(Credit: René Ramos, Bob Al-Greene; Google)
Android developers can start working with Google’s next version of its mobile operating system now that Google has posted a developer preview of Android 15.
An advance copy of Google’s post announcing this preview doesn’t speak to major new apps or interface changes—those usually come later in the preview cycle of an Android release—and instead emphasizes changes to below-the-surface app frameworks.
Two privacy changes top that list. Android 15 will ship with the latest version of Privacy Sandbox on Android, a layer of software that Google began testing last February as part of its effort to preserve its advertising business while addressing privacy concerns of people weary of feeling like they’re living under marketing microscopes.
Like the Privacy Sandbox now rolling out in Chrome, this aims to stop up-close tracking of your activities—in this case, by developers of one app seeing what you do in others (Apple lets iOS users block with its App Tracking Transparency feature)—while allowing advertisers to target types of interests as computed on-device by Google’s own software and then shared with advertisers in a less-personalized form.
Android 15 will also include an update to Android Health Connect, an encrypted, on-device hub for health data collected by apps that support this feature. Android 15’s implementation may make this more appealing to quantified-self types by supporting new types of fitness and nutrition data.
And new screen-sharing controls will allow people to record or share only part of their device’s screen, meaning you won’t have to reveal the embarrassing number of social-media notifications your phone gets.
The other media functions noted in Google’s post affect the camera (developers will have more options for low-light settings and flash brightness) and audio (music-composition apps will be able to control virtual MIDI apps in the same way they could control USB-connected MIDI hardware).
A few system-level updates round out the changes coming in Android 15: an option to verify individual files against tampering with custom cryptographic signatures and a set of “dynamic performance” features that allow apps to interact with the system to optimize either longer-term battery life or short-term power-intensive workloads.
Developers can start testing this update on newer Pixel phones–the 6, 7, or 8 series, plus the Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet. A timeline in Google’s post suggests the first beta release of Android 15 will arrive in April, followed by a “platform stability” milestone in June and a final release “several months later.”
If Android 15 follows the pattern of Android 14—first posted as a developer preview just over a year ago, then shipped in October—that suggests that users of Google’s Pixel devices will be able to install 15 by early fall. Users of other devices will have to wait, but Samsung’s recent work at accelerating how it ships Android updates suggests that might not be long: That company delivered Android 14 for the Galaxy S23 series in the US about a month after Android 14’s release, despite having Android encrusted with its own OneUI software.
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