Mark Moons

Android 15 Beta 2 is HERE! Beta 2 brings loads of new changes and features. Here’s a summary: - Private space is here! This feature, as I previously reported, lets users make a separate space where they can keep sensitive apps away from prying eyes. It makes a separate user profile that’s paused when the device is locked. Private space apps show up in a dedicated container in the launcher and are hidden from recents, notifications, settings, etc. when the profile is locked. - App pairs are here! As I previously reported, Android 15 now lets you save a pair of apps to launch in split-screen mode. - Predictive back is enabled by default! You no longer need to enable a developer option to see the system animations for back-to-home, cross-task, and cross-activity in apps that have properly migrated. - Apps can now highlight only the most recently selected photos and videos when partial access to media permissions is granted. - Apps targeting Android 15 can provide Remote Views to the Widget Picker so they can update the preview to be more personal/relevant. - Health Connect adds 2 new data types: skin temperature and training plans. - If your system language is set to French, you can now change how the OS addresses you (grammatical gender) by going to language settings. - Android 15 Beta 2 lets apps set rich vibrations for incoming notifications by channel. This lets users distinguish between notifications by haptics. - The animation for entering PiP mode in Android 15 is now smoother. This will benefit apps having UI elements overlaid on top of their main UI that enters PiP. Apps can now receive a callback when the PiP enter animation starts so they can quickly toggle irrelevant UI elements. - Android 15 blocks apps that don’t match the top UID on the stack from launching activities. This is to prevent malicious apps within the same task from launching another app’s activity then overlaying themselves on top. - New APIs to perform permission checks on content URIs. - Android 15 will block users from installing apps with a target SDK version ≤ 23. Previously, Android 14 blocked apps with target SDK version ≤ 22. - As I previously reported, Android 15 is adding support for 16 KB page sizes. Google says devices with larger page sizes can see improved performance in memory-intensive workloads. Apps with NDK libraries will likely need to be rebuilt to work on these devices. - Android 15 includes ANGLE as an optional layer for running OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan. The move to ANGLE will standardize the Android OpenGL implementation. Going forward, ANGLE will be shipped as the default GL system driver on more new devices with the goal for GL/ES to be only available through ANGLE. - On devices that don’t have a HW AV1 decoder, VideoLAN’s SW AV1 decoder (dav1d) can be utilized. As I previously reported, dav1d is a highly efficient and performant AV1 decoder. It’s included by default in Android 15 but is available on Android 11+ devices through a Play System Update. However, apps have to opt in by invoking dav1d by name for now. - Improvements to the security of intents. Intents that target specific components must match the target’s intent-filter specifications. Intents without an action will no longer match any intent-filters. - Foreground services that rely on the SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission exemption for background starts are now required to have a visible overlay when targeting Android 15. - The dataSync and mediaProcessing foreground service types now have a ~6 hour timeout after which the service is no longer considered a foreground service. If the service doesn’t stop itself, it’ll get stopped with a failure. - Lastly, some text changes. Beta 2 includes API-related updates from ICU 74. The font file for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is now a variable font. There’s now a font file for the Japanese Hentaigana font. TextView now allocates additional width for cursive fonts or language characters with complex shaping that may otherwise get clipped.