By Dave Burke, VP of Engineering
Every month, we’re bringing Android 12 closer to its final form with innovative features, a new user-friendly UI, performance improvements, privacy enhancements, security improvements, and more. Many people have already developed and tested Android 12 through our Beta program, and thanks again for sharing your feedback all the time!
But there’s still a lot of work to do before the release. Today we’re bringing you the third Beta of Android 12. In addition to updates such as scrolling screenshots, privacy indicator apis, and enhanced auto-rotation, Beta 3 includes the final version of the Android 12 API and the official SDK. With this in hand, you can test your application and update it before the platform stability milestone, which will be reached in Beta 4. Now get your application ready!
You can start playing Android 12 Beta 3 today with an OTA update on your Pixel device, and if you’ve participated in a Beta test before, you’ll get the update automatically. You can also try Android 12 Beta 3 on selected devices from our device manufacturer partners, such as Sharp and TCL.
For more information on Android 12 and how to get started, visit the Android 12 Developer website.
Beta 3 update at a glance
Beta 3 includes many updates to improve functionality, user experience, and performance. Here are some of the highlights.
Scroll Screenshots – To make it easier to save and share scroll content, we’ve added the scroll screenshots feature. Starting with Beta 3, when you take a screenshot of scrollable content, you’ll see a “Capture more” button that extends the screenshot to the entire content and allows you to adjust the crop range.
△ Scroll screen capture in Settings
Scrolling screenshots are out-of-the-box for most applications: if your application uses a standard View-based interface, no changes are required. For non-view-based or highly customized application interfaces and UI toolkits, we will provide a new ScrollCapture API to support scrolling screenshots. This API notifies the application of requests for scrolling screenshots and provides a Surface on which you can draw the UI. We’ll continue to iterate on scrolling screenshots, and in Beta 4, you’ll see more scenarios that support this feature by default, including support for ListView. We are also trying to support more content, such as web content. Be sure to share your impressions with us!
Device Search – In Beta 3 we further enhanced platform support for AppSearch, a new high-performance device search engine. With AppSearch, applications can index structured data and search with built-in full-text search capabilities, as well as native features such as efficient indexing and retrieval, multilingual support, and correlation sorting.
AppSearch can be used in two ways: one is to provide local indexes for your application through the new AppSearch Jetpack library, which is forward compatible; The other is a central index maintained for the entire system, supported by Android 12 and later. When you use central indexing, the system UI can display data for your application unless you choose not to use this feature. In addition, you can securely share data with other applications, allowing them to search their own and your application’s data simultaneously. Please visit the official documentation for details.
In Beta 2, we added a privacy indicator to the status bar that shows when an app is using the device’s camera or microphone. Because indicators display when the application is in immersive mode and may overwrite controls or content, applications need to know where indicators can be drawn and make necessary adjustments to avoid overwriting useful content. In Beta 3, we added a new Privacy Indicator API to the WindowInsets that lets you know the maximum range of indicators and their relative position on the screen, taking into account current screen orientation and language Settings. Please visit the official documentation (English) for details:
Enterprise-configurable Camera and Microphone Switch – In Beta 2, we introduced a new switch that allows users to instantly turn off all applications’ access to the device’s microphone and camera. We now make it accessible to enterprise administrators, who can limit their use of these sensors on devices they fully manage. Please visit the official documentation for details.
New permissions to start foreground services for CDM-paired apps – To better support Companion apps performing core functions while providing transparency to the system, Companion Device Manager (CDM) paired apps can declare a new common permission, Start the foreground service from the background. Please visit the official documentation for details.
Better, faster Auto Rotation – We’ve enhanced Android’s auto rotation feature by using the front-facing camera to more accurately recognize when to rotate the screen. It gives you a better experience when using the device while lying on the sofa or in bed. For developers, this means that automatic rotation will provide a better experience for users, as long as they turn it on in their system Settings. Enhanced auto-rotation is supported by our recently announced Private Compute Core, so images are never stored on or sent out of the device. In Beta 3, this feature works with Pixel 4 and newer Pixel devices.
To make screen rotation as fast as possible on all devices, we also optimized animation and redraw, and added a machine learning-driven gesture detection algorithm. With these optimizations, the basic auto-rotation delay has been reduced by 25%, and the rotation with face detection builds on these improvements. Welcome to experience the improved automatic rotation function and share your experience with us.
Game support for Android 12 — With the Game Mode API, you can react when players choose different performance configurations for your Game: saving battery consumption during a long commute, for example, or getting the highest frame rate through performance Mode. These apis will be integrated with the upcoming game dashboard, which provides an additional layer of controls to allow players to quickly set up key utility features during play. The game dashboard will be available on selected devices later this year.
Touchgrind BMX on Android 12
In addition, the Play as You Download feature will allow you to download game resources from the background during the installation process, making it faster for players to enter the game:
Check out the Android 12 developer website to learn more about the new Android 12 features
Final API and SDK
We’ve been working on the Android 12 API for the past few months. The API is available today with the release of Beta 3, along with the official API Level 31 SDK. We plan to reach the full platform stability milestone in Beta 4, where not only the API, but the entire list of application-oriented system behaviors and non-SDK interfaces will be finalized.
If you are building your application against the Android 12 API, we recommend updating your development environment with today’s release and recompiling your application with the official SDK and the latest tools.
Application compatibility
Many early adopters and developers are already experimenting with Android 12 Beta on Pixel and other devices, and now it’s time to make sure your apps are compatible so they can use them to their heart’s content!
To test your app compatibility on Beta 3, install your official app on a device or emulator running Android 12 Beta through Google Play or another channel. Test all of your application’s processes to find problems exposed in functionality or UI. Use the behavior change list to identify potential changes that could affect your application to focus your testing. You don’t need to update the targetSdkVersion of your app right now, please release the updated version of your app for your Android 12 Beta users as soon as you resolve any issues you find.
As mentioned earlier, Android 12 will reach a platform stability milestone with the release of the next release, Beta 4. At that point, the application-oriented system behavior, SDK/NDK API, and non-SDK list will all be finalized. You will be able to perform final compatibility tests and release fully compatible applications, SDKS, or development libraries. The release schedule can be found here.
Start playing Android 12 now
Whether you want to try out Android 12’s features, test your apps, or submit feedback, you can start with this Beta. Simply sign up for the test using a supported Pixel device to get updates over the air (OTA). To get started, install and set up the Android 12 SDK.
You can also try Android 12 Beta 3 on devices from top device manufacturer partners participating in the Android 12 Developer Preview program, such as Sharp and TCL. Please visit the developer. The android. Google. Cn/about/versi… View the complete list of partners. For more extensive testing on more devices, install and play Android 12 Beta with an Android GSI image (English). If you don’t have the right device, you can also test it on an Android emulator.
Beta 3 is also available for Android TV, where you can check out the latest features, test your apps, and try out the new Google TV experience. Head over to the Android TV developer website for more information and get started with the ADT-3 developer kit.
Check out the Android 12 developer website for details about the Beta.
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