Google is launching the first Android 12 preview for developers on Thursday. This is the start of a seven-month beta process that is expected to end with a final release around September. The system images will be released today for the Pixel line (if these links are broken, check later). Support for the Pixel 2 is being cut this year; for smartphones, the preview will only work on Pixel 3 / 3a and higher. There is also an “Android 12 preview for Android TV” available for the ADT-3 Developer Kit, which is interesting because commercial Android TV devices, such as “Google Chromecast with Google TV”, still run Android 10.
What’s new? It is difficult to do a full audit now, as we are only working from a blog post with no images and no documentation to read yet, but Google describes some interesting features. First, Google says it is “updating notification designs to make them more modern, easier to use and functional”, which probably applies to previous leaks that have already reached the Internet. The company also says it is “optimizing transitions and animations throughout the system to make them smoother”, which is something we will investigate as soon as we get some real code.
As far as performance is concerned, ART, the Android RunTime engine that powers all non-Android game apps, is now officially upgradeable through the Play Store, whereas before it needed a complete system update to be changed. ART is now a Project Mainline module, Google’s new system for sending host code through the Play Store. Google is taking the first steps to make ART a Mainline module in previous years – ART has been packaged as a Mainline module on Pixel phones since Android 10, but has never been updated. For Android 12, Google says it will send ART updates that can “improve runtime performance and accuracy, manage memory more efficiently and make Kotlin operations faster – all without requiring a complete system update”. Android’s Binder IPC (InterProcess Communication) calls are also undergoing optimization, which Google says should reduce “system variability” and “generated an approximately 2x increase in the performance of Binder calls in general.”
Android 12 will support another image format – AVIF, an image codec based on the AV1 video codec. AV1 is a royalty-free, open source video codec, created as a successor to VP9, which is rapidly being adopted by Netflix, YouTube, Facebook and many other streaming providers due to its superior performance and lack of royalties . AVIF is a competitor of that other strange new image format, HEIC, but since it is based on H.265, HEIC has royalty costs. AVIF comparisons show the format generally outperforming JPEG and WEBP – meaning better image quality with less bandwidth. Google’s position as a browser developer, operating system developer and large content distributor through YouTube and various sites means that it can make format changes on its own platforms.
On the security and privacy side of things, Android’s WebVew (web content embedded in apps) will include the same Chrome “SameSite” cookie behavior, which means it will block unsigned third-party cookies. Android is working harder to limit access to device identifiers, cutting off Netlink’s MAC address access to all applications. There are also some changes to the standard handling of Android intentions, which allow Android apps to access resources from other apps. This may be an attempt to prevent poorly configured applications from creating security vulnerabilities, but it is difficult to say without seeing the documents first.
There are many other things mentioned in the Google blog post, but it is difficult to do much of it without access to documentation. By the time you are reading this, all of this will have been released and we will be working on a complete practice. Google says it hopes to achieve “platform stability” in August 2021, which will give developers “several weeks before the official launch to do final tests”.