to hear your feedback, and we appreciate your ongoing support in making Android a platform that works for everybody!
Themed application icon
In Android 13, we’re extending Material You dynamic colour beyond Google applications to all app icons, allowing users to choose between icons that inherit the hue of their wallpaper and other theme settings and icons that don’t. Only a monochrome app icon (for example, your notification drawable) and a change to the adaptable icon XML are required from your app. All developers are encouraged to supply suitable icons to allow users who have opted in to enjoy a consistent experience. Themed app icons are currently only available on Pixel smartphones, but we’re working with our device maker partners to expand their availability.
Users may choose to have customised app icons starting with Android 13. This feature tints app icons incompatible with Android launchers to match the colour scheme of the user’s wallpaper and other themes.
To use this functionality, your app must have a monochromatic app icon that is linked from the manifest’s adaptive-icon> element. If a user has activated the Themed icons toggle on their device, the system determines the tint colour by looking at the colour of the user’s wallpaper and theme, which it then adds to the monochromatic app icon.
Specifications
The following requirements should be met by your monochromatic app icon:
It must be in SVG format and not a photograph.
We propose that the logo be contained within a 90 × 90 dp container with a 36 x 36 dp area. If the logo must be larger, it must be at least 60 × 60 dp.
You may utilise the alpha gradient if your logo is three-dimensional.
➊Container area (90 x 90 dp).
➋ Logo area (36 x 36 dp recommended, 60 x 60 dp maximum).
At the heart of it, all are privacy and security
People would like an operating system and apps they can trust with their most private and sensitive data. Android 13 focuses on establishing a responsible and high-quality platform for everybody by delivering a safer environment on the device and more controls to the user, which is central to Android’s product principles. We’re adding a picture picker in today’s release to allow users to safely share photographs and videos with applications, as well as a new Wi-Fi permission to reduce the requirement for apps to have location permission. We propose that you check out the new APIs and see how they affect your project.
Android 13 introduces a system picture picker – a standard and streamlined approach for users to share both local and cloud-based photographs securely — to help preserve users’ photo and video privacy. The long-standing Android document picker allows a user to share certain documents of any type with an app without requiring that app to have access to all media files on the device. This functionality is enhanced by the picture picker, which provides a specialised experience for selecting photographs and videos. The picture picker APIs allow apps to access shared photographs and videos without requiring access to all media assets on the device. As part of Google Play system upgrades, we intend to provide the picture picker experience to more Android users.
Productivity and tools for developers
New features and tools for developer productivity are also included in Android 13. One of our key aims is to help you build beautiful applications that run on billions of devices, whether it’s in Android 13 or through our tools for contemporary Android development, such as a language you’ll enjoy in Kotlin or opinionated APIs with Jetpack. We hope to reduce your development costs by assisting you in being more productive so you can focus on creating outstanding experiences. Here are some of the new features in today’s version.
Shaders that can be programmed – Android 13 introduces support for programmable RuntimeShader objects, which may have their behaviour specified using the Android Graphics Shading Language (AGSL). AGSL is similar to GLSL in syntax, but it is used within the Android rendering engine to modify painting on the canvas and filter of View content. These shaders are used internally by Android to generate ripple effects, blur, and stretch overscroll, and Android 13 allows you to apply equivalent sophisticated effects in your app.
Compatibility with apps
We’re looking to make upgrades faster and smoother with each platform release by emphasising app compatibility as we roll out new platform versions. Most app-facing changes have been made opt-in in Android 13 to offer you more time, and we’ve upgraded our tools and procedures to help you get ready faster.
More Android apps are now available on Google Play – We’re continuing to invest in Google Play system improvements (Project Mainline) with Android 13 to provide apps a more consistent, safe environment across devices, as well as to provide new features and capabilities to consumers. Through upgrades to existing modules, we can now bring new functionality like picture picker and OpenJDK 11 to users on previous versions of Android. New modules, such as Bluetooth and Ultra-wideband, have been included to increase the breadth of Android’s updatable core capabilities.
Platform security milestone – As we did last year, we’re letting you know about our Platform Stability milestone ahead of time so you can plan ahead for app compatibility work. We’ll publish not only the final SDK/NDK APIs but also the final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviours at this point. This year, we anticipate hitting Platform Stability in June 2022, and you’ll have several weeks to complete your last testing before the official release. The release schedule is detailed below.
Start using Android 13 today
You may get started on a Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL, or Pixel 4 smartphone today by flashing a system image to it.
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