Android team unveils first developer preview of Android 13

Google LLC’s Android team today announced the first developer preview for Android 13, which continues to iterate on privacy and security and adds further developer tools.

The objective of developer previews is to provide developers a first look at what’s going into the new build and allow them a chance to guide its development. At this point, the Android team is seeking early feedback about what should be included in the final release.

The preview is available now with complete setup instructions for running on an Android emulator. For phones, it is possible to flash a system image onto the device today. Android 13 Preview 1 is compatible with Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL and Pixel 4 devices.

Privacy and security features

As with Android 12, the team said that front and center has been increasing privacy and security for users. To help with this, two new features have been added in order to make secure application development easier for developers while also enhancing privacy for users.

Android 13 introduces NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES, a runtime permission that allows apps to ask permission to discover and access devices on nearby WiFi networks without needing permission to access location services. That’s useful for developers because Android is capable of determining its location based on nearby WiFi hotspots.

However, there is a multitude of reasons for an app to need access to nearby WiFi devices that don’t include needing device location. By adding the “neverForLocation” flag, now apps can request access while also respecting user privacy. More information is available at the Android 13 portal.

Photos and videos are now easier to securely share with any app on Android devices without the app needing permission to view all media on the device using a new “photo picker” capability. Android already has a document picker capability that operates that same way.

Apps can now also access this feature through a photo picker application programming interface. When an app needs access to a photo, it can simply call on the picker to allow the user to select a photo or video without needing permission to view all media files on the device. That should greatly improve user privacy, according to Google

The company said that it intends to bring this capability to more Android users through Google Play updates to devices running Android 11 and above.

Developer productivity enhancements

Android 13 is adding developer productivity tools and preparing app comparability for more devices. That should make the lives of developers everywhere a lot easier when working with Android in the future.

In this release, developers will get access to the Quick Settings placement API, this will allow building apps with tile configurations to add tiles to Quick Settings where users can be prompted to add custom tiles directly within the app. Material You, which received a makeover in Android 12, got an extended dynamic color tint for all icons, not just Google app icons, this means developers can submit monochrome versions of their icons and they will adapt to match themes.

For user accessibility, per-app language preferences have been updated in a new platform API that allows individual applications to choose a language that differs from the system language. That’s important for multilingual users.

The user interface will also present with faster hyphenation, which adds the “-” when a word is split up at the edge of a screen to make pages of text easier to read. With this addition, the rendering happens 200% faster.

Android’s Core Libraries are being updated as well to align with Java 11’s programming language support for app and platform developers.

In addition, the team has been pushing further compatibility with more devices by updating through Google Play in order to provide a more consistent and secure environment across all devices. They’re capable of providing tools such as the photo picker using Java 11 directly to users with older versions of Android through updates of existing modules.

Android 13 is also being optimized for more form factors as Android is becoming more prevalent in more devices such as tablets, foldables and Chromebooks. With this preview, Google said, it’s a good time for developers to prepare their apps for these screen sizes and design them so that they can take advantage of the different screen real estate.

This is the first preview for Android 13 and platform stability is not expected until June. After that, the final release will take about a month. Further details on the timeline are available at the Android 13 developer portal.

Image: Google