Almost exactly a year after Google announced the first developer preview of Android 11, the company released it today. First developer preview of Android 12.. Google delayed the deployment of Android 11 a bit as the team and company partners adapted to work during the pandemic, but it seems they still couldn’t keep up with the Android 12 schedule. As you might expect from the early developer preview, most of the changes here are made internally, and there aren’t any brave non-developer wireless updates yet to try it out.
Image credit: Google
It’s important to note that some of the highlights of previous releases are that Google tends to add user changes and UI updates throughout the preview cycle, but the media is of the following high quality: There is a function to transcode to the format of. AV1 image format, Faster, more responsive notifications, and new developer features that allow you to switch between individual platform changes make it easier to test app compatibility.Google promises it again Just like Android 11, Add platform stability milestones to Android 12 to notify developers in advance when final changes for apps occur during the operating system development cycle. Last year, the team reached that milestone in July, when it launched its second beta release.
“Each version is committed to making the OS smarter, easier to use, and better performing, with privacy and security at its core,” said Dave Burke, Google’s Vice President of Engineering. “To Android 12 We are also working to provide new tools for building great experiences for our users. Start with compatible media transcoding and more. This allows you to use it if your app doesn’t yet support the latest video formats, and you can easily copy and paste rich content such as images and videos into your app. We’ve also added privacy protection, updated the UI, optimized performance and kept the app responsive. “
Image comparison from AVIF has landed.Image by Jake Archibald
Obviously, Android 12 has dozens of developer updates. Let’s take a closer look at some.
For example, for Android 12 WebView, Google implements the same SameSite Cookie behavior as Chrome. Last year, the company delayed the rollout of this change. This made it difficult for advertisers to track activity across Chrome sites just because there were too many sites. With this feature fully implemented in Chrome, Android teams can now implement the same privacy tools in WebView that other apps use to display web content.
Regarding the encoding function, Burke said: “With the spread of HEVC hardware encoders on mobile devices, camera apps are becoming more and more popular. HEVC formatThis greatly improves quality and compression over older codecs. He states that most apps need to support HEVC, but for apps that can’t, Android 12 now offers a service to transcode files to AVC.
Image credit: Google
In addition, Android 12 is now AV1 image file format As a container for images and image sequences like GIFs. “Like other modern image formats, AVIF utilizes in-frame encoded content from video compression,” explains Burke. “This dramatically improves the image quality of the same file size compared to older image formats such as JPEG.”
Image credit: Google
Like all Android releases, Google continues to mess with the notification system. This time, the team promises to redesign to “make it more modern, easier to use and more functional.” Burke calls optimized transitions and animations, as well as the ability for apps to decorate notifications with custom content.Google is also a developer Implement A system that instantly moves users from notifications to the app, without an intermediate broadcast receiver or service Recommended before..
Image credit: Google
Android 12 enhances support for up to 24 channels of multi-channel audio (which will definitely benefit music and other audio apps), spatial audio, MPEG-H support, and tactile-coupled audio effects. Vibration and frequency based on audio (there is no doubt that it will benefit the game).There is also Improved gesture navigation And many other optimizations and minor changes throughout the operating system.
Google also continues to promote the project mainline. This allows you to update core features of the Android OS via the Google Play system, avoiding the slow update cycle of most hardware manufacturers. Android 12 brings the Android runtime module to the mainline, allowing Google to push updates to the core runtime and libraries to the device. “You can improve runtime performance and accuracy, manage memory more efficiently, and speed up Kotlin operations without having to update your entire system,” says Burke. “We have also extended the functionality of existing modules, for example, providing seamless transcoding capabilities within updatable modules.”
You can find a detailed list of all the changes in Android 12 Here..
Image credit: Google
Developers who want to start deploying their apps on Android 12 today Flashing device image For Pixel devices. Currently, Android 12 supports Pixel 3/3 XL, Pixel 3a / 3a XL, Pixel 4/4 XL, Pixel 4a / 4a 5G, Pixel 5. You can also use the system image with Google’s Android Studio Android emulator.