With the arrival of the second Android 13 developer preview, we’ve got a better idea of what’s coming in the next major release of Google’s mobile operating system. This is the software that will ship on the best Android phones of the coming year.
After Android 12, which was a huge deal visually for the entire platform, and Android 12L, which overhauled Android for bigger screens, Android 13 may seem like a relatively minor update. After all, Google has spent most of the past year getting rid of bugs in Android 12 and finalizing the 12L.
There’s more to Google’s vision for Android in 2023 than a handful of subtle changes, however, I figured out using the latest Android 13 build on Google Pixel 6 over the past few weeks.
Less spam notification
The biggest feature addition in the current Android 13 developer preview is the new permission for notifications. Currently in Android, apps don’t need explicit permission to send you notifications. Any app can fire as many notifications as it wants – although Android also makes it easy to silence alerts from annoying apps. After updating to Android 13, existing apps will launch a prompt asking if you want to receive notifications, and new apps will do the same when used for the first time.
There are plenty of apps – even relatively reputable ones – that get you up and running quickly and without restrictions with notifications. And while Android’s notification channels feature has long allowed users to filter out alerts they don’t want to see, the explicit permission to send notifications is a welcome improvement — and a great way to avoid increasingly annoying apps that deliver unnecessary notification cues. Notifications now require the user to explicitly sign up, just like any other feature that might be annoying.
Using Android 13 with the new notification permission has allowed me to do some sort of micro-check which apps are allowed to send notifications. While I’m fine with notifications from most social apps—at least I can have them quietly if I don’t want to be bothered—other apps like games and streaming services will only clutter my notification shade with the things I’m using. not want to.
There’s also a digital wellbeing angle here, of course, with the new permission pretty much guaranteed to reduce the number of distractions coming from your phone throughout the day.
Better multi-language support
There is also an improved display of many languages using character sets along with the Latin alphabet. In Japanese, for example, text will wrap between lines more naturally than text will wrap by character. (There is no English equivalent here, but the way things currently work is a little Similar to splitting words between lines.)
In other languages, such as Tamil and Burmese, where line height sometimes cuts parts of characters off, Android 13 introduces improved line spacing so that characters appear correctly.
And in languages like Japanese and Chinese, where you type phonetically instead of entering characters directly, Android 13 improves autocomplete during search so you don’t have to wait for characters to execute. This new API doesn’t seem to be used anywhere in any of the preloaded apps, but it should save you a lot of time once it’s rolled out.
If you are only typing in a language that uses a character set such as the Latin alphabet, you will be given the apps ability to type as you enter the characters into the search field. With this latest change, Android is increasing the search speed in these languages with the English and other European languages app. (For an English analogy here, imagine if an in-app search only made suggestions once you completed a word or sentence.)
In a related change, the per-app language setting that was announced back with the first developer preview is now really live, with apps letting you choose one of your system’s languages or any from a very long list of supported languages. Not every app supports this feature — Twitter, in particular, is locked to your system language — but a surprising number of popular apps will let you choose a specific language.
If you are bilingual and routinely manipulate two or more languages, this can be a huge improvement in quality of life. Even if you are a learner, switching one or more applications to your second language can help you improve your fluency.
Clearer sound, sharper emoji
Bluetooth LE Audio It is also new in the latest Android 13 Preview. This is the latest wireless audio standard that, along with the right headphones, can save energy when listening to music, videos, podcasts, or just about anything else. In the same way that Bluetooth LE made wearables more battery efficient, ushering in the era of smartwatches, LE Audio must do the same to play audio.
Android Central Senior Editor Jerry Hildenbrand explains more in his writing on Bluetooth LE.
“Bluetooth works on two different radios. A classic Bluetooth radio uses more power to do things like push higher bitrate streams and extend the range of connected devices while a low-power radio traditionally uses slower connections on things like IoT devices. LE Audio aims to change some of that. , improvements have been made that allow the low-power radio to transmit better sound over longer distances so that the battery in your headphones and the battery in your phone last longer.
The Bluetooth SIG claims that this will allow manufacturers to use Low-Energy for the same use cases that current Bluetooth specifications need for classic radio and consumers will note the benefit. She also says that this means entirely new use cases can be created for Bluetooth equipment, so look for some great new ideas from companies that make speakers and headphones. “
You’ll likely need new headphones (and possibly a new phone) as well as the Android 13 update to take advantage of Bluetooth LE Audio. Regardless, the support built into Android 13 is the beginning of mobile audio optimization for the entire ecosystem.
Another standard adopted by Android 13 is COLRv1, which is a standard for color vector fonts. What this means is that emojis should scale to larger sizes more clearly, without the blurring you get from taking and zooming in a bitmap. If you’ve ever created an Instagram Story or a TikTok video, you’ll know that most emojis now exist as fixed-resolution images – which is why they become blurry or pixelated once they are scaled to a larger size.
Emojis are a huge part of the way we communicate and express ourselves on our phones, so better-looking emojis are definitely something we can fall behind.
A large number of smaller changes to the user interface
There are a bunch of small changes to the Pixel UI in this release. The most obvious is the new media card design, which is larger and uses album art as the background. Google has messed with the way this particular slice of the user interface works a lot on the past few Android versions, and Android manufacturers have their own take on media cards as well. But in vanilla Android 13, Google has settled on something that looks very good, combining its material aesthetic with a decent level of functionality, while highlighting a visual representation of everything you’re listening to.
There’s also a new way to go to messaging apps from a notification in Android 13 – just long-press on an alert and drag it to the top or bottom of the screen. This feature hasn’t been fully demonstrated yet, and in my experience, it will only load the messaging app in full screen, even after selecting the split screen view. But this may be another convenient way to respond to messages without interrupting what you’re doing in the background.
And there’s another slight change that’s sure to play with years of muscle memory for longtime Android users — the settings and power buttons have moved to the bottom of the notification shade, perhaps to distinguish them more from the rest of the quick settings area.
Interestingly enough, Android 13 on big screens has developed an app drawer button – which revives a few old Android icons we haven’t seen in some time, while also being a natural addition to the new Android 12L tablet user interface.
As with anything in the developer preview, all of these things can change between now and the final stable release of Android 13. The final release is probably still about five months away, and that’s a long time in software development.
The current release will be the final developer preview of Android 13 – the next release in April should launch the Android 13 Beta program before the Google I/O conference in May. With Google nearing its development homepage, I/O is where we’d expect to hear more about anything left pioneer Features not yet revealed.