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Google unveiled the first developer preview of Android 12, giving users a glimpse of what could be expected in the major Android update scheduled for later this year.
With the new features, the tech giant wants to keep privacy and security at the core of new version. To enhance privacy and safety of users, Google added new controls over identifiers that can be used for tracking, safer defaults for app components, and more.
New Features
Google is working on compatible media transcoding, which helps the app to work with the latest video formats if it doesn’t already support them, and easier copy/paste of rich content into your apps, like images and videos.
For higher quality images with efficient compression, Android 12 is adding support for AV1 Image File Format (AVIF). This container format for images and sequences uses intra-frame encoded content from video compression which image quality for the same file size when compared to older image formats, such as JPEG.
Google is also introducing a unified API that lets users accept content from any source: clipboard, keyboard, or drag and drop. This will help to insert and move images, videos and other expressive content in apps.
Audio updates
The developer preview also sheds light on a few audio improvements. Android 12 includes support for MPEG-H H playback in passthrough and offload mode, and the audio mixers, re samplers and effects have been optimized for up to 24 channels from 8 previously. Besides, apps in Android 12 can provide audio-coupled haptic feedback through the phone's vibrator.
For instance, a video calling app could use custom ringtones to identify the caller through haptic feedback, or you could simulate rough terrain in a racing game.
Notifications
Google is updating its notification designs to give a more modern feel with easy to use functions. It is decorating notifications with custom content and expanding affordances to match all other notifications.
Google said since users expect to directly jump into the app after tapping a notification, developers should make sure that notification taps trigger Activity starts directly, rather than using an intermediary broadcast receiver or service to start the Activity. Android 12 will block this intermediary broadcast receiver, trampolines, from launching their target activities as it asks developers to move away from this pattern.
Other updates
With the new Android Runtime, users will now see system updates in the Google Play Store. Google has also expanded the functionality of existing modules such as delivering compatible media transcoding feature inside an updatable module.
As more people use apps on large screen devices like tablets, and TVs, Google is bringing the latest Android features to the TV and users will be able to test their apps on the all-new Google TV experience.
To make it easier for users to test the opt-in changes to apps, the company has made them toggleable. They can enable or disable the changes individually from developer options.
Google will invite consumers to try the features as they get closer to the final product. The company highlighted that Android Beta is not currently available for Android 12.
