Google Announces Android 12 With The First Developer Preview

Google announced the first developer preview of Android 12, which is the major update to the mobile operating system that powers Android phones. Among the updates of the release, AVIF image support, foreground service optimizations, rich content insertion, and faster & more responsive notifications are the ones that Google highlights. It seems Google tends to add more user-facing changes and UI updates throughout the preview cycle. 

“With each version, we’re working to make the OS smarter, easier to use, and better performing, with privacy and security at the core,” writes Google VP of Engineering Dave Burke. “In Android 12 we’re also working to give you new tools for building great experiences for users. Starting with things like compatible media transcoding, which helps your app to work with the latest video formats if you don’t already support them, and easier copy/paste of rich content into your apps, like images and videos. We’re also adding privacy protections, refreshing the UI, and optimizing performance to keep your apps responsive.” As Dave Burke states, there are many updates on Android 12, but here are some of them.

To start with AVIF image support, it takes advantage of the intra-frame encoded content from video compression. This dramatically improves image quality for the same file size when compared to older image formats, such as JPEG. Google also adds a new unified API called OnReceiveContentListener to make inserting and moving video, image content in apps simple for apps to receive rich content. This lets developers accept content from any source: clipboard, keyboard, or drag and drop.

On the notifications side, Google is decorating notifications with custom content with icon and expand affordances to make them more modern, easier to use, and more functional. And for more responsive and faster notifications, Android 12 will block notification trampolines by preventing them from launching their target Activities to keep notifications more responsive.

And on the performance side, Google is reducing system variability in Android 12 and making optimizations that reduce the median experience from the tail end, or 99% percentile use case. In that part, Google targets improvements to system binder calls adding lightweight caching strategies and focusing on removing lock contention to improve latency distribution.

Android 12 is currently available to developers, but it will be made available as a public beta around May.