The first developer preview of Android 13 brought an early Valentine’s Day gift to Android app developers today. Note that this is only a “first look” at the upcoming OS and is intended primarily for developers. It is expected that the first public beta build of Android 13 will arrive in April and that the final release of Android 13 will come sometime after July.
Google has published a timeline with a second developer preview coming next month, a beta in April, a special “Platform Stability” build in May, then release candidates in June and July. Let’s take a look at what’s new.
New Features:
Android 13 brings a new system photo picker to make sharing images securely easier while focusing on privacy and security. The Android document picker allows you to pick photos and videos, too. Yes, without asking your permission to access all media on your device as it does with documents. Through Google Play updates for all Android 11 and higher devices (except Android Go) eventually, “more Android users” will be able to access this.
In terms of Google Play updates, these will cover “more of Android” with new modules added to the update mechanism.
The next step is to allow apps to discover and connect to nearby Wi-Fi devices without requiring location permission. With the new API for Quick Settings and a new system dialog for adding tiles from within an app. It will be much easier to add custom tiles to Quick Settings.
In Android 13, the Material You dynamically adjusting color engine is available for all app icons, not just Google’s. In order for this to work, developers must provide compatible icons for their apps. Google promises it will work with its device manufacturer partners to bring these custom icons to additional phones in the future.
Android 13 also offers per-app language preferences, which will be helpful for multilingual users.
In the case that you are a developer and would like to try out this build of Android 13, you can flash a system image onto the Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6 5G, Pixel 5 5G, Pixel 4a 5G, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 4 or Pixel 4. The build number is TPP1.220114.001.
