In the second half of the year, we will be able to see the first batch of devices that update the Android 13 system.
It has been nearly a year since the release of the Android 12 beta version last year, regardless of whether your phone has received an update push based on Android 12 at this moment, the update of Android 13 has entered the latest beta testing stage, and from the earlier announced Android update time line, it is only one step away from entering the stage where various system functions are stabilizing.
Although the Android beta program schedule in the past two years has been more advanced, as the time enters May, the new year's Google I/O will officially open on May 11, and all the important features that will be officially added in Android 13 will also be announced.
But until then, we can still use the existing Android 13 Beta 1 update to get a rough idea of what to expect in Android 13.
Apply independent language settings
This feature is certainly not unfamiliar to iOS users, but Android did not wait until the thirteenth major version update. This feature allows the application to set another display language independently of the language set by the system (of course, the premise still requires the application itself to provide multi-language support), which is often quite convenient when using some language applications.
In Android 13, when the Language & Input menu in system settings opens, you'll see new standalone app language setting options.
While this setting option is temporarily hidden in the latest Android 13 Beta 1, it's not expected to be a lot of issues in the final Android 13 release update.
The system theme goes a step further
Android 12 is considered by many to be the biggest improvement since Android 5.0 thanks in large part to Google's newly introduced Material You theme coloring system. In short, it is a set of desktop wallpaper changes that can be followed by the mobile phone, to automatically replace the accent color, icons, desktop widgets, and even the third-party in-app page design can be reloaded together.
But it is also because Android 12 has made too many drastic improvements in the theme system part, and even some of the implementation effects promised by Android official promises have not appeared in the official version of Android 12 in the end, so there is also a saying that "Android 12 is updated in two years".
It is also true that in the material you theme app implementation, some of the content in Android 12 has been "PPT debut", until the recent Android 13 Beta 1 has been finally updated: for example, the following Android 13 media card added animation effects.
The Material You color picking effect gives more choices: In Android 13 Beta 1, the color selection is directly upgraded from the four selections of the Android 12 period to the wallpaper extraction color + basic color, a total of 32 color combinations, and two different color taking algorithms can generate monochrome, bi-color and three-color alternative combinations from the wallpaper color. Let the theme style also have more options.
Material You icon color picking is also one of the important components: after turning on the theme icon option, the adapted app icons on the desktop can also change the style according to the phone accent color settings, but in the Android 12 stage, the adaptation progress of this feature is relatively slow, and only a few third-party apps have adapted to this feature after the past year.
In order to solve this problem, a new theme icon API was introduced in Android 13, and app developers only need to provide a monochrome app icon when developing the app, which can be applied to the dynamic icon style function in Android 13, which greatly reduces the development cost of developers adapting to new features. In addition, Google is already cooperating with other Android mobile phone manufacturers to promote this feature to more Android third-party operating systems.
Privacy and security remain a priority
Privacy permission control is also one of the improvement directions that Android 12 has focused on, and in this regard, the changes directly made by native Android to the bottom layer of the system are also of great significance to other third-party Android systems. For example, for the first time in Android 12, the Control Center card design can be disabled globally with one click.
Turning off these switches, disabling the camera won't even be able to unlock with the Pixel's own face, and disabling microphone permissions won't be able to talk, and in Android 13, these tightening controls on system permissions have been further improved, with a new geolocation item added to the global permissions option and the integration of camera/microphone permissions into a new Privacy Control card.
In the settings, Android 13 also further integrates the privacy-related settings scattered around in the past to become a new "privacy information center", allowing users to directly check the use of various permissions in the past week, including system applications, and the use of permissions can be seen here in detail to the minutes of permission usage records.
Android 13 also introduced the concept of a separate photo picker: for example, if you want to share a group of photos with friends in a "small and beautiful" chat software, but do not want to grant the software access to all the photos in your phone, then Android 13's new photo picker can manually select the photo content you need to share, and only grant access to the photos you select to the chat application, minimizing the risk of privacy leakage.
Big Screen Experience & Smart Home
Following the release of the Android 12 update, Android launched another special system test program, Android 12L; this update to optimize the large screen/folding screen was given a standalone system codename, and even became a development project in parallel with the earlier Android 13 test plan.
In Android 13, more deep improvements have been added to the display mode for different scenes of folding screens/different screen sizes, while getting a better display between multiple screen transitions; such as "desktop mode" with a 90-degree expansion of the screen.
At present, in Android 13, the smart home that is often mentioned in the home scene is also one of the important directions for the addition of new features, for example, Android 13 Beta 1 has added the option of "lock screen control smart device", which allows the adapted smart home services (such as Mijia, Google Home, etc.) to unlock the phone without unlocking the phone, and the basic smart home operation can be carried out in the lock screen state.
From the current information, Android 13 will also add a "Media Tap to Transfer" function; although the actual information of this function is still very small compared to other functions that have appeared, but this will be an Android native media projection function similar to Apple AirDrop and Huawei sharing functions, but it is detected that there are tablets/laptops and other devices under the same LAN that are in use, or UWB near-field communication. Get close to the smart speaker to project music to it.
Also unpublished, but already mentioned in the relevant code, there is also the new "Hub mode" in Android 13 that allows multiple users to share a set of data on the same Android 13 device, while also retaining personal information between multiple users.
This feature is obviously not prepared for personal use of tablets, but Samsung also showed the "smart home hub" equipped with the Android system during cess this year: it is actually an Android tablet, but in addition to the charging base, it has also added more software improvements for home use scenarios.
This also confirms the previous rumors that Google will release a smart display equipped with the Android system, of course, these may not be the content that appears with Android 13 in the upcoming Google I/O conference in May. But still worth looking forward to.
summary
The above is the main feature update that appears in the current Android 13 Beta 1, in addition to continuing to emphasize the privacy/theme that has been often talked about in Android 12, the Android folding screen for actual needs, the need for large screen adaptation, and the functional improvements in the field of smart home are also worth paying attention to.
It is also worth noting that in addition to the official release of Android 13 at the I/O Conference, the traditional reservation project also has an Android open test plan for more mobile phone brands: this is also the moment when the Android 13 adaptation of first-line mobile phone manufacturers begins, and each company will compete to release an Android 13 update that can "taste the early" for their own devices.
It is expected that the latest flagship phones released by brands such as Xiaomi/Redmi, OPPO, vivo and other brands in the first half of this year will be the first devices to join the Android 13 Beta Open Beta Test Program to help Android software developers with the latest system adaptation work.
In the second half of the year, we will be able to see the first batch of devices that update the Android 13 system.
GeekChoice original article